My iPhone 7 is dead this morning. I wake up; hit the home button; nothing. This is my work number, so, yeah... it's a slight inconvenience. Put on a pot of coffee and climb the stairs to my office: "maybe if I connect to the old MacPro I can get some diagnostic info..."

I open iTunes -- device doesn't register; open Image Capture -- device doesn't register. I could go to the command line, but who wants to do that before coffee? Quick Google search says to open iTunes and hold the power and volume-down buttons on the side of the phone. Sure enough, a restore prompt opens. I have two choices:

• Upgrade iTunes to 13.x so I can update iOS and keep the data on my phone, or...
• Perform a Factory Reset and lose EVERYTHING.

Hmm... one of these options looks only slightly better than the other (foreced upgrade!?!--really!?). Nonetheless, the obvious winner is to upgrade iTunes. So I open up the App Store and, WHADDAYA KNOW?--in order to upgrade iTunes I need to upgrade my OS. I don't have time for this garbage. I'm running a 2008 MacPro two months shy of 2020, and I start work in an hour. Apple's suggestion: "find a friend with an Apple computer".

WTF happened, Apple? W---T---F happened?

Background:

I grew up with Apple. No, not the teal/key lime/tangerine/pink colored clam-shell iBook that was all the rave in 2001--not that Apple. I grew up with the goddamned Apple Classic II and the PowerPC. You know: Apple before Apple was a thing--back when the Apple Store didn't exist and the internet was only a glimmer in everyone's eyes; back when admitting that you liked Apple would get you dirty looks from just about anyone. The only cool games for the Mac were the Oregon Trail and Sim City 2000... and even then, everyone knew they were for nerds.

No. Our school district was a Mac only kind of place... So, by the time I hit middle school, Apple was just a given. Then, one day, my mother landed an educational grant with her High School (she was a teacher), and all of a sudden we had a top of the line PowerPC in the house. Whooooaaah, mama! That thing was a beast!--loaded with MS Office, Photoshop 6 (... I still drool with nostalgia), Illustrator, and a cutting edge 56k modem (screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, bdang, bdang, bdang). I can't remember whether I pirated it or not, but at one point we even had Dreamweaver! By the time I was in high school, in between chatting up girls on AOL, I was using Photoshop 7 to process images for any number of hobby sites I had going on Geocities--the world was my stage.

So, when I turned 18, I went out and bought myself a graphite PowerMac G4 (you know, with the massive graphite CRT display). Apple was still transitioning from OS9 to OSX, and I remember having to run most of my games in Classic mode: Civ II, Ceasar III, Sim City 2k.--they just don't make games like that anymore (at least, not outside the open source community). I don't recall how Apple did it... how they managed to squeeze two OS'es into one; it must have been some sort of emulation. But, when I think back on it now, it was probably one of the stupidest OS features you can imagine: no backwards compatibility, so let's just ship the new OS with the ability for users to open the old one without needing to dual boot; the software equivalent of "separate but equal"(we all know how that worked out...). At the very least, though, it was Apple trying to accommodate the reality of their base. People had substantial investments in the pre-OSX ecosystem (I hung on to my pirated OS9-specific applications right up until I lost the HD they were on), and the company understood it. Thanks for giving us the time to transition, Apple--at the time, it was both a novelty and a necessity.

And, TBH, even once we made it to OSX, things were pretty good: Apple had finished it's rebranding; everything was colorful and sexy; iCloud wasn't a thing, and there were no devices with which to bloat the Apple ecosystem (the iPod had just come out, but it wasn't WiFi capable, and it was probably more akin to a USB dongle than anything else). If you told your mac to sit down, it would sit down; if you asked it to stand, it would stand.

It wasn't long, though, before Apple began to build their true ecosystem: a precursor to iCloud and, I'd argue, the basis for the App Store. They called it iLife--a suite of, at first free, apps that shared libraries and features. iTunes was part of it, as was iPhoto. Apple prompted us to express our creativity with applications like iMovie and GarageBand. There was even a website builder called iWeb (I used this to build the first website for my business in Tokyo--it takes me back).

Now, I'm no software developer, but if my experiences with web applications like WordPress and Drupal have taught me anything, it's that interdependencies can make upgrades a pain. If you tie your photo and music applications into your movie-making application, you're probably gonna need to consider those applications when you upgrade the movie app. The greater the interdependency, the more the need to keep everything in line. The more you need to keep everything in line, the less control you have over any one application.

In other words, software in the OSX ecosystem has become less and less a good, and more and more a service. Like any machine with interlocking and moving parts, it needs to be maintained; the greater the number of parts, the greater the chance of something going wrong, and the greater the need for servicing. Apple, and admittedly, the industry as a whole, has only moved further in this direction. The default for Windows 10 is to run updates at Microsoft's whim. Apple, arguably, forces you to update with planned obsolescence. Today, in the age of Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, there are so many parties with hooks in your hardware, it's a wonder your phone starts up at all.

It's a MAGA moment, my friends: Make Apple Great Again. We need a return to the good old days--back when we were masters over our computers.

My phone is back up... not sure what fixed it, since I never got the OS updated. You know that "service engine" light that shows up on your dash every 20k miles?...

This is why I run Linux on my work computer.

I have 25 years of data with Apple. It'll be a pain to download/extract it all. I think it's finally time, though.