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I would like to preface what I’m about to say by stating that I am in no way, shape, or form, intending to be a downer with this post. I’m in fact hoping that it will help others to avoid what we’ve been going through the past few days.

Anyway, I have a love/hate relationship with Apple anymore. We own so many of their products and with technology changing on what seems like a hourly basis, my frustration grows more and more as time goes on. Most recently, we have had numerous problems with our iPhones and iMac ever since enabling iCloud.

After spending well over an hour on the phone with AppleCare, an appointment was scheduled at the Apple Store for this past Tuesday. Sparing the details of my in-store visit–gotta love that place…NOT!–things progressively got worse. Now, despite the fact that I had duplicate, triplicate, and quadruplicate entries, I was grateful that they replaced my iPhone for the umpteenth time; however, I was and still am not thrilled with what happened next.

I learned that most of our problems came from the fact that iCloud is not compatible with Snow Leopard (or anything earlier) as far as syncing iCal and the Address Book in between the iPhone and computer goes. (“Houston, we have a problem!” Actually, this is a big problem considering everything related to my business is on my iPhone and needs to be synced on a regular basis.) You want to know what the resolution to this was? “Upgrade to Lion… It only costs $29.99 as opposed to the $129.99 norm, and it will definitely resolve most of the issues.” You want to know what I did? I came home and downloaded the app so I could install the software on our computer. Not too long after, I noticed that several of my software programs were no longer compatible… That being Quicken, CS2, and Dreamweaver. As a result, I can’t balance my personal and business checkbooks, I can’t really do much with my photography, and I can’t update my business website. Oh, snap!

I called AppleCare that same night and spent three hours on the phone with two different people; my husband spent an additional hour to hour and a half after I handed the phone over to him so I could go to bed and clear my head. To solve this problem, it was decided that we were going to recover everything using the latest backup from our Time Capsule. Ummm… No such luck. Time Machine showed that there were backups every hour since August 2011, but for some strange reason, we couldn’t access them. According to the Sr. Technical Support dude, something was clearly wrong and now Engineers needed to get involved. Three days have gone by and absolutely nothing has been resolved from their end, as of yet.

I had an idea when we were originally talking that was somewhat poo-poo’d; that being that I had saved the Quicken software download to an old external hard drive several years ago so I should probably make use of it. With that said, the next day I took it upon myself to install that on my daughter’s iMac. I then used the “sharing” feature to access the Quicken files. Good thing I have a decent amount of knowledge when it comes to computers because at least I got that portion of the problem somewhat taken care of. Funny thing is, I now have to figure out what to do next as far as our finances go because Quicken no longer creates upgrades for their software; per the Apple tech, they have moved everything online. Could that be because Apple updates their software so frequently and Quicken is fed up? I’m gonna assume that’s the case because I know I’m fed up.

(5D Mark II, 291mm, ISO 3200, 1/160 @ f/14)

Many moons ago (six years worth to be exact), I switched over to Mac from Windows. I still find Mac to be more sufficient in terms of my needs, but enough already with the upgrades. I’m sick and tired of having to spend money every few months on this and that in order to make everything work cohesively.

Since I currently can’t use my CS2, I opted to try using my Digital Photo Professional. I’m not at all proficient in working with RAW files, but here is another picture of the moon I took the other morning. I’m pleased with how it turned out!

As stated, I still haven’t heard back from Apple. I’m hoping that’s because they’re working with Customer Relations to get us the most recent upgrade of Creative Suite free of charge, which would solve the rest of our problems for the most part. That way I could stick with Lion, which would save a lot of time on both ends (the next step mentioned was erasing the whole hard drive and starting all over). I expressed that that’s the least they can do taking into account all of the problems we’ve had over the years, including the fact that they originally sold us CS2 (with our first iMac), which happened to be incompatible from the get-go due to the Mac/Intel processor–never could use Version Cue.

Not sure if any of that made sense, but I hope you find this informative if you’re a Mac user and please keep your fingers crossed for us 🙂

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As always, thanks for visiting my blog and I hope you like what you see. All feedback is welcome!

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Images on this blog are copyright of Nicole Ftacnik Photography and cannot be copied, downloaded, or used without my written permission. Feel free to contact me directly if you are interested in purchasing an image for commercial use or you can visit my photography website to purchase for print.