Apple goes too far in iTunes 8
blogs.zdnet.com
blogs.zdnet.com
Reminds me of another media company that took over your system up upgrades .. 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.
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.
Ever heard the saying about not attributing to malice something that can be explained by incompetence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
The issue presented here isn't microsoft, its Apple. its about apple's iTunes product being sub-standard quality. And thats that.
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.
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.
Intentional or not? I don't know, but this is hardly news.
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.
I haven't used iTunes myself, by the way - I buy CDs for the sound quality.
Sorry for the misinformed post.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.