Apple sneaks into your living room at night and rearranges the furniture.
In the morning, you come downstairs and see the couch is not where it belongs, the chairs turned facing the wall, the hutch, askew. You go to put your everything back in place, and can’t. The couch is too heavy. The chairs, somehow bolted to the floor. The knicknacks are missing.
So you call Apple. Together, virtually, you push furniture this way and that. For nearly an hour. But when you’re done, the living room is somehow still not right. You could live with it this way. But why should you have to? You want it the way it was.
Welcome to my week with Apple, a company I’ve been patronizing with canine devotion for nearly 25 years. I own a half dozen devices, including a spanking new iMac desktop computer, bought last January. Paid for extra memory.
So when a little notice appears that it is time for the Tahoe 26.5.1 update, I do not feel a protective frisson of fear. . These updates are necessary, for security. I click my approval and go to bed.
I awake to a changed world. My screen saver, for years a view of the Grand Canal in Venice, now replaced by some rock strewn aqua lake. The icons on my desktop are not in their familiar disarray, but assembled in neat rows, as if by some sociopath.
But that isn’t the bad part. The bad part is when I open my photos, I find 1,640. Not the 88,000 possessed the day before.
No problem. Up into iCloud. There they all are. Whew. And I could leave it like that. But clouds blow away. Things happen. I paid extra for the terabyte of memory on my machine because I want the photos at hand, where I can edit them, which you can’t do in the cloud. So I begin to download the photos.
Only they won’t go. I get to 10,000 or so, and the thing freezes up. I try various strategies, guided first by AI, then phoning, reaching a very realistic voice. We try this, then that ,then this again. Only it doesn’t work. Nothing works.
Eventually, I ‘m passed along to an actual human. Very nice. We work together for another hour. No luck.
Throughout it all, I tell myself: The photos are in the cloud. Human agency will get them out. On Day Four, another human has me download a new update, 26.5.2. I wonder if it has just been issued to address the nest of bugs caused by the last update.
So I contact Apple media relations, and that is really why I’m writing this — well, that and to complain.
I wonder — is this how the system is set up? To wipe away our photos, so they have to live in the Cloud? Force us to depend on them? “It seems odd to me that this would happen automatically — taking the library off my iMac — and I am wondering if this is intentional, or a glitch? Are others complaining about it?”
I hear from someone — or something — with the musical, perhaps improbable, name, Vivi Du Pond, who keeps trying to push me toward various automatic systems, while ignoring my actual questions. “How frequently do updates cause problems such as this? How many human support staff does Apple employ? Other people said it is a good practice to wait, for the kinks to be worked out, before downloading an update. Is that a smart practice?”
“Thanks for your questions,” she (or should that be “it”?) replies, “but we don’t have anything further to share on this.”
Eventually, our efforts bear fruit. The photos start transferring and keep transferring. Joy. I get Venice back up, on the third try. I finally understand — duh — their shot of Lake Tahoe. (Get it? Tahoe the operating system, Tahoe the lake).
What I still don’t grasp is, in what world does Apple think, “Hey, let’s swap our branded screensaver for whatever our users actually choose for themselves”?
Maybe in the world we’re hurtling toward. Or dwelling in.
It never stops. This morning, my iPhone gave me this message.
“Software Update Tonight iOS 26.5.2 will be installed when iPhone is locked and has enough battery to update.”
My choices are “Update Now” and “Cancel Update.” I really want to choose the latter. But hit the former. Watching the little line as the update builds, I resist the urge to shut off the phone, stop the download. A few minutes later, it is done. The phone seems unharmed.
The future races at us, and not one necessarily crafted for our comfort, convenience or peace of mind. But cope with it we must.