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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

by 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.
    - jcl 18y ago
      Daemon Tools needs to install drivers because it is adding fake hardware -- a fake CD drive that needs to be indistinguishable from a real one so that it can circumvent physical copy protection. I'd be surprised if iTunes needs to do the same thing.
      - tdavis 18y ago
        Perhaps not the same thing, but it would seem that we have opposite assertions both based on assumptions. I don't think this is going anywhere ;)
  - run4yourlives 18y ago
    I give you the alternative: Linux package dependency nightmare.
boredguy8 18y ago
I missed where "MobileMe" was an essential component of iTunes. And this isn't a problem of "testing them all". It's not like there's 4 rogue configurations floating around in the Windows ecosystem. It's TENS of THOUSANDS of people, and the problem falls well within what should be standard pre-release testing. And I think people would be far less upset if it weren't for the fact that Apple tries to pretend it doesn't do things like install bloatware.
- rcoder 18y ago
  The moment where "MobileMe" became part of iTunes was precisely when they decided to make iTunes the gatekeeper all iPod and iPhone content. Want to use an iPhone on Windows? Them's the breaks. Also, your "TENS of THOUSANDS" of people are a frigging drop in the bucket compared to the TENS of MILLIONS (or possibly even HUNDREDS) of Windows systems currently in deployment in countries where Apple distributes their products. Don't people constantly defend Microsoft with the same argument -- namely, that they have no way to test every possible interaction between bad drivers and hardware components simply due to the sheer number and variety of Windows systems in use at any given time?
  - kajecounterhack 18y ago
    Tens of thousands are tens of thousands. Don't try to skew the data, ten thousand people is a lot. There is no room to be relative there. People buy a product and expect it to work. Not just that, there are probably much fewer than "tens of millions" using the iTunes software. So ten thousand would be a big number, even in relative terms. The issue presented here isn't microsoft, its Apple. its about apple's iTunes product being sub-standard quality. And thats that.
  - boredguy8 18y ago
    I like how you justify malware/bloatware/bad stewardship of client machines. "But we say you need it" does not defeat the fact that it's malware. And tens of thousands of users having the same problem (and having it be reducible in 2 or 3 days to a repeatable problem) means that there was little to no testing done. Part of testing is USING the myriad environments of the ecosphere in which your application will exist. It would be like writing a web phone app that only works at 120 x 160 but crashes at 128x128. Sure, it doesn't crash on EVERY phone, but it crashes on a significant number of them. (It's unclear to me, by the way, that your claim that only a few systems crash is true. I'm able to reproduce the error bug by doing a clean install of iTunes 8. It seems like the problem is much larger than you want it to be. But even if I concede your point that it's smaller than everyone, it's still large enough that we're seeing 'software malpractice') And Microsoft got hip to how bad the "but there's lots of systems, wahhhhh" excuse is. Welcome to the 21st century. Apple should get hip to how lame that excuse is, too.

by rcoder 18y ago

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.
  - jcl 18y ago
    Daemon Tools needs to install drivers because it is adding fake hardware -- a fake CD drive that needs to be indistinguishable from a real one so that it can circumvent physical copy protection. I'd be surprised if iTunes needs to do the same thing.
    - tdavis 18y ago
      Perhaps not the same thing, but it would seem that we have opposite assertions both based on assumptions. I don't think this is going anywhere ;)
- run4yourlives 18y ago
  I give you the alternative: Linux package dependency nightmare.

boredguy8 18y ago

I missed where "MobileMe" was an essential component of iTunes. And this isn't a problem of "testing them all". It's not like there's 4 rogue configurations floating around in the Windows ecosystem. It's TENS of THOUSANDS of people, and the problem falls well within what should be standard pre-release testing. And I think people would be far less upset if it weren't for the fact that Apple tries to pretend it doesn't do things like install bloatware.

rcoder 18y ago
The moment where "MobileMe" became part of iTunes was precisely when they decided to make iTunes the gatekeeper all iPod and iPhone content. Want to use an iPhone on Windows? Them's the breaks. Also, your "TENS of THOUSANDS" of people are a frigging drop in the bucket compared to the TENS of MILLIONS (or possibly even HUNDREDS) of Windows systems currently in deployment in countries where Apple distributes their products. Don't people constantly defend Microsoft with the same argument -- namely, that they have no way to test every possible interaction between bad drivers and hardware components simply due to the sheer number and variety of Windows systems in use at any given time?
- kajecounterhack 18y ago
  Tens of thousands are tens of thousands. Don't try to skew the data, ten thousand people is a lot. There is no room to be relative there. People buy a product and expect it to work. Not just that, there are probably much fewer than "tens of millions" using the iTunes software. So ten thousand would be a big number, even in relative terms. The issue presented here isn't microsoft, its Apple. its about apple's iTunes product being sub-standard quality. And thats that.
- boredguy8 18y ago
  I like how you justify malware/bloatware/bad stewardship of client machines. "But we say you need it" does not defeat the fact that it's malware. And tens of thousands of users having the same problem (and having it be reducible in 2 or 3 days to a repeatable problem) means that there was little to no testing done. Part of testing is USING the myriad environments of the ecosphere in which your application will exist. It would be like writing a web phone app that only works at 120 x 160 but crashes at 128x128. Sure, it doesn't crash on EVERY phone, but it crashes on a significant number of them. (It's unclear to me, by the way, that your claim that only a few systems crash is true. I'm able to reproduce the error bug by doing a clean install of iTunes 8. It seems like the problem is much larger than you want it to be. But even if I concede your point that it's smaller than everyone, it's still large enough that we're seeing 'software malpractice') And Microsoft got hip to how bad the "but there's lots of systems, wahhhhh" excuse is. Welcome to the 21st century. Apple should get hip to how lame that excuse is, too.