[tupputuppu]

You said it. I've got no problems dropping 1200 on a phone when I know it doesn't have ads, yet that's slowly not the case with iPhones anymore. I've got a bunch of my own recordings on my laptop I want to listen to on my phone, yet the only solution Apple has is for me to subscribe to a paid service (Apple music/iTunes whatever) or use a USB cable and manually copy the music to my phone. Then when listening to said recordings on my phone, the music player tries to upsell me with Apple Music.

Or Apple TV+ - I've already got the subscription, yet half of the stuff it shows me on the front page is actually movies I still need to pay extra for, and you don't find out until you try to watch the movie in question.

[thirdsun]

> or use a USB cable and manually copy the music to my phone.

So? I don't see the problem. I sync my whole music collection to my iPhone (using iTunes' very helpful transcoding option from lossless to 256 Kbit/s in order to fit onto the 512 GB internal storage). Using an USB cable about once a week to do so isn't really an issue, is it?

> Then when listening to said recordings on my phone, the music player tries to upsell me with Apple Music.

This can be disabled in the settings entirely. That way you won't see Apple Music in the music.app. Again, I don't have any use for Apple Music either, but I think it's fine for it to be present by default since for most people streaming is the most common way to consume music these days.