Our Rant –> Dr Gonzo

Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the new Windows version of iTunes in San Francisco last week on October 16, dubbing it “The Best Windows App Ever written”. As always, whenever he speaks, the gaggle of Mac-olites that he’s kept at his side since Super Bowl Sunday 1984 cooed with delight for their master when given the proper visual cues (and possibly electroshock treatments administered at the same time using that remote control he always carries). Every word that comes from his mouth is gospel, as if it was God himself claiming that iTunes for Windows is the best app ever. Now I’m no Rhodes scholar, but it seems to me that when you claim that something is the best of it’s kind, then that thing better be the best damn thing that you are claiming it to be.

I will admit right now that I use iTunes, I was waiting for it since it was rumored to be in the works, and then confirmed to be released by years end. I’ve found it to be a robust, and feature packed app, and I have even gone so far as to erase all my mp3s I ripped from my CDs in order to re-rip them using the AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) file format in order to save disk space but retain high quality.

Confused? Don’t be. Although I enjoy iTunes, and think that it kicks the shit out of any other Windows compatible media player currently out there, I cannot in good faith agree that it is “The best Windows app ever written”; and I’ll tell you good people why.

Starting with the small things first, it’s only Windows 2000 and XP compatible, thus ignoring all those people who still have to use Windows 95, 98, Me, and NT at home, school, or work. There might be a good reason for this considering one of iTunes’ flaws; it’s memory usage fluctuates violently like a schizophrenic who’s being kicked in the balls repeatedly. I have seen no rhyme or reason to this, and because the Win9x series are horrible at managing their own memory usage, iTunes would probably cause those OSs to choke on their own puke before they died.

Another, fairly annoying problem with iTunes lies in it’s “ability” to burn CDs. I have no idea what’s going on here, but after using Nero 5 & 6 for burning audio CDs, I have gotten used to the idea of doing some email, and light surfing while burning. Not so with iTunes, attempting these tasks normally results in skips in the tracks, and to top it off, Apple’s “Dumbing it down a notch” approach to user interfaces leaves iTunes without any advanced burn settings like buffer size. It doesn’t even include a buffer indicator, so if I want to use iTunes to burn a CD, I’d have to use the famous Ron Popeil line, “Set it, and forget it!” While discussing the matter with a friend of mine, I found that he too had some lackluster results using an older Mac version of iTunes to burn CDs. It appears that Apple doesn’t care hard enough to address this issue in it’s latest release of iTunes either, but this is still not the driving factor behind my rant.

Mere minutes after Jobs made the debut, and Apple made the new Windows version of iTunes available for public download, people discovered that “Best” doesn’t necessarily mean “Good”. Many Windows users started to run into problems after installing iTunes, big major fucking headache sized problems. The problem was that after installing and rebooting Windows, many could not load Windows again, or if they did it would take a major bit of massaging, kicking, swearing, and crying. Luckily I was unaffected, but I feel for these people. Sometimes there is so much of our lives stored on these PCs, that you feel dead inside when a major incident like this occurs.

By all accounts, the problem was caused by a bad interaction with the iTunes and Adaptec/Roxio EZ-CD Creator and/or DirectCD burning engines. Now as a ton of OEMs (HP, IBM, Dell, etc.) have been shipping new Windows PCs with this software for years, you’d think that this problem would have been found in Apple’s beta tests and resolved before releasing the finished product. However Apple seems to have had their thumbs shoved straight up their asses on this one. Apparently Apple did not have a large release of the Beta of the new Windows version of iTunes in order to properly work out the bugs, nor did they seem to choose to remember their own history so as not to repeat it. According to some posts on the Apple discussion boards, Apple had almost the exact same problem with an older version of iTunes — at that time available only for the Mac OS. The culprit again was a bad interaction between the iTunes and Adaptec/Roxio Toast (Mac version of EZ-CD Creator) burning engines.

I was unaffected by this horrible flaw, as I use just about everything but EZ-CD Creator to burn audio and data CDs, but some of those that were affected turned to the Apple discussion boards for help and insight into the problem. What I saw amazed me (although I guess that it shouldn’t have) to no end. Although there were a lot of helpful tips, suggestions etc, there were many posts by Mac-Nazis. You know the type, those assholes that look down their noses at anyone who doesn’t use a Mac, assume that all Mac users are more educated than the rest of us, and feel that Macs are the end all and be all of personal computing. Well instead of being helpful like normal Mac enthusiasts, the Mac-Nazis’ replies to the discussions droned on about how this problem with iTunes wouldn’t have happened on OS X because Apple makes all of their own hardware and doesn’t have to support the dizzying configurations of hardware that Microsoft does with Windows. The Mac-Nazis would also come out and say that these users should have known better than to buy a PC with Windows instead of a glorious Mac. First this sort of behaviour is rude, if you have nothing helpful to contribute, you’re not supposed to post your two-bit opinion. Second, it makes them come off as total idiots because this problem isn’t a hardware compatibility issue, it’s an issue of software not playing fair with the other software on the system.

Now some would say that this is the price that we pay for using free software, and that we shouldn’t expect anything more. Ordinarily I would agree with them, however iTunes and the integrated iTunes Music Store are being used by Apple as vehicles to increase sales of iPods. If Apple wants us to buy into the whole idea of the iTunes/iPod media hub in order to increase their profitability, I think they could have done us (and themselves) the small favour of doing better software testing. In the end this may end up being a financial setback for Apple, as their reputation (and future plans) as a producer of quality software and hardware took a bit of a hit. How many of those affected by this crippling bug will turnaround and pay the approximately $450 CDN for the entry level iPod? Not as many as would have had this bug been caught before iTunes’ release last Thursday. Another aspect of this gaff revolves around those Windows PC users that were poised to make the switch to a Macintosh PC, both in the home and in the office. Now if they weren’t put off by the idea of switching forever, these users may at the very least put that idea onto the back burner for some time, causing Apple to lose the market share of the PC market it so desperately needs to maintain overall profitability.

I wanted to end this rant with a wicked funny punch line, but if it exists it escapes me. My point to all of this is this: Don’t listen to Mac-Nazis, they’re too smart, and think too differently from the rest of us to know anything of value.

Comments(0)