iCloud - the never-ending nightmare
I've been with what is now called "iCloud" for at least 7 years. (Since it was mac.com). When it comes to Apple I could generally be categorized as a "true believer", but the incessantly deteriorating iCloud experience is certainly a challenge to maintaining that optimism.
My biggest complaint with iCloud is that it does not sync between my 4 Apple devices -- (an iMac, a MacBook Pro, an iPhone, and an iPad). The two computers tend to stay in sync, but EACH of the iPhone and the iPad do not recognize emails that I have already read. Not only that, but I sometimes have to open and exit a single email as many as 20 times before my phone will mark it as read. It is an unbelievably shoddy experience.
Secondly, for many months now, when composing emails in the Safari web browser, upon hitting send, iCloud usually (and with increasing frequency) responds with "Cannot send email right now." It can't send and it can't save the draft, either. The only way to save your work is to select all, copy and paste it into a text document to retrieve later.
Having to do with with 95% of the emails that you send is obviously an unacceptable situation.
Tonight iCloud has taken failure to a new level. Every time I try to reply to an email it immediately logs me out. This has happened over a dozen times. For an hour I've been trying to reply to an important email and am unable to do so on account of this intractable problem.
Apple really ought to be ashamed at what a terrible job they have done with this service. Even horrible Yahoo does a better job with their email services. I guess it's time for me to switch to Gmail but I've been hanging on so long hoping for Apple to get their act together. What are they spending all their money on?
Comments
Having also been with "iCloud" since ".mac", I can say that I've not experienced any problems... I sync between 3 computers, 2 phones, and 3 iPads without any hiccups. (plus use the family-sharing feature with 4 other phones.) I don't generally use web-based mail since there's a client/app on all those devices, but the few times I have used it, it works fine.
I'm not saying your problems aren't real, but they don't seem to be common to all of iCloud. In fact, they seem to be pretty rare. Is it possible the problem stems from your ISP/internet connection?... perhaps ports are blocked or the firewall isn't allowing the proper connections? I'm just guessing... but it's entirely POSSIBLE the problem doesn't lie with Apple.
Thanks for the ideas. Largely I am just here blowing off steam I guess.
I never had any problems with mac.com when I used it with my Blackberry phone (years ago, in the early days). I have had many more problems since switching to an iPhone.
I guess part of what I am trying to figure out is if I should get another iPhone (my contract is up) and cross my fingers with iCloud; get a Samsung and hope it works better with iCloud; or get a new iPhone and use it with gMail. Or whatever possible combination will give me the least headaches.
In the past I chose all Apple products and services to try and simplify things but it did not have that effect at all.
? should have just bought out dropbox
i can upload any file to it and share
iphoto to Photos has been a mess with me
tried everything didn't have enough permissions
dropbox never asks me about permission
i didn't want to pay twice for cloud service
i already have 3 just to make sure i had options
hoping ? could see the light and make this work
my goodness everyone else can upload and backup stuff
what's ? missing in order to get my iPhoto library to work with photos i had to search for days till i tried every suggestion finally on ? discussions i found this about changing my iPhoto library "info" extension and it worked here it is
lumpygumboApr 12, 2015 2:19 PM
Re: Opening Photos first time from iPhoto on external drive - Please help!!in response to lumpygumboSolved
Just an update: for my issue (not being able to open iPhoto library with Photos), the fudge I did worked out alright. If anyone else gets the same problem (on the off-chance), here's a fix:
Locate your iPhoto library, which will be a package file. It defaults to being in your Photos folder, although you may have moved it
Right click on the package and select "get info"
Give the file the extension .photoslibrary
Hence if your iPhoto library is called iPhoto Library (which is the default), it should now read iPhoto Library.photoslibrary underneath "Name & Extension"
You should get a warning asking if you want to change the file extension - select okay
Open the Photos application, holding down the function key (either ? or Alt)
Select the photo library you've just created
Let Photos do its thing
Note: Photos takes what feels like an age to upgrade an iPhoto library into a Photos library. It will appear to hang several times and you may even think its crashed. It probably hasn't - it's just very very slow. Sometimes it speeds up though too. My library took about 4 hours to upgrade, though I'm sure it could take a dozen hours if your library is big enough. The best thing to do is just to close down any unnecessary applications, switch off the wifi, turn off all the energy saver settings and just leave it to do its thing.
@perallin are you able to connect the external drive by USB or something similar?
Then when they put iCloud Drive on the springboard, I use Dropbox almost never.
https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B03595X5Hfk5Gq
thanks for this information.