Apple Services in 2025

I agree that many of their services are being enshittified by ads, but I upgrade my iPhone yearly and Watch every 2-3 years, and I have never had any issue transferring Apple Pay cards, or using Apple Pay at a gas pump. The only times I have had Apple Pay fail (more broadly, not just at gas pumps), it is due to the merchant's terminal ("Oh, yeah, we've been having problems with tap lately").

I would say for me, at least, Apple Pay remains a shining (nearly singular?) example of something they're doing completely right. Except the ads in the Wallet app... though luckily the number of times I need to open it in a year can probably be counted on two hands.

Transit is pretty good I guess. Maybe keys will work as well. But marginally better than competition (or convenience and/or locking in) is a far cry from phenomenal.

I have tons of issues with iCloud forcing downloads of huge files. I vacate them, they immediately get downloaded again. Restarting the computer, reinstalling the operating system from scratch (all demanded by Apple support) did nothing and then they ghosted me after supposedly escalating it to an "engineer" and giving me a support liason, who never followed through on anything and never responded to my checkins

Apple Pay is always so nice to use, but especially so when buying on the Web with that one button to give shipping address and pay.

iMessage, Apple Maps and directions (in the US in cities has gotten really good), Freeform, Pages... privacy in general... all are nice/positive/better than average experiences for me.

Their stuff is generally pretty good so it's all the more painful when there's a regression in usability.

Always good to read some quote from Cue to have a laugh. "Global expansion" — surely he's not referring to Apple News, which is still available only in 4 countries. "Continuous innovation" — by now, Apple executives use that word like a filler, like when one keeps saying 'you know' when speaking.

Of all the services he mentioned, I'm only using iCloud+ at the moment, and the only reason is that I need the space for all the backups of my older iOS devices, given that the free iCloud tier still offers 5 GB of storage (and it will still presumably offer that same amount of storage a century from now).

Sure, ApplePay (and the Open Banking integration in the UK) is actually rather nice now.

Such a shame that Safari state and Messages syncing is still so fscking broken, at the best of times, but it's even less excusable because Apple no longer let you have ADP here. And iCloud Mail still filters far, far too aggressively and doesn't give you control. It does get more useful with iCloud Plus, though, thanks to custom domains and "Hide My Email". But, as with @Riccardo, the main reason to pay up is because you can't back up otherwise without continuously being prompted to enter your passcode to "Trust this computer and start a backup", because security—security that's mysteriously catered for by using iCloud and paying Apple money. Wankers.

Music? Burning skip. TV? Also burning, but there are some good shows if you're willing to pick up the offers.

Some things work. But most are just mediocre; it's lock-in doing the work, is all.

ApplePay (with TouchID on an iPhone) has always been one of the most sublimely wonderful technologies I think I've ever encountered in ~30+ years. It just works, it's frictionless, the home button on my phone is where my thumb naturally falls when I take it out of my pocket, it works with a mask and sunglasses on in a store - I can count on one hand the number of times I've used cash in the past 7+ years.

Messages in the Cloud was something I came to late, only a couple of years ago, having previously used the sync option where the devices sync directly between each other over wifi / bluetooth. That way was pretty relable, but syncing via iCloud has been almost faultless, and when it's had problems (a couple of times) for an hour or so, it's then sorted itself out and ended up all correct.

I'm happy to be super critical of things Apple does badly, but those two are genuinely great (to be fair, IMAP email is just as if not more reliable and that's ancient and non-proprietary).

@Someone I’m glad to hear that. My own experience is that Messages in the Cloud has never worked as advertised. The messages on different devices don’t match.

I don't use Messages in the Cloud, but just "normal" Messages, and I only rarely have times when messages don't appear on all my devices. Guess I'm lucky.

I think a lot of this stuff (like your ongoing problems with playing certain music on your HomePod, @Michael) is very user-specific. I use Apple Music and pretty much never have problems with it (outside of global outages), but I also just basically use it on two computers and a couple mobile devices.

Humans tend to see patterns or assume that what's broken for one user must be broken for a large number, if not all, of them. And seeing someone like yourself saying something is broken makes this human go "Oh, must be a bigger problem," even though I know logically that's a fallacy to automatically make that assumption without further evidence.

Not to say that Apple software and services don't have more than their share of bugs and problems -- ye gods -- but I also often wonder how many of these issues are actually widespread beyond folks who speak up about them.

(Then again, I have never really used iCloud as a storage medium outside of a handful of times when it was easier to just do that. I use kind of a custom brew of SyncThing, OneDrive [which has plenty of its own problems, trust me], and keeping a server at home I can remote into to throw stuff on when needed. But I do know iCloud has long been a pain point for a lot of people. There is too much smoke there for it not to be a fire that Apple seems less than interested in actually putting out. )

@Kevin Well, the HomePod issue is that I’m not using Apple Music. I’m quite sure that Apple cares about the streaming use case and that probably works. Based on my understanding of the issue with purchased music, it probably affects everyone who purchased certain albums at certain times in the past. A general design flaw that they just don’t care to fix.

I think, in general, there are way more bugs than people talk about. So many times I’ve had a less techy user come to me with what they thought was user error but was actually something that should have worked.

I started blogging more about specific bugs because I had been making general comments about software quality and people seemed not to believe them. Since then, whenever I mention something specific (e.g. the recent broken D key issue) I tend to hear confirmation from others that they’ve seen the same thing, too. I suppose that’s still user-specific in a way, but Apple has billions of devices shipped, and my reach is not even in the millions.