I ran across Craig Mod’s post on Medium and shook my head at how off the mark it was. I had moved on from it as just another “slow news day type of article and was content to let its ridiculous premise slip beneath the waves of inane content.
But do you want to go back to the slower Touch ID? How often, when you unlock your phone, do you want to use one of the lockscreen affordances? And how does the time you lose in those cases compare to the time you gain in all those cases when you don’t want to use the lockscreen?
I don’t know where this footnote went in his original post, but I laughed when I read it in my newsreader:
As I’ve said before, they call it Medium because it’s neither rare nor well done Well said.
I have been happy with Apple Music so far. I went into it with some hesitation because it was an Apple cloud service, and those haven’t been solid at launch historically, and I was happy with as a streaming music service. After using Apple’s offering for a while, I was confident enough that it would work for me and ended up leaping and canceled my long-standing account. I haven’t regretted it.
Apple Music’s “For You” section has been fantastic, and I have been impressed by the well-curated playlists. After uploading the rest of my local music collection, it is now available for streaming to all of my devices, which has been working out really well for me as well. As a result, I have been rediscovering music that has been sitting on unplugged hard drives for years. The waltz down music-memory lane has been fun.
While I have seen some of the infrequent issues encountered by others, these are things I have experienced before with other streaming services. They aren’t perfect. I admit it has been interesting watching my Twitter stream when there’s a temporary outage. It is like the internet has never actually used something on the internet before. With so many ways for things to break, interruptions happen. It doesn’t mean I am happy about it, but I am certainly not surprised when it happens, and never so frustrated by a minute-long outage that I want to stop using the service and return to the dark days of syncing music to my phone again.
Jim Dalrymple wrote an article a few days ago skewering the service and leaving a very frustrated “goodbye” note to Apple Music for his readers to mull over. I read it and wasn’t too surprised by what I found there. It is no surprise that he is frustrated about losing 4800 songs, but I find myself befuddled as to why he wouldn’t have backed up his music collection before uploading his entire collection into a 1.0 Apple cloud product, having used 1.0 Apple products before (let alone their iffy cloud offerings).
Also, Jim’s music collection was the years-long creation of a music fanatic who had a lot of strange cuts, alternative versions of songs, etc (with nearly-identical metadata no doubt) and spanning multiple albums. I don’t think this is going to be the case for of the music listeners out there. Dalrymple, of all people, should know that Apple’s focus is on the mainstream use case. Being on the fringe as an Apple user can sometimes be a frustrating experience. Should Apple’s offerings serve niche users? Sure, but not for v1.0.
The takeaway here is more of a cautionary tale if you have an extensive hair metal collection and four versions of the same Bob Dylan song, Apple Music might not deliver the best out-of-the-box experience.
I have some very eclectic music tastes, however and Apple Music still seems to serve my needs just fine. I am not alone either. Jonathan over at Candler Blog, wrote a great piece that really resonated. Go read that for a different take that is far different.
