I ended up following ACE’s suggestions to reload Sonoma. Among other things, Reminders no longer synchs between the iPhone and the Mac like it did before reloading Sonoma. Logging out of iCloud on both devices didn’t fix that. But it created a bunch of other issues. First I had to go back and disable all the iCloud stuff I don’t want (most of iCloud…) But synching Reminders was one of those I left on. After rebooting, etc, Reminders still won’t sync.
Then I was unable to access the one service that is keyed to my fixed IP address. Disabling “hide IP address” in Safari didn’t fix it. Turns out I had to also go back and disable this in iCloud (the iCloud setting supercedes the Safari setting, and that’s just piss-poor design. At least they could issue a warning when changing a Safari setting is overridden by an iCloud setting.) Hide IP address is A Good Thing that needs to allow for exceptions.
The bug I had before reloading Sonoma where I couldn’t permanently change the iPhone to backup to the Mac is still there. Each time I change it, during the sync process it gets changed back to “important data to iCloud.”
And then there’s all the different passwords and steps I had to go through to re-enable iCloud. Seems Apple has adopted the Vista approach for annoying security prompts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuqZ8AqmLPY (Adam commented on this when reinstalling applications after his Sonoma re-load.)
add: A related thought: the ‘controversy’ over NameDrop being enabled by default shows how Apple should provide an easy way to review new features added in an OS (iOS or Mac OS) update, allowing the user to enable/disable each. That can be an app that is run during the installation, with the ability to decline to run it during installation but come back and run it later. And the default mode for new features should be OFF!!!