[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.

[Brad]

I haven't tried it yet, but I've read good things about PhotoPrism. TrueNAS has a one-click-install thing for it. That means it has freely available Docker images, and I figure your Synology could handle that easily.

https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism - source
https://github.com/photoprism/photoprism/projects/5 - development roadmap
https://demo.photoprism.app/browse - live demo
https://docs.photoprism.app/developer-guide/media/ - supported image formats (including HEIF's .avci, .avcs, .avif, .avifs, .heic, .heics, .heif, .heifs)
https://docs.photoprism.app/getting-started/docker/ - docker guide

Oh, hey! Well, look at that:

https://docs.photoprism.app/getting-.../nas/synology/

Visit the Synology Knowledge Base to learn what kind of CPU and how much memory your device has. We recommend hosting PhotoPrism on a 64-bit system with at least 2 cores and 3 GB of physical memory. High-resolution panoramic images may require additional swap space and/or physical memory above the recommended minimum. RAW image conversion and TensorFlow are disabled on devices with 1 GB or less memory. You will have to resort to 32-bit Docker images to run PhotoPrism and MariaDB on ARMv7-based entry-level devices like the Synology DS218j.

but

Will my device be fast enough? This largely depends on your expectations and the number of files you have. Most users report that PhotoPrism runs well on their Synology NAS. However, you should keep in mind: initial indexing may take longer than on standard desktop computers the hardware has no video transcoding support and software transcoding is generally slow

So, maybe export a mount to a nearby machine that has beefier hardware running the container?

[drewprops]

The amount of time spent building and maintaining a less than optimal experience doesn't seem like a better value from over here.

Would switching to a PC/Android-based ecosystem deliver any cost/performance benefits?

...

[PB PM]

Originally Posted by drewprops The amount of time spent building and maintaining a less than optimal experience doesn't seem like a better value from over here. Would switching to a PC/Android-based ecosystem deliver any cost/performance benefits? ...

Not really, and it's more disjointed.

As it is I use iCloud to sync files between my PC and my Apple devices. IMO there isn't a really elegant way to get out of iCloud as an Apple user, at least not with the same functionality, without exposing your home network to more external connections. I guess a VPN would help?

[turtle]

Moving to PC/Android is not an option. However, I've been told by Mrs T that she REALLY wants to keep Apple Music. So even though I have tons of music in Plex, it isn't the same and isn't as integrated as Music and Siri.

Sooo...

I'm still exploring this but with the likelihood that I will not be getting rid of the One plan anytime soon.

That said, Synology Drive works great for an iCloud Drive replacement with my NAS. I already have a VPN through my NAS so I don't need to change up anything with that. Tons of space and no need for iCloud. We can have one device sync to iCloud for free (5GB) and any other above that sync to a computer. So phones to iCloud for free and iPads to computers kinda thing.

For photos, I'm working with Synology Photos right now. It is included free with the NAS so it is easy to test out. So far I'm backing up from my iPad to it and it is taking a while for sure. I've got ~25k images to be synced over. Mrs T, she has over 250k though. Heck, her having all of our photos is why we went to the 2TB iCloud plan. I'm not sure the NAS is going to be enough to handle her library... but I'm still going to try as a backup.

[turtle]

Coming back to this, I think the worst part is we all kinda go "nothing is as polished as iCloud so why bother". I know I have been fighting that. I mean, it is all integrated and simple... but for a fee.

[kieran]

I hear you on that. I am mostly all in on iCloud, with just my work email on Google Suite at the moment.

It is so easy to keep everything seamless and backed up that it's hard to justify moving away from it, besides the simple fact of "Because I don't want everything tied up in one place."

We do use AppleTV fairly regularly and I use Apple Music pretty much daily. Appel News is also something that both my wife and I use a few times a day at least.

Since I was already paying for increased iCloud storage and Apple Music, the bundle just made sense. It's a lot to put into one basket, but the convenience outweighs the negatives for me at the moment.

[PB PM]

My only problem with switching iCloud for a NAS is that the NAS is in the users home. House gets robbed, burns down, washes out in a flood, or name your other natural disaster, and everything is gone with your home. Yikes. As much as I dislike using cloud storage, it's kind of protection against that. I pay less than $15 a year for iCloud (I only pay for storage, no Apple music, TV+ or any of that other subscription crap...), I can pay for that for many years before I could equal the cost of good NAS setup.

[turtle]

YOU ARE ALL NOT HELPING!!!!



I'm trying to get rid of this monthly money leach and I keep getting pushed back to it. I already have the NAS and TBs of available storage on it. The fact that I don't have an off-site replication is the real problem I have. I can get that, but at about $12 for 2TB as opposed to $10 for iCloud. $12 is from Wasabi and is S3 storage with ingress and egress included for the monthly fee of $5.99. iCloud is integrated and "seamless" for our devices.

[PB PM]

If you want to lower the cost dump everything, other than the storage for offsite backup. The rest seems like a waste.

[turtle]

Interesting. Seems a class action lawsuit is in the works because I'm not the only one wanting an escape plan.

The Hill reports:

Apple faces a proposed class action lawsuit alleging the company holds an illegal monopoly over digital storage for its customers. The suit, filed Friday, claims “surgical” restraints prevent customers from effectively using any service except its iCloud storage system. iCloud is the only service that can host certain data from the company’s phones, tablets and computers, including application data and device settings. Plaintiffs allege the practice has “unlawfully ‘tied’” the devices and iCloud together. “Apple’s arbitrary prohibition on hosting Restricted Files fundamentally distorts the competitive landscape to privilege iCloud over all rivals,” the suit reads. “As a result of this restraint, would-be cloud competitors are unable to offer Apple’s device holders a full-service cloud-storage solution, or even a pale comparison.” iCloud enjoys about 70 percent market share in cloud storage for Apple users, according to the suit. Plaintiffs also noted that the high market share has allowed prices to skyrocket, marking it “undisciplined by competition.” “Apple has marked up its iCloud prices to the point where the service is generating almost pure profit. Apple’s ability to sustain these prices is a testament to its monopoly power,” the suit said. The plaintiffs propose a class action suit with tens of millions of members, all iCloud platform users. The Hill has reached out to Apple for comment.

I would love to be able to "OwnCloud" my iCloud with my NASs or even other online storage options. Sure I like certain services... but others I would dump if it meant a cost savings.

[chucker]

I think there's some truth to the complaint, but I'm unsure it rises to the level of being appropriate for a lawsuit.

I'm also unsure how practical this would be. In theory, providing either an API for third parties to implement iCloud Photo Library-compatible storage, or providing a Photos Server app for macOS (they seem to have left that business altogether), would be great. In practice, especially the first of those is really hard to do.

(And Apple are hardly the only ones who avoid it. Atlassian used to offer a self-hosted version of Confluence, but has now restricted it to people willing to pay five figures, and will perhaps eventually phase that out altogether. Microsoft offers, e.g., a self-hosted Azure DevOps Server, but it always lags behind their cloud Azure DevOps Services, with no clear guidance on whether they'll even continue offering that.)

[turtle]

That is the real problem. People like me with technical know-how and willingness to make it work are by far the minority. Apple isn't going to build for a minority in this case.

However, opening up another *Kit to allow someone like Dropbox, OwnCloud, Synology Photos or the like to tap in (even if only though an iOS app) would give flexibility to even the technical neophytes. Why would Apple do that though? That would involve them spending their dev energy for the gain of someone else. Avoiding a class-action lawsuit would seem to be the only good reason I could see.

I do agree that this isn't likely to amount to a legit class-action suit, but still. Rattle the cage enough and Apple just might move in that direction to minimize legal costs.

[chucker]

Originally Posted by turtle That is the real problem. People like me with technical know-how and willingness to make it work are by far the minority. Apple isn't going to build for a minority in this case. However, opening up another *Kit to allow someone like Dropbox, OwnCloud, Synology Photos or the like to tap in (even if only though an iOS app) would give flexibility to even the technical neophytes. Why would Apple do that though? That would involve them spending their dev energy for the gain of someone else. Avoiding a class-action lawsuit would seem to be the only good reason I could see.

Yeah, but writing a PhotosServerKit for Synology et al to hook into is way harder even than making a Photos Server.

They arguably picked the easiest way out, which sucks for consumers, but I imagine if they do eventually offer something non-cloud again, surely they'd prefer to at least control the server code.

(I also suspect a lot of networked Time Machine problems stem from this. They picked a more-or-less open protocol in SMB, then bolted proprietary Time Machine-specific extensions on top of it. Even when a vendor like Synology suppotrs those, the SMB protocol isn't really designed for a backup process, and if they had their entirely own server-side thing, TM could likely be made both more reliable and also faster.)

Originally Posted by turtle I do agree that this isn't likely to amount to a legit class-action suit, but still. Rattle the cage enough and Apple just might move in that direction to minimize legal costs.

Yeah, maybe.