It's a pity they couldn't continue to pack those into production iPods (I'm sure it would've been too costly). There's a handful of albums within that group I already own, and a good number that I wouldn't necessarily buy, but would definitely listen to if it were freely included.
Apple Computer was continuously in legal battles with Apple Corps (the record label owned by the Beatles) over staying out of each other’s business (easy for the Beatles, hard for Steve Jobs)
Shipping iPod with Beatles content would have been a really nasty legal knot. Or it would have made the universe implode. One or the other.
> When new sounds for System 7 were created, the sounds were reviewed by Apple's Legal Department who objected that the new sound alert "chime" had a name that was "too musical," under the recent settlement. The creator of the new sound alerts for System 7, Jim Reekes, had grown frustrated with the legal scrutiny and first quipped it should be named "Let It Beep", a pun on The Beatles' "Let It Be". When someone remarked that that would not pass Legal's approval, he remarked, "so sue me". After a brief reflection, he resubmitted the sound's name as sosumi (a homophone of "so sue me"), telling the Legal Department that the name was Japanese and had nothing to do with music.
When Apple and Apple settled their differences and you could finally get the Beatles on iTunes, Apple Stores played only Beetles music over their sound systems for months. I can only imagine what it was like working there at that point.
Working in any environment where you listen to the same 2-hour loop of music for months at a time is rough, when it is the same loop of the same artist?
I don't think people would complain if it came with the product, just like no one complained about the few tracks that came with Windows 7 (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja_Tuna).
The problem with the U2 tracks is that 1) they were delivered automatically by surprise and 2) you couldn't refuse them. They were just dropped onto your phone without warning. This is especially egregious when you consider the fact that Apple has been charging an arm and a leg for storage space on phones, so people were left without storage as this album auto downloaded. (see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2794347/oops...)
Preloads are fine, especially when done tastefully or unobtrusively. Apple didn't do that with the U2 tracks.
It was also a reminder that your phone is backdoored by Apple and they can do whatever they please with it and your files. But they never would. But they can.
There is a pretty big difference between something that autodownloads a list retrieved from a database-backed web service and remote code execution (a “backdoor”).
I've never had an iPod (even as a kid, I had to be "that guy" being different, with my Creative ZEN mp3 player), but my understanding is that the U2 album was something that was pushed out to everyone, not pre-loaded, correct? Maybe I'm misremembering.
FWIW, I'm also a Kobo user, and I've never heard of anyone complaining about the 100 public domain eBooks that were preloaded onto early Kobo devices.[1]
