

Apple goes too far in iTunes 8 - boredguy8
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=536

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josefresco
I would argue that Apple went too far with iTunes when they started bundling
... anything.

Reminds me of another media company that took over your system up upgrades ..
any remember RealNetworks?

~~~
froo
_.. any remember RealNetworks?_

I still suffer nightmares from it.

Just the other day I really wanted to watch an online presentation, yet it
insisted I installed realplayer. I was considering it, as I really wanted to
watch this particular presentation, but unfortunately I just could not bring
myself to going through that again.

~~~
benzim
I also would never install realplayer. Real alternative + vlc has worked for
everything I've tried.

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funkyheff
yeah, this is definitely paranoia, but is it possible that apple is trying to
make the user experience of itunes in windows frustrating so heavy ipod and
iphone users with limited technical knowledge will blame it on windows and
think about switching to a mac? It's certainly not a nice practice, but Jobs
didn't get the market share he has by being nice either.

~~~
jcl
That strikes me as highly unlikely.

First, it's extremely risky. It would expose Apple to class-action suits from
users, as well as giving other companies fodder for an anti-competitive
practices lawsuit.

Second, this particular error is more likely to hurt Apple's reputation than
Microsoft's: The article says that the crashes were observed when plugging in
an iPod or launching iTunes. Users will almost certainly associate new crash
behavior on an otherwise stable Windows system with their last action: using
an Apple product. If Apple really wanted to hurt Windows' reputation, they
would have made the crashes random.

~~~
ars
You're assuming they did it on purpose. Why assume that?

Ever heard the saying about not attributing to malice something that can be
explained by incompetence.

~~~
jcl
The malicious assumption is in the parent post ("Jobs didn't get the market
share he has by being nice") -- I'm saying that's unlikely, hence I agree that
Apple's problem is most likely due to incompetence.

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snewe
I find that Apple continually installs Safari with iTunes automatic upgrades.
Very annoying. They are nicer to me on my Mac.

~~~
tl
What happens if you rip out Safari on a Mac?

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ROFISH
Define rip Safari out of Mac. Safari is nothing but a shell for WebKit, the
HTML renderer. (+ JS and a lot of other things.) You can probably delete
Safari no problem, although it'll probably reinstall with system updates.

You can't pull WebKit out of Mac since it's used in all kinds of programs. The
least of which is iTunes for their iTunes Store.

~~~
run4yourlives
Heh, didn't another company get sued for that kind of crap?

~~~
tesseract
I think they were sued over iexplore.exe, not mshtml.dll.

~~~
william42
Actually, they were sued over OEMs and netscape.exe, if I remember correctly.

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lallysingh
The long rant seems to be two parts: 1\. A buggy device driver. 2\. MobileMe
getting installed.

The former isn't anything new on Windows side, and part of a continuing trend
in lower software quality out of apple recently. Hopefully they'll tightening
down their dev & testing processes soon.

The latter is the 2nd time they've used iTunes as a beachhead for pushing
other software onto Windows.

Maybe it's just old payback for forcing IE on mac os for all those years?
Shame how it's the user who has to pay.

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ngvrnd
The iTunes 8 release FAILs on my macbook running the latest OS X. Crashes on
startup. I'm not the only one; their support forums have lots of other folks
complaining about start up crashes. They didn't shit on windows; they just
screwed this upgrade up royally.

~~~
ngvrnd
I should add, for anyone else who's seeing this, I found that if you hold down
some combination of alt-command-ctrl (play around, it's not hard to find, and
I can't remember exactly what it was) when you click on itunes to start it up,
you'll get a "Starting iTunes in safe mode" dialog and that will get you past
the crash I'm seeing. It seems to be related to processing cover art.

~~~
dcurtis
Wow, the fact that iTunes has a "safe mode" is just ridiculous. Glad it helped
you, though.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
Many apps have a "safe mode." The Firefox safe mode has saved my butt many
times when I installed a misbehaving plugin....

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rcoder
iTunes is not just a music player. It is also a media store client, a CD/DVD-
burning application, and a sync tool for the iPod & iPhone.

Why then should it be surprising to anyone that it installs background
processes and drivers? Yes, malware authors use hidden background tasks, but
so does _everyone else_. The technique itself is not evil.

Furthermore, blaming Apple for poor QA because _some_ Windows systems crash
when iTunes 8 is installed is ridiculous. Windows is an ecosystem, not an
operating system, and there are far too many possible system configurations
for Apple (or any other vendor) to test them all.

There are plenty of causes to call Apple evil (DRM, restrictive platform
access, insane RAM pricing) or incompetent (MobileMe launch, iPhone 3G signal
issues) but a buggy Windows experience isn't one of them.

~~~
boredguy8
I missed where "MobileMe" was an essential component of iTunes.

And this isn't a problem of "testing them all". It's not like there's 4 rogue
configurations floating around in the Windows ecosystem. It's TENS of
THOUSANDS of people, and the problem falls well within what should be standard
pre-release testing.

And I think people would be far less upset if it weren't for the fact that
Apple tries to pretend it doesn't do things like install bloatware.

~~~
rcoder
The moment where "MobileMe" became part of iTunes was precisely when they
decided to make iTunes the gatekeeper all iPod and iPhone content. Want to use
an iPhone on Windows? Them's the breaks.

Also, your "TENS of THOUSANDS" of people are a frigging _drop in the bucket_
compared to the TENS of MILLIONS (or possibly even HUNDREDS) of Windows
systems currently in deployment in countries where Apple distributes their
products.

Don't people constantly defend Microsoft with the same argument -- namely,
that they have no way to test every possible interaction between bad drivers
and hardware components simply due to the sheer number and variety of Windows
systems in use at any given time?

~~~
boredguy8
I like how you justify malware/bloatware/bad stewardship of client machines.
"But we say you need it" does not defeat the fact that it's malware.

And tens of thousands of users having the same problem (and having it be
reducible in 2 or 3 days to a repeatable problem) means that there was little
to no testing done. Part of testing is USING the myriad environments of the
ecosphere in which your application will exist. It would be like writing a web
phone app that only works at 120 x 160 but crashes at 128x128. Sure, it
doesn't crash on EVERY phone, but it crashes on a significant number of them.

(It's unclear to me, by the way, that your claim that only a few systems crash
is true. I'm able to reproduce the error bug by doing a clean install of
iTunes 8. It seems like the problem is much larger than you want it to be. But
even if I concede your point that it's smaller than everyone, it's still large
enough that we're seeing 'software malpractice')

And Microsoft got hip to how bad the "but there's lots of systems, wahhhhh"
excuse is. Welcome to the 21st century. Apple should get hip to how lame that
excuse is, too.

~~~
tesseract
So buggy software is now 'malware'? That seems slightly harsh.

------
shimi
iPhone 3G and now this

Apple are under pressure, these are not minor bugs, these are major issues

I guess they are pushing their products way before they are ready for a global
release.

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trezor
Apple just _shits_ over the Windows platform once again with its software
releases.

Intentional or not? I don't know, but this is hardly news.

~~~
shiranaihito
I share your respect for Apple's products (and contempt for Windows).

But this is a bit like all those sites where they have helpfully selected five
different "Yes, please spam me!" boxes for you when registering.

~~~
boredguy8
Except there's no option to un-check a box in this situation. This just -is-
the practice of malware, and should not be accepted.

~~~
shiranaihito
Oh? That's just weird..

I haven't used iTunes myself, by the way - I buy CDs for the sound quality.

Sorry for the misinformed post.

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weegee
excellent article. seems like if Apple wants to maintain their marketshare
with Windows users they had better beat a trail to solving this problem. I'd
be curious to find out what percentage of iPod users (and iTunes music store
users) use Mac vs. Windows. I know people who avoid the iPod because you can't
fill it up easily without iTunes.

~~~
ryanb
I personally think iTunes sucks for playing music. I definitely prefer Winamp
instead, but unfortunately there isn't a Winamp build for OS X that I know of.
If not for easy iPod syncing, I wouldn't use iTunes at all.

~~~
netcan
What I find interesting is this: The music player has become a huge pivot
point. Itunes is (theoretically) one of _the_ reasons ipods have made it.

None of the pre-ipod desktop players really got much out of their previous
positions.

Imagine if in the first few ipod years, scandisk, sony or some unknown had
come to market with an _ipod_ that uses winamp as its itunes. half the price &
just use whatever software you were using before. That would have been a big
gun in the arsenal. It was already popular with the right people to buy mp3
players (people who had mp3s), already proved to be nice to use (lots of
people used it).

Instead, they used their own crappy software that no one in a million years
would choose to use if it wasn't for the damn mp3 player they got when they
where too cheap to go for an ipod.

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jauco
Actually when the first ipod (1st and 2nd) gen came out, it was simply miles
ahead of any of the competition. It had more than 128mb of storage data _and_
it fitted in your pocket (there was one alternative from creative which, well,
didn't fit in your pocket)

It came with a horrible mp3 manager until itunes was ported to windows a few
years later, but I was okay with that since the ipod was so awesome.

The device was way more important than the software.

~~~
netcan
I didn't know about the original software.

But I was talking about the point when the alternative devices were just as
good but with no advantage other then price & a software disadvantage.

~~~
altano
Now that's just silly. You clearly didn't use both the 1st generation iPod and
its competitors.

I fiddled around with the Creative Jukebox or whatever it was called before
buying the first iPod: the forward next buttons barely worked, the LCD could
barely fit the name of a single track on the screen, and the entire UI was
barely responsive. The click wheel for scrolling, the large LCD, the great
battery life, the incredible form factor... the iPod was 5 years ahead of the
competitors.

There were the Rios which were well made, but that was a different league...
they were more akin to the shuffle.

And to top it all off, I was using Windows at the time, so it was at a
software disadvantage. I had to use some hacky 3rd party, unsupported software
to even sync the thing.

