Originally posted by Frances_iom
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The reason I use Apple products is because some of them are good, and Windows "does my head in" - to use a phrase I read recently. However some aspects of Apple are, IMO, diabolical. The iPad is only useful for some people who don't want to do very serious work. The sloppy way in which only some of the user data gets backed up [or not] is inexcusable. [I lost all my PDF files after an iOS upgrade ...]. The lack of a group email facility in the iPad email is not good. The messy way in which files get downloaded, and allocated to applications - not always the one one really wants to use - really dreadful. The complete lack of any decent file system on iPads - because apparently it confuses people - execrable. OTOH, being able to email links to web pages easily and a few other usage features of iOS are very useful.
One learns by experience, but really one shouldn't have to. Eventually one discovers that Papers can be used on both the iPad and on Mac OS X to exchange PDF files, though it costs extra money - such a facility should be built in.
iTunes is not great, but actually it does work quite well for large collections of music. Quirky it may be, but it's not impossible to tame it.
Extracting files from iPods is another bad area. Apple seem to think you shouldn't be allowed to do it, even if you own the music files. I eventually bought a software program called Xilisoft iDevice Magic Platinum Mac which did allow me to extract the music files from an iPod which wouldn't sync with any of my machines, and it looks as though that tool can be used both to extract files, but also to put files onto an iPod. Whether this would cause more problems with iTunes I don't know. Now that I have the music files I can wipe the iPod and start again, and just possibly the iCloud may help to avoid some of the problems we have had before.
One can run most of the Linux/Unix type things using Terminal on Mac OS X, and if anyone wants to use vi or emacs that's one way to do it - though personally I prefer to use tools such as TextWrangler.
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