4 ms·

Apple goes too far in iTunes 8

43 points by boredguy8 18y ago

weegee 18y ago
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.
- notauser 18y ago
  The new iPod touch has to be activated (like the iPhone) with iTunes before you can use it. The one I saw today couldn't be used because activation depended on a firmware update, and iTunes kept crashing before the update could complete.
- ryanb 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    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.
    - jauco 18y ago
      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 18y ago
        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 18y ago
        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.
funkyheff 18y ago
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.
- pedalpete 18y ago
  seems that the names Jobs and Gates are getting closer to being used interchangeably.
- jcl 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    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 18y ago
      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.
- netcan 18y ago
  I doubt it. At least in the press, a lot of Apple's growth is attributed to 'See how good ipod/itunes works? You'll like OS X.' I think I recall Apple's own marketing materials leveraging the same 'If you get itunes, you'll get all apple stuff' line. That all sits on top of the fact that Apple doesn't necessarily seem that excited over selling macs. They're happy selling iphones & ipods that need pc support. It may be a lead in to a mac, but's its a big business in itself. A single long term iphone user may even be worth more then a mac user (kickbacks, music/apps, more frequent upgrading). So purposely being crap on windows is not smart.
trezor 18y ago
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 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    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 18y ago
      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.
snewe 18y ago
I find that Apple continually installs Safari with iTunes automatic upgrades. Very annoying. They are nicer to me on my Mac.
- tl 18y ago
  What happens if you rip out Safari on a Mac?
  - petercooper 18y ago
    In terms of operation or in terms of updates? In terms of operation, everything continues to work fine (where everything is not literal, but nothing significant).
  - ROFISH 18y ago
    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 18y ago
      Heh, didn't another company get sued for that kind of crap?
      - tesseract 18y ago
        I think they were sued over iexplore.exe, not mshtml.dll.
        william42 18y ago
        Actually, they were sued over OEMs and netscape.exe, if I remember correctly.
  - 18y ago
rcoder 18y ago
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.
- tdavis 18y ago
  Hear, hear. I own a Mac Pro, MBP, iPod and iPhone and I'll be the first to admit Apple isn't a perfect company by any means; I have had some sort of issue with all of these devices and many are ongoing. That being said, a CD/DVD burning app that installs CD/DVD burning drivers... that seems reasonable to me. And I'd like to point out the fact that nobody notices if something isn't in a EULA or License Agreement until there's some really horrendous bug (like causing a BSOD) and people start looking in them precisely so they can say the terms aren't there. I mean, what do you want, a checkbox that says "Do not install drivers required for the proper functioning of iTunes"? Le Sigh
  - jcl 18y ago
    On the other hand, a driver is supposed to be a low-level interface to hardware. iTunes is not adding a new CD/DVD burner, so why would it presume to know more about the operation of your CD/DVD burner than the manufacturer, who presumably wrote the driver already installed on the system?
    - tdavis 18y ago
      Probably for the same reason Daemon Tools doesn't add any hardware but still installs drivers? They're required for the software to function properly.
josefresco 18y ago
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 18y ago
  .. 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 18y ago
    I also would never install realplayer. Real alternative + vlc has worked for everything I've tried.
  - delano 18y ago
    The BBC has a special version of RealPlayer that doesn't have the adware or nag screens: http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/categories/plug/real/newreal.shtml?intro2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/categories/plug/real/newreal.sh...
- siculars 18y ago
  seconded
ngvrnd 18y ago
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 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    Wow, the fact that iTunes has a "safe mode" is just ridiculous. Glad it helped you, though.
    - LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
      Many apps have a "safe mode." The Firefox safe mode has saved my butt many times when I installed a misbehaving plugin....
lallysingh 18y ago
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.
shimi 18y ago
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.

43 points by boredguy8 18y ago

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.

notauser 18y ago
The new iPod touch has to be activated (like the iPhone) with iTunes before you can use it. The one I saw today couldn't be used because activation depended on a firmware update, and iTunes kept crashing before the update could complete.
ryanb 18y ago
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 18y ago
  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.
  - jauco 18y ago
    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 18y ago
      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 18y ago
        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.

funkyheff 18y ago

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.

pedalpete 18y ago
seems that the names Jobs and Gates are getting closer to being used interchangeably.
jcl 18y ago
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 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    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.
netcan 18y ago
I doubt it. At least in the press, a lot of Apple's growth is attributed to 'See how good ipod/itunes works? You'll like OS X.' I think I recall Apple's own marketing materials leveraging the same 'If you get itunes, you'll get all apple stuff' line. That all sits on top of the fact that Apple doesn't necessarily seem that excited over selling macs. They're happy selling iphones & ipods that need pc support. It may be a lead in to a mac, but's its a big business in itself. A single long term iphone user may even be worth more then a mac user (kickbacks, music/apps, more frequent upgrading). So purposely being crap on windows is not smart.

trezor 18y ago

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 18y ago
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 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    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.

snewe 18y ago

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

tl 18y ago
What happens if you rip out Safari on a Mac?
- petercooper 18y ago
  In terms of operation or in terms of updates? In terms of operation, everything continues to work fine (where everything is not literal, but nothing significant).
- ROFISH 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    Heh, didn't another company get sued for that kind of crap?
    - tesseract 18y ago
      I think they were sued over iexplore.exe, not mshtml.dll.
      - william42 18y ago
        Actually, they were sued over OEMs and netscape.exe, if I remember correctly.
- 18y ago

rcoder 18y ago

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.

tdavis 18y ago
Hear, hear. I own a Mac Pro, MBP, iPod and iPhone and I'll be the first to admit Apple isn't a perfect company by any means; I have had some sort of issue with all of these devices and many are ongoing. That being said, a CD/DVD burning app that installs CD/DVD burning drivers... that seems reasonable to me. And I'd like to point out the fact that nobody notices if something isn't in a EULA or License Agreement until there's some really horrendous bug (like causing a BSOD) and people start looking in them precisely so they can say the terms aren't there. I mean, what do you want, a checkbox that says "Do not install drivers required for the proper functioning of iTunes"? Le Sigh
- jcl 18y ago
  On the other hand, a driver is supposed to be a low-level interface to hardware. iTunes is not adding a new CD/DVD burner, so why would it presume to know more about the operation of your CD/DVD burner than the manufacturer, who presumably wrote the driver already installed on the system?
  - tdavis 18y ago
    Probably for the same reason Daemon Tools doesn't add any hardware but still installs drivers? They're required for the software to function properly.

josefresco 18y ago

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 18y ago
.. 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 18y ago
  I also would never install realplayer. Real alternative + vlc has worked for everything I've tried.
- delano 18y ago
  The BBC has a special version of RealPlayer that doesn't have the adware or nag screens: http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/categories/plug/real/newreal.shtml?intro2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/webwise/categories/plug/real/newreal.sh...
siculars 18y ago
seconded

ngvrnd 18y ago

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 18y ago
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 18y ago
  Wow, the fact that iTunes has a "safe mode" is just ridiculous. Glad it helped you, though.
  - LogicHoleFlaw 18y ago
    Many apps have a "safe mode." The Firefox safe mode has saved my butt many times when I installed a misbehaving plugin....

lallysingh 18y ago

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.

shimi 18y ago

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.