[turtle]

A while ago when the Apple subscriptions came out I said I would never buy them. Then came the photos problem Mrs T ran into and so we subscribed to the storage upgrade for iCloud Drive. Ultimately it went up to 2TB to help her store her photos. She is personally at 1.3TB all by herself.

Then we realized we wanted Fitness+ because it was helping us lose weight and made certain workouts fun. We used it almost every day but we paid for it by the year so it would only be $80 saving us some money. Now we barely use it at all. I have my routing and she has hers and Fitness+ isn’t in the mix, though it could be.

Then my mom wanted the kids to have Apple Arcade so she gave me $60 to pay for 12 months of it. So we ordered Apple Arcade.

Then I realized I wanted Apple Music for new music options without commercials (or outright begging by KLove). At this point It would have been most cost effective to pay for the Premier One plan as opposed to a la cart.

Now I’m looking at the fact that I pay Apple $32 a month (after taxes) and it just creeped up on me. I cannot believe I got here, but it was all justified at the time.

Personally, I want to keep Apple Arcade for my kids because they really love the games and my mom is paying for it anyway. What I’m really needing to figure out is how can I break free from Apple for all the other services.

I don’t use News+ or AppleTV+ at all.

Storage isn’t a problem… sort of. I’ve told my kids to start using Synology Drive and store everything on my NAS now instead of iCloud. However, iDevice backups won’t fit on the free 5GB plan. This part I need to figure out. I have an iPad and phone which is something like 8GB or so of backups.

Photos is a BIG part of my problem. I know Synology has a Photos option too, but I think it struggles with HEIC. I need to get it figured out either way though because I need to be able to give up the $10 a month for convenience. Especially when I have plenty of room on my NAS(es).

Music, I still have my huge music library on Plex so I don’t have to worry about it, just will have to figure out another way to play new music and not deal with commercials. Not a real problem, just one that isn’t worth me giving Apple that much money a month.

So help me with an escape plan please. There has to be software out there that are better options. I (and each family member) can sync our devices to computers for free and not deal with iCloud for backups, but I’m open to third party options if there are good ones, I’ve just never looked into them.

I think Photos really is the big rock in the pile of crap I’m having to figure out.