For years I have lamented the dumbing down of Apple products for the masses, especially when OS X is build on the so powerful UNIX operating system, but it has certainly gotten much worse of late. Just look at Lion. It now hides you Library folder where all preferences and other user system files are stored, and it even password protects your Utilities folder. This may be fine for an average user, but for a power user they are just frustrations that add steps to the normal things we do every day, but that is not the worst of it. The worst part is when they dumb something down too much and it doesn’t function right. It is not like Apple has good customer support, unless you want to go into an Apple store, and I am not brining in my tower, ipad and iPhone to get iCloud to work right!

A little explanation is necessary here, but I use both Firefox and Google Chrome as my primary browsers, not Safari, but I do have an iPhone and iPad, and like them to have the same bookmarks as my main browsers, so I use X-Marks to sync my bookmarks between all browsers, but recently it stopped syncing my bookmarks correctly to my iPhone and iPad. I looked on Apple’s forums, and tried all sorts of methods to clear my bookmarks off of iCloud, which seam to have become corrupt, but nothing seems to work. With iSync you could always set to overwrite the bookmarks in the cloud, because these things happen (and you can do it in X-Marks), but they have dumbed down iCloud to the point where it has basically zero controls, so when something like this happens you are just SOL!

And I already had to give up cloud syncing for my iPad and iPhone as when I moved from my trusty iPad 1 to my the New iPad, I tried syncing my iPad from the cloud and it basically hung every time, and I had to revert to my last backup from iTunes, which was 4 months old, but at least that worked. Now I don’t trust iCloud at all, and use iTunes to backup and sync bookmarks as that actually seems to work with some consistency (though don’t even get me started on how old and out of date iTunes is).

Now unfortunately iCloud is completely useless to me as it is broken on two fronts, and I have no way to reset things in the cloud to make them better. No way to see those files, or delete them and start over. Maybe if I went into an Apple store I could get them to do it, but honestly I don’t have time. And for files i have moved away from the now defunct Mobile me to services from SugarSync, DropBox and Box.net as they work and won’t have features pulled as I continue to use them, only get better.

I have been an Apple man for years and years, since I was a little kid and got an Apple IIC, but really the company is making many stupid decisions and I think a lot of them will end up biting them on the ass, like the whole killing Final Cut Pro 7 thing. I continue to like Apple products, have have never been a fan of windows, but have been considering getting a windows machine to edit and do graphics on, and possibly that will mean that my only Apple products are my iPhone and iPad, and the computers I so loved will no longer matter to me, but I sure hope that doesn’t happen.

Apple you are not perfect and your products are not either, please restore a modicum of control to us users to fix thing when they do have issues.