Apple and artificial restrictions on file syncing

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A week ago today, my MacBook Pro suddenly stopped being able to communicate with its SSD. I’m not entirely sure what happened, but I spent most of my Tuesday afternoon wiping everything from the drive and reinstalling macOS so that I could get back to work. While I haven’t kept a physical backup for a couple of years (I accidentally fried mine when moving back into my campus office in Fall 2020), I have all of my most important documents scattered between three cloud services, so this wasn’t too painful of a process.

One of the biggest hiccups, though, was getting my music collection back in place. I have a collection of 20+ GB of music that I’ve been building up since high school, and I’m very glad not to have lost it. However, this was no thanks to Apple, which makes several deliberate decisions that intentionally make backing up your music more difficult. I pay for iCloud storage to store photos and personal files—iCloud (generally) works great for these purposes, and it could work just as well for syncing a music library. In fact, letting people use iCloud to sync music collections between different Apple devices would be an obvious synergy between different Apple offerings. However, Apple intentionally carves music out of iCloud features so that it can make this an Apple Music feature and charge a lot more for it. Not cool.

Great, so my music is (mostly) synced to my iPhone—couldn’t I restore my macOS music library through a copper connection? Maybe I missed something obvious, but as far as I can tell, syncing between a MacBook and an iPhone only goes one way, so having my music synced to my iPhone is more a matter of convenience than an actual backup. This strikes me less as a nickel-and-diming strategy than as a way to play nice with music companies. It’s got to be related to the same restriction that keeps my iPhone from syncing to more than one Mac at a time. I get why music companies would want this, but it’s a real pain now that I have a campus computer and a home office computer. Of course, if I were to subscribe to Apple Music, then I’d be able to sync my collection between my two computers without any problems.

At the end of the day, it was a manual backup of my music collection (minus the Stranger Things soundtrack, which I’d started downloading from Freegal since my last backup) stored in iCloud that made it so that I didn’t lose everything, but it cheeses me off that given the money I’m already paying Apple for their hardware and cloud storage, this wasn’t an easier process. I sometimes describe Apple as probably the best of the big tech companies—but still a big tech company and therefore still bad a lot of the time. This is a perfect example—there’s no reason that Apple’s hardware and software couldn’t have made putting my music library back together much easier than it was, but there are business decisions at work here that intentionally make things harder for me so that Apple can make some more money.

Times like these, I wonder if I shouldn’t have stuck with Ubuntu back in 2013 instead of buying a MacBook for grad school.

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