The expectation (set by Apple rather than their customers) is that as an Apple consumer, you and your device are tied to the internet and Apple's servers or you are basically at a dead end.
Ever heard of "walled garden"? Apple doesn't sell you a device, nor does it sell you a piece of software. It sells you a solution for a certain set of problems. The system they provide is intended to be used in a certain fashion. It works very well when used that way. If you try to use it in a fashion that it is not intended for, then it may not work well, or may not work at all. You will usually know when you are mis-using it, because things get exponentially harder.
I've gone through the same frustration, with my personal example being using a Mac to play music, using the iTunes program, but copying the music from my own mp3 files (which are well structured, organized, with play lists in m3u format, and ID3 tags). Works extremely badly, but it actually does work. After talking to a few Apple people (I have a few very experienced Apple engineers and bosses among my neighbors and friends), I understood the mistake I was making. I was assuming that iTunes was generic software, which I was wrongly expecting to be usable in a generic environment, with arbitrary inputs and outputs. But it is exactly not that. It is part of a suite of applications, hardware, and services, that if used end-to-end provides an excellent music experience, but if you take the individual components of it out of context, it will be somewhere between frustrating and non-functional.
Imagine you go to a kitchen gadget store, and buy a blender. You're thinking "I can make margaritas with that". Then you look, and decide that it has a motor and a blade, so it must be usable as a meat slicer, to turn a long stick of salami into sandwiches. So you take the electric motor out of the case, remove the glass jar, flatten the blade ... and discover that you have ended up with a really horrible blender, which makes awful sandwiches (the salami slices are bumpy not flat), sprays the kitchen counter and ceiling with little bits of salami, and is super dangerous and annoying to use. Surprised? You shouldn't be. You bought an appliance, and mis-used it.
Take the Apple device, and keep it in its walled garden, and it will work excellently, it will delight you, and it will be a good value. This message is being typed on a MacBook Pro, we have another few Macs strewn around the house, my son's cell phone is an iPhone, we have a few iPads around the house, and I'm too lazy to count the total number of Apple devices. I could make jokes that doing so would require taking my socks off, but it's so hot, I'm not actually wearing socks. But using Apple devices is only a good thing if their intended use matches your needs and wants. If not, don't be a hacker and think that you can bend them to your wishes, because that's not the way Apple works. There is a reason I also have FreeBSD machines at home, plus Linux ones: the correct tool for every job.
