4 ms·

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 curio

by 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.

by weegee 18y ago

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.