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Comment by abestic9 | Hacker News Reader

I'm optimistic that Apple is working on most of these issues (especially catch-all) right now and this is just representative of their new offering.

Like many things I've seen from Apple it will take a release cycle or two (of 1-2 years per cycle) to bring in this arguably basic functionality - as is tradition we'll groan about other issues being held back in favour of fancy new features.

I have no doubt they intend to fully compete with the email services from Google and Microsoft. Following on from last year we should see VPs taking us through the updates to iCloud+ alongside device launches as it expands into a fundamental service offering.

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I would fear that Apple forgets about the feature after a few years and then just drops it. This is not central to their business and Apple trims such things very agressively.

I would always buy a domain-email from somebody who has this as their main business, and I would never couple my email to Apple which could lock me out of my account if they think I "behave suspiciously".

On the contrary, services are where Apple has been spending a lot of focus, for better or for worse.

> I would fear that Apple forgets about the feature after a few years and then just drops it.

This is a Google thing to do. Apple seems pretty great at picking and choosing commitments before they launch rather than what you describe here.

Not with online services, they've at least rebranded if not recoded them a few times. mac.com, MobileMe/me.com, icloud.com. It's true that the market is now much more stable, though.

True, but iCloud is over 10 years old now.

> I would fear that Apple forgets about the feature after a few years and then just drops it.

It seems unlikely, given that it's tied into Family and Apple One offerings.

I'm trying to remember any services that Apple has trimmed, and can't seem to come up with any. I'm sure I'm just not remembering. Do you have examples?

Off the top of my head there was Ping, their music social network, and Aperture, the semi-professional photo processing app.

Ping probably shouldn’t have started in the first place, and while I miss the sleek, professional feel of Aperture and its own workflow I’m not sure of any features it had that modern Apple Photos doesn’t have

This happened to me with EndJunk and it was absolutely devastating trying to recover and reset the email address on all of my accounts. Some were straight-up locked out after too many failed password attempts and required email access on the original email address (which I no longer had access to as EndJunk had gone silently under), so I just lost those. Some let me change email addrs if I remembered the password, others required verification at the original and new addr, which again was impossible as EndJunk was just gone.

I guess I got what I paid for.

Single point of evidence counter to that:

I remember in the early days of the iPhone that it took a couple of years, but eventually I had a smartphone that could gasp copy and paste text ;)

Anybody on any macOS > Catalina? Can you still delete/select multiple messages in Messages app the way you can do on iPhone? Because I can’t on Catalina.

Do the deleted messages on one device syncs and gets deleted on another? No luck here as well. Support replied saying “they’ve checked and their systems are working fine and they can’t do anything about it more”.

This may not help, but here goes. Deleting SMS messages on one device never gets synced to another device for me. I rarely use iMessage, but I expect SMS to also be handled the same way (since I have SMS forwarding setup and get the same messages on multiple devices, with all of them tied to a single Apple ID).

I agree with you.

In fact I am planning to create accounts for my yet to be born children just so that they will be able to have that <fancy short id>@icloud.com. Because like you I also have faith in Apple and I’m pretty sure they would take 10-15 WWDCs stage announcements to get all of these things right unless they deemed these features as “nobody wants it and we know what they want instead”.

> “nobody wants it and we know what they want instead”

I would feel much more comfortable if they said this; it almost gaurantees that the feature in question that nobody wants will be the headline act at the The Apple Event 2025.

Apple reimagining email - catchall email addresses now available in iCloud+ 25 (now works with copy and paste in iCloud+ 26)

> I have no doubt they intend to fully compete with the email services from Google and Microsoft

Both Google and Microsoft's email services are aimed at large enterprise customers. Apple is targeting theirs towards individual end users and their families. They aren't competing in the same space.

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