Another Stupid Apple Trick

When Apple came out with iBooks and the wonderful and completely ignored iBooks Editor, they promised a new route in digital publishing.  The editor was easy to use.  The iBooks platform promised a single place for your electronic reading material that would be accessible and synced between all your Apple devices.  It was an amazing promise.

Then it became clear that iBooks Editor was no longer fashionable.  Perhaps it was not thin enough, or had too much bezel.  So Apple has long since ignored it.  A great product left to die at the side of the road.  Jerkwads.

Then there was iBooks, plainly the "red-headed stepchild" of the Apple software ecosystem.  Sometimes it would maintain sync, sometimes it would not.  Sometimes a ebook or emagazine downloaded to an iBooks client would show up in all your other iBooks client, and sometimes not.

The iBooks store was trying to compete with Amazon, Scribd and other services and did so with slow performance and the highest possible prices, partly because Apple thinks that Apple customers are happy to pay more if whatever it is comes from Apple.  Reality has been a hard pill to swallow in this regard.

Now with public betas of iOS, and macOS widely available, there are changes to iBooks.  It has a new name.  Now it is called Books.  Does this mean that the iPhone is soon to be renamed "Phone".  The new app syncs fine with itself, but if you have (oh the horror) a perfectly good device that Apple has decided cannot run iOS 12 or macOS Mojave, will cause breakage with earlier versions of iBooks.  Most folks I know who use iBooks, use it to hold things like user manuals and magazines, most commonly in the PDF format.  iBooks does not offer much in the way of user control, following the latest Apple principles that customers are stupid and need to be highly controlled in how they use tools, but at least there were/are collections to help you organize your stuff.  Yes, you could not rename something once inside iBooks, or at least not without a blood sacrifice and a series of chants, but you could put things in collections.  However, while existing collections are available in Books, and changes in collections in iBooks do not make it to the collections in Books.  Moreover, if you drop a document in an iBooks collection it will not show up in the collection on Books, but will appear in what I would call the root of the Books library, or as I more accurately put it, all your stuff thrown haphazardly on the floor.

Maybe I am too OCD.  I enjoy order to some extent.  I like structure because it makes things easy to find things without having to go to the Search bar, the epitome of lazy thinking.

i realize that I am working with beta software on iOS.  I have not installed Mojave beta because it will only run on two of five production machines.  I have looked at Mojave and have yet to see anything compelling other than cosmetics, but I may have missed something.  Regardless I cannot afford to replace perfectly functional machines because Apple wants me to.

Perhaps Apple could take some of their trillion dollars and find a way to resurrect Steve Jobs, who unless changed by death would go through the company with a scythe removing the customer ignorant dingbats in charge.

The current MacBook Pro couldn't find its way to pro with a Google Map (don't get me started on Apple Maps).  The current MacPro has been completely abandoned and the so called iMac Pro is three times at least more expensive than a similarly powered PC.  I, like many Mac enthusiasts use software that runs on both macOS and Windows and while I much prefer the macOS experience, I can dump Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X and learn to tolerate the Windows 10 UI in exchange for thousands of dollars saved and significantly better performance.

I'm starting to think that this customer f**ckover by Apple is on purpose.  So many smart people could not commit so many faults by accident, could they?

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