Comment by somebodynew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somebodynew | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the article's conclusion that as bad as this manual merging process is, Apple trying to offer an automated account merge would be a nightmare.

They don't provide any backwards compatibility when adding even minor new features to apps like Notes or Reminders that synchronize through iCloud. If you update your iPhone but not your Macbook, new notes created on the phone may be silently ignored on the Macbook, or mysteriously vanish into the void if you perform one of the bulk operations that replaces the canonical list of existing objects with the older software's limited accessible subset.

I also know from experience that changing your Apple ID email address (which is permitted) will leave many iCloud services confused and trigger sporadic strange pop-up messages about your account status for years. I would not trust a merge button that needs to deal with disparate photo libraries (any of which may have existing byzantine compatibility baggage from the upgrade from iPhoto to Photos), Notes, Reminders, and all of the other services to leave a well-used account in a reasonable state.

Two years after I moved countries, my credit card expired from my home country, so I wanted to use my new UK card, which requires changing your Apple ID country.

Changing your Apple ID country requires cancelling all your subscriptions, including Apple Music, which deleted my entire music collection (even my previously uploaded iTunes Match library). When faced with the prospect of starting from scratch, i just moved to Spotify.

Why not just download the songs from iTunes Match, then reupload after the switch?

My fault, I just didn't think about the process that much - I wasn't thinking about "cancelling Apple Music", more about just changing card/countries. I figured it would keep my library around, just deactivated.

I actually did end up attempting to restore backups where i had downloaded everything, but as soon as I signed in with my account it just deleted everything from my local library again.

I had been using windows more and more and I didn't care so I switched to Spotify and am better for it.

Man, that sounds like it would work, but what an annoying workaround for a stupid problem on their side - which I guess has to do with music licensing in different jurisdictions.

Makes me think of this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyVZFm7P0CQ

I was just going to make this comment, but it's funny how stuff "in the cloud" has jurisdictions. I'm reminded of a Saudi Arabian guy I sat next to on a plane from Austria to Turkey. He couldn't get iTunes on his iPad to play stuff because... he was in the wrong region. Serves him (and his girlfriend) right, they came on board the plane as the last 2 people carrying six large shopping bags as carry-ons.

I also had to change my Apple ID country once — the system blocked me because I had credit left on my account after applying a gift card. The amount remaining on my account? 4 cents.

I had the same problem with remaining 50 uen moving country from Japan to Europe. But call to Apple Support solved the problem..

For the record, changing country on Spotify is fairly easy. You need to cancel your subscription and wait for your account to be a free one, then change your country and restart a new subscription.

You don’t lose anything because free accounts keep the same data.

On Spotify, there is some music that is only available in some countries. But it's a small fraction of the music, probably less than 0.1%. When switching countries, those songs will be kept in your playlists even if unplayable, IIRC.

When changing country on iCloud, did you lose all your purchases (apart from subscriptions)? Like books, apps, movies…

I lost some but not most of my movies. Same for apps. Music was the worst, but on Apple Music so not purchases (just had to re-add a lot of things to my library).

It has to do with how the individual content (film, app, song) is licensed. If the same content has a separate license in the new country, it won’t carry over.

Also note this means it will depend on the two countries you are moving between (ie. I went US > UK, and I would guess there is a lot more licensing crossover between these two countries, whereas two others may not have so much).

And this is why I flat-out will not buy digital content unless:

1. It's DRM-Free.

2. I can remove the DRM. (All iTunes movies released prior to 2020 fall into this category.)

3. It's cheap enough that I can treat it like a rental; I fully expect to loose access after a few years and anything longer is a bonus.

No. The only thing I lost was my entire music library. All other purchases remained, from what I can tell.

It's non-deterministic because they don't care about it, because caring about or not caring about it are treated equally - there are no forces that make them need to care. There is no profit motive. I have an iPad signed into an account I created on the fly to try to "start from scratch" - I didn't realize that there would be no way to have interoperability with another 15 year account I had with Apple. Of course, now that that's the case - I just have to deal with some nonsense restriction that's imposed because of some risk-averse lawyer sitting in a corner office.

Glad I can still torrent movies, cheers to Bram Cohen for advancing the field and denting the absurd DRM culture that's developed.

"caring about or not caring about it are treated equally - there are no forces that make them need to care"

I find this assumption that large organisations like Apple are rational, perfectly optimised economic actors very odd. People would never apply it to a government but give it to a nepotistic dictatorship like Apple without a second thought.

Apple has a culture problem re regressions which is only hurting them and not benefiting them.

That's why they warn you when you open Notes or Reminders and give you an opportunity to not upgrade so all your devices are compatible with each other.

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