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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I see you’re offering a “free” iPod Touch if we buy a Mac for university. There are two things wrong with this ad, and no, one of them is not the ubiquitous asterisk and “Terms apply” gotcha.

There’s no such thing as a free iPod

Again, you’re proving you’re no different than most other retailers in deceptively saying that the iPod is free. It’s not free, it’s included in the price. Well, actually, it’s worse than that. We have to buy it at the retail price and you will rebate up to $259. Since the cheapest Touch retails at $259 that doesn’t cover the taxes now does it? So it ain’t free, is it?

It’s also just a rebate, which means you’re bribing us with our own money. We pay you. You hold on to millions of dollars of our cumulative money earning interest for weeks. We waste our time filling out your stupid rebate form and sending it in (don’t get a single character wrong or it’s grounds for rejection). You give us our money back sometime while we worry about if you’re using a shady rebate company that will conveniently “forget” to send the cheque. We’ve still paid the taxes and you’ve stolen our time.

Clearance

And, for those who don’t follow your product release cycles, you neglect to mention that this is the older generation model that will be replaced with the next generation in — oh — October. Once all the kids are back at school and have had to purchase the Mac and iPod.

Fine, fine, it’s a nice way for you to clear inventory before the new model comes out. Why not be up front about it or just discount the Mac price by $259? Then we save on taxes and don’t waste time on sucky rebates. Right, because your cost is a heck of a lot cheaper than the cash price, so it’s really costing you nowhere near $259 to make this offer.

You demean yourself with every one of these deceptive tactics.

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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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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Here is a very sad posting on your discussion forums about the iTunes 8.1 and 8.1.1 updates breaking the 2G Shuffle. It seems that your internal developers are treating their own tech support folks like mushrooms — keep ‘em in the dark and feed ‘em manure.

The poster contacted two different support techs who gave pretty much the same message. They’d never heard of the the 2G Shuffle problems and required the poster to run through some silly steps to arrive at the conclusion we already know — iTunes 8.1 made a total mess of the 2G Shuffle.

Surely, the iTunes manager, once aware of the 2G Shuffle problems, would immediately inform tech support so that customers and tech support wouldn’t have to waste their time chasing known issues. So why didn’t this happen?

This can mean one of several things; incompetence, design intent, or … ?

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As happens to me far too often, a random neuron fired and got me wondering … what does Jonathan Ive think about all those ugly iPod cases that cover his beautiful designs?

Do a Google image search for ipod case or ipod sleeve. But be warned! Don’t do this on a full stomach.

Even the laptops have all kinds of bizarre covers.

 

The poor guy puts his heart and soul into creating fascinating industrial designs only to have people wander around the planet polluting the photons with tasteless crud.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, just like a sharp stick.

The last couple of postings were pretty depressing, so let’s see if I can pick things up a bit.

Although I’ve had to roll-back to iTunes 8.0 to restore syncing capability for the second generation Shuffle that was removed in 8.1, I did get some time to play before the pain.
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In attempting to rollback to iTunes 8.0.2 due to the iTunes 8.1 update breaking the 2nd generation Shuffle syncing (details), I decided to document the horrible procedure you put us through due to your constantly updating the iTunes library in incompatible ways.

I launched the 8.0 installer but it would not install over the 8.1 version. Why don’t you allow that? We’ll find out in a sec.
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If you have a second generation Shuffle, do not upgrade to iTunes 8.1!

The Sync contextual menu is now missing when you right-click the device so there is no way to sync now between iTunes and the 2G Shuffle.

When I play a podcast on iTunes that is also on the Shuffle, the play position does remain synced when I eject, play on the Shuffle, and redock. But, when the podcast is completed either on another iPod, iTunes or simply by marking the podcast as Not New, this information is no longer synced to the Shuffle.
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I’m cursing all you guys at Apple who came out with a new Shuffle before I could complete my voluminous postings on the old Shuffle. “He who hesitates is lost.”

As my car dealer said when I bought a new car with a manual transmission, “This is a great anti-theft feature because most people, including most thieves, can’t drive a stick so they just move on to the next car.”

Given how complex you’ve made this new controller, anyone who doesn’t have the manual for this baby won’t be able to figure out how to operate it. Word will get around that the new Shuffle is too complicated to use and thieves and customers will just move on to the next iPod.
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