Apple Nag

I’ve used your products primarily since March 1, 1984 when I bought my first original Macintosh and ImageWriter printer. I was proud to be a Mac owner because it was so superior to the alternatives.

In the subsequent years leading up to the present time I became a Mac bigot. Everything else was not only not good, it was trash and I wondered how anyone could use that crapola.

Then Macs started going downhill with quality problems in the hardware and software. Macs just sucked less. I stopped doing unpaid sales and evangelizing for you and kept pretty quiet. When people asked me what kind of computer to get, I would no longer say, “Get a Mac”, I’d say, “What do you want to use a computer for?” I often told them to buy a PC.

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Was it all the way back in 2002 that you guys first starting talking about the Digital Hub. That’s seven, count ‘em, years ago. When do you think we’ll see it come to fruition?

You have made steps, for sure, because we’ve got Macs, iPods, iPhones, Apple TV, and a monitor or two. That covers desktop and mobile computing.

There’s iLife and MobileMe to tie the hardware together giving us personal web site creation, photos, home movies, the ability to burn DVDs (those old fossils), and to share content with our family, friends, and the world on the Internet.

iTunes is a big part of the integration for music, movies, TV shows, podcasts and syncing to the other devices like iPods and Apple TV. In many ways, the features are targeted at making you more money than what’s best for your customers (don’t get me started on the 2G Shuffle and iTunes 8.1 fiasco).

It sure looks like you’ve got a hub strategy. Yet, you don’t promote the hub concept anymore. Is that because it would handcuff you into implementing features that would be detrimental to maximizing your profit margin?

Let’s talk about the rough edges and one huge group of people you’ve left out — family.

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The more I use my Apple TV, the more I wish you’d stop treating it as a hobby and go pro. I mean, I’d be paying the same price regardless, right?

iTunes decided it couldn’t sync with my Apple TV because it could not connect. But wait, why was it still in the sidebar then? Was there some delay in realizing it had lost touch with the Apple TV? If so, then why wasn’t the device removed from the list as soon as it realized it couldn’t connect after I asked it to sync?

The first step was to quit iTunes and relaunch. The iTunes menu bar remained even though the Dock said the app had quit. Sigh.

After relaunching, the Apple TV showed up in the list of devices, but still wouldn’t sync. I guess that means I’d have to reboot the Apple TV.

Now this is where I get annoyed.

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I was about to write up a blog post wondering why iTunes didn’t show any content for the Apple TV in the sidebar like I was experiencing yesterday. I was suspecting it would only show purchased content. Today, I go to get the screen capture and wouldn’t you know it, it’s all listed there — both purchased and private content. Sigh.

You know, surprises may be nice in a personal relationship, but not between a man and his computer.

That seems to be the question you ask your customers when they want to do silly things like, oh, say sync both Events and Albums from iPhoto to the Apple TV. For some bizarre reason, you make us choose one or the other, yet you support both in iPhoto.

I guess the Apple TV really is just a hobby for you. Would you mind putting a co-op student on the Apple TV full time? Maybe we could get some consistency in user interfaces, and in his spare time he can fix the horrendous lag between clicking the remote and anything happening on the screen. Thanks.

A couple of nights ago, I was browsing the iTunes Store from my Apple TV and found your $1 movie specials. I opted for the $2 HD version of Rain Man.

This is a good deal considering the price of regular rentals that are between $4-$6. It’s not a great deal because you don’t have the enormous expenses of a bricks-and-mortar store, but fair given the high market prices.

When I looked at the list of Top rented movies, wouldn’t you know it but all three $1 rentals were in the top 7 movies.

I know you don’t have complete control of pricing, in spite of your best efforts, but perhaps someone at the movie studios will figure out that they can make a ton of money by having reasonable prices.

The Apple TV purchasing experience is fantastic, something you’ve really done well (except for trying to find a movie). I’m technologically savvy enough to know how to use The Pirate Bay and Bittorrent to find almost any movie I want to watch. But, it’s a horrible experience trying to download some low-res video with all the hassle of worrying about seeds and wasting my ridiculously low Rogers data cap by uploading back to the torrent. It takes hours before I can start watching, days for a pseudo-HD movie. It’s not worth the hassle.

Why would I inflict that upon myself when I can watch an HD movie on my Apple TV for $2, and start watching it a couple of minutes after I decide to do so?

So I don’t pirate movies because my time is valuable. I subscribe to Rogers Video Direct, operated by Zip.ca. But, I have to wait days, weeks, or months for a DVD. I have limited choice over what movie arrives and have to wait a long time for new releases.

Is everybody in the movie studios and yourselves daft? Can’t you see you’re walking away from money? Price online downloads at a reasonable amount and everyone — everyone — wins.

I had some HD video podcasts that I wanted to take with me on the iPod Touch. Unfortunately, you guys never considered that we might like to watch the podcast on the Mac, the Apple TV, or the Touch, whichever was best suited at the time. Your own children don’t know how to play nice with each other.

Elgato’s EyeTV allows us to create a schedule and specify that we want to transcode automatically to an Apple TV or iPod video format. We can’t select both, unfortunately, but that’s for another nag.

iTunes forces us to manually do the conversion. That’s bad enough, but your user interface experts don’t seem to understand the concept of a “use case“. They haven’t thought through how real people want to use the features.

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Since rolling back to iTunes 8.0 from your infamous iTunes 8.1 “downgrade” (at least for the 2G Shuffle), I’ve been experiencing a plethora of errors when syncing to Apple TV. It seems the database must have been screwed up somehow, even though I restored it from your own backup.
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I was converting some TV shows over to Apple TV format to view in the comfort of my living room instead of yet more hours in front of the computer, and noticed that the aspect ratio was wrong. The original content had been originated for HD so the broadcaster left the top and bottom black bars in the standard def signal. I actually prefer to see all the content rather than the clipping that happens with pan-and-scan, so I don’t mind this.

When I use my Elgato EyeTV 200 box, it allows me to playback and select various aspect ratios to view the standard def content on a widescreen monitor or TV, effectively removing the black bars. This is yet another feature that is missing from the Apple TV.

You keep saying the Apple TV is only a hobby. I don’t think I’ll buy another one, or recommend any friends to buy one, until you remove a lot of these nagging limitations. It’s time to turn your hobby into a business.

All the readers from the U.S.A. can tune out now. They won’t understand this posting since you’ve created a reasonably well-populated iTunes Store. But in Canada? I can hear the wind blowing through the Canadian iTunes Store.

No doubt you’d like to offer a wider variety of content but there are some stupid, Canadian protectionist regulations on top of the ridiculous licensing restrictions of the content providers. That leaves us with negligible content and TV shows that don’t appeal to me.
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