Apple lightning cables fray at the insertion end — where my kids pull on them.

Standard Anker cables don’t fray, but the contacts fail.

Anker PowerLine+ cables haven’t failed yet. Early days though.

Writing my Smarthones for All section on backup and suddenly realized it’s not all that important. The book’s target users just won’t have critical data that’s not in iCloud Photos or iCloud Calendar or streamed from an Apple source. Sure, games data will be lost, but that’s manageable. The big hit is to setup data; that can be pain to redo given all the work needed to make an iPhone special needs friendly. (Note to Apple – you should read the book.)

Weird moment. We old dudes are so used to backup being critical.

Turns out if you don’t own anything, you have nothing to backup. Just a password written on paper.

Duh. So obvious. Sucks to be old.

I had to create an iTunes playlist called “On Device” and drag from iTunes Library to Playlist, then set old school iTunes sync to include that playlist in podcasts. Then in Podcasts.app I could safely choose items that wouldn’t use data.

In several iOS apps there’s a (generally poorly implemented) way to restrict pick lists to on-device content, but I couldn’t figure that out for Podcasts.app.

So does Apple want the Apple ID that owns all these purchases, or the Apple ID associated with my iCloud documents? [1]

I’ve been waiting for things like this to happen. For years Apple allowed us to have a separate Apple ID for purchases and iCloud service — but it’s clearly not their preference.

Meanwhile there is no way to merge Apple IDs (though it may be possible to do this with customer service).

This is going to go badly…

[1] In this case they wanted my iCloud Drive/Documents ID, not the Apple ID for DRMd content. I don’t have any DRMd eBooks fortunately — all purchased books are from Google Play store and any DRM is stripped.

Update: Via Twitter, @dfjdejulio suggested:

Partial workaround is to have iCloud account be head of family and store account be family member. Use iCloud account, access all content.

Clever! I may do this. Need to think it over a bit.