Worth noting however that Apple have already made file transfer from iphones to anything outside their ecosystem a pain:
iphone to external drive on a mac is a nightmare. Can’t use the photos app, so you gotta use image capture which is laggy as hell and you either can “select all” or else you have to scroll through and select manually if you just want to transfer the latest photos.
For iphone to linux, granted, whoever’s using linux will likely be more familiar with the command line, but libimobiledevice and ifuse are anything but intuitive for the non-tech-savvy.
As for windows, Apple still wants you to use the apple-approved way but iirc I have, inconsistently, been able to get into the DCIM folder.
But even then once you do get into DCIM, the internal folder structure is absurd. Albums are just an illusion, all you get is a bunch of “###APPLE” folders containing around 1000 photos each, and to top it off you also gotta deal with the heic format. And if you wanted to access anything that isn’t photos or videos, good luck. On linux I’ve more albums than DCIM have showed up but they mostly just seemed to contain metadata files. I get that the user isn’t “supposed” to deal with this folder, but with the apple ecosystem so closed off and unfriendly to anything not-apple-approved, there isn’t really an alternative.
Yes, it should be better. But you know how you mass-produce a product at a competitive price (though premium) and sell a shitload of them? By optimizing for the average user. They should be awesome in every area. But when you choose what you focus on, it’s not the tiny number of users with niche needs. This is similar to arguing that they should have higher than 10Gbps transfer speeds. It’s not useful for enough people to justify the cost. And software is a cost, just as is hardware. Source: worked in software.
Worth noting however that Apple have already made file transfer from iphones to anything outside their ecosystem a pain:
iphone to external drive on a mac is a nightmare. Can’t use the photos app, so you gotta use image capture which is laggy as hell and you either can “select all” or else you have to scroll through and select manually if you just want to transfer the latest photos.
For iphone to linux, granted, whoever’s using linux will likely be more familiar with the command line, but libimobiledevice and ifuse are anything but intuitive for the non-tech-savvy.
As for windows, Apple still wants you to use the apple-approved way but iirc I have, inconsistently, been able to get into the DCIM folder.
But even then once you do get into DCIM, the internal folder structure is absurd. Albums are just an illusion, all you get is a bunch of “###APPLE” folders containing around 1000 photos each, and to top it off you also gotta deal with the heic format. And if you wanted to access anything that isn’t photos or videos, good luck. On linux I’ve more albums than DCIM have showed up but they mostly just seemed to contain metadata files. I get that the user isn’t “supposed” to deal with this folder, but with the apple ecosystem so closed off and unfriendly to anything not-apple-approved, there isn’t really an alternative.
Slower transfer speeds is just the cherry on top.
Yes, it should be better. But you know how you mass-produce a product at a competitive price (though premium) and sell a shitload of them? By optimizing for the average user. They should be awesome in every area. But when you choose what you focus on, it’s not the tiny number of users with niche needs. This is similar to arguing that they should have higher than 10Gbps transfer speeds. It’s not useful for enough people to justify the cost. And software is a cost, just as is hardware. Source: worked in software.