I’ve been saying for years now that, for as much as I like most Apple products, they simply don’t seem to get cloud computing. Their poor track record is proof positive but, even now, each time they revise their approach I look at it and think, “Eh. STILL not doing it right.”
Case in point: in my ever-ongoing quest to get more of my digital media life in to the amazing Plex media system, I recently signed up for iTunes Match so I could liberate the last of my music collection (namely those CDs that were purchased before Apple finally ditched copy protection) for playback using other, non-Apple software (like Plex).
While that all went fine, I then took a look at my iPhone and saw that, as expected, my entire music collection was now visible via iTunes Match. I thought, “Huh. Maybe they’ve figured it out!” Of, course – I was wrong. Selecting a song from my collection proceeded to DOWNLOAD the song for playback.
Argh! Apple – it’s the 21st century – I don’t WANT to be cluttering up my storage with one-off MP3s – just stream it to me! I thought there might be a setting to change this but, nope – no such luck.
Now, I’ll admit, I still have AT&T unlimited data from my early adoption of the iPhone and I’ve come to realize that some of my philosophy is based around this – I always buy the device with the lowest storage capacity because I want to stream everything I can and don’t care about the bandwidth. I realize that most people don’t have this and loading up the phone is a workaround for that.
But Apple should at least give us the option.
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