[sugarpimpdorsey]

You forgot they broke iTunes Home Sharing on iOS some years ago and have refused to fix it.

Takes over a minute to connect now. (Allegedly the fault of a new, yet horribly inefficient, parser that chokes on large libraries which worked fine a decade ago on phones with half the CPU and RAM.)

Once connected, it won't play DRM-protected tracks I PAID FOR, says I'm not authorized.

I ended up having to break the DRM because Apple can't be bothered to include a functioning music player anymore.

An "iPod with touch controls" is no longer part of iPhone.

An ad-filled music subscription consumption software is.

[seec]

Apple has stopped caring and producing local/personal software for a while now. Which is absolutely brain dead because that was the primary reason to buy their hardware in the first place. Why spend the premium for a Mac if you are going to run some shitty cloud software anyway.

For now the illusion is maintained because they are dominating with their chips, but that won't last forever and the competition is almost caught up (it's not that relevant for non mobile computers anyway).

iTunes had it's flaw but at least it was a very useful software and it worked quite well (at some point I had a library of over 100k tracks); the replacement while trying to keep some of the fundamentals is a joke in comparison.

[pjmlp]

In general their products weren't that great, hence why they almost went bankrupt.

They only played nice during the time they were getting back into the game

[pwg]

It sounds like they are well on their way down the "Enshittification" [1] path. Eventually they will enshittify sufficiently that the illusion will shatter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification