I spent several hours yesterday writing 1,300 words for my newsletter. I write in Tot, which syncs between Mac and iPad (and in principle iPhone) via iCloud. This morning, I opened Tot on the iPad to make a small edit, and was perturbed to find that the document was blank. Presumably it hadn’t synced with the Mac yet for some reason of its own. I forced quit Tot on the iPad and woke the Mac. In the seconds before it connected to the wifi, I copied my draft post to the clipboard and pasted it into TextEdit. Almost immediately, the text disappeared from Tot, as the iPad version (which was blank of course) overwrote it. Just as well I had my TextEdit copy. I thought Apple/iCloud had solved this problem now. A few years ago, I lost 10,000 words the same way, but iCloud seemed to have got more reliable at keeping things in sync in the meantime, and I had been lulled into a false sense of security.

I wrote recently that I’m never again going to own more than one Apple device at a time. I was already disillusioned with, and ready to give up the iPad and iPhone, but now I think I might be ready to ditch the Mac too. That won’t be easy but Apple seems to be determined to make it easier.