Vocal Voices

Today I saw an Article about Apple being in court (again) and the little snippets which fall out every time that happens.

It reminded me of this old joke entitled if Operating Systems were Airlines. It's a bit rare for those not in the IT business and also for those who don't remember a time before WindowsXP.

The key part is the sarcastic take on Apple...

Mac Airways: The cashiers, flight attendants, and pilots all look the same, talk the same, and act the same. When you ask them questions about the flight, they reply that you don't want to know, don't need to know, and would you please return to your seat and watch the movie.

So when I saw this article today I thought I'd have a read.

What comes out of it is this:

Interesting nuggets of information tend to come out of Apple trials, and this week’s iTunes class-action courtroom drama is no exception. The plaintiffs claim Apple would delete songs downloaded from rival music services when iPod owners synced their devices to iTunes over a two-year period from 2007 to 2009.

And this

But the problem, Coughlin argued, is that Apple didn’t tell users which songs were potentially harmful. Instead, the company would push an error message telling the user to restore factory settings on the iPod and remove the offending files in the process.

And the joker in the pack

“We don’t need to give users too much information,” Farrugia offered by way of explanation.

I have been well aware that Apple plays these games. Ever since it decided that an application which was perfectly OK in the Apple store became persona non grata. So when they produced their next firmware update for their iPod's they disabled and removed the software. Software users had paid for.

I'm glad Apple is being hammered for this. I'm just unhappy that it's not being broadcast more widely. Given the recent discussion on Apples iOS "Autocorrect" rather than Autosuggest, I see that the Apple ethos, "you don't want to know, don't need to know" is alive and well.

My first Boss in Computing used to say to me "God protect me from forgiving systems". "Why" I would say. His reply was "When it goes wrong, how do I work out what it thought I was telling it to do?"

Mick doesn't like Apple either.

What a coincidence.

I was on the bus next to a young woman with an iPod, and there she was fiddling and pressing and picking it up and putting it down..... and it brought back memories. The first was that Steve Jobs was an excellent salesman.

The second was when I was in a shop in Singapore at about the time the second or third generation of iPods came out. The BIG selling point was how much memory they had and how many tunes they could hold.... not much was said about the earlier introduction of iTunes, or the tie-ins.

Did Sir want one?

No thanks: please let me have a look at that Cenix job, the one with 1Gig memory, FM radio, sound recorder, supports mp3 and wma, supports playlists and shuffle play, has a clock and connects to a PC via a USB cable........ oh, and it is only 1/20 the price of the iPod.

I also remember a fairly strong cottage industry working to break the iTunes link, but even then the support for mp3 was only up to something like 320Kb/s and VBR. It was that or massive wav files.

The list is extremely long isn't it. Like when Mrs S wanted 3 iPod Shuffles, one for each genre of music. She was not listening about playlists she wanted to treat it like a super large CD.

Until I tried to link all 3 to iTunes. At iPod3 it told me it had reached it's limit of connected iPods and would I like to wipe it. Then I went out and got the open source Java software which will manage an iPod and used that to load the songs.

It's "AppleWorld". No you can't use 3 of the smaller one's, you are doing it wrong, you must buy the bigger "much more expensive" one's and do it the way we say.

I was amused when the "Apple Watch" shipped. The press started calling Apple tech "Perfume" because it was all about the marketing. The press didn't get it. It's always been about the marketing even if the software has generally been pretty capable. There have always been extremely capable alternatives on the market, the press just couldn't get their "Apple filters" away from their eyes.

I've been through many variants of media players over the years. Never really paying more than £50 for 8 gig and, recently, £25 for 16gb.

However, today, things have moved on again. My most recent purchase was 2 x 64gb micro SD cards for a grand sum of £11. OK they're pretty slow to write. Well slow enough that I have to use a PC, a phone can't cope. But, however, the real story is that they are in my two phones.

Now I have two phones, one Android and one Windows which can play my music for me. The Android phone sucks the battery dead in less than a day when playing music. The xBox Windows music will, however, go on for days playing. So I do all my phoning/web surfing on the large android phone and listen to music on the Windows phone.

My latest birthday request was a Bluetooth headphone adapter in which I can plug my Denon ear canal headphones and link it to the Windows phone. Works a treat.

i Wot???

I wonder how Apple is going to cope with the upcoming generations? You don't need to know is not going to fly for the younger generation and Android already has more than 80% of the world smartphone market and is also starting to eat into media players, tablets, watches and ebook readers....

I'm sure there will remain many millions of Apple fans who "just love the designs", but I hope that they lose the discerning customers and go back to obscurity where they so successfully emerged from....

I too just HATE Apple particularly since I tried to change the battery in my first generation iphone. They are like the medical professionals - I don`t call them "doctors" unless they have an MD or PhD - who put it over that stupid patients do not need to know so why waste time trying to tell them.

We loves our apples.

Plus they seem to outlast everything else. Mr Shell's iPhone is a generation 1 still going strong, as is his iPad. We changed our big Mac not because it wore out but because we couldn't get the software for it anymore, it was 13 years old.

Luke's Mac mini is 8 years old and both iPods have to be over 5 years old

They just go and go and go

Yes, but you are careful owners, not like most of us.

I have a friend who had an old mobile phone which was more than a decade old. He told me he literally had to take the battery out of it and throw it against a wall to even try to distort it....

It wasn't an Apple though. He tells me his love affair with Apple is coming to an end. He doesn't want a phone and a tablet he can't extend with more storage. He doesn't want a phone he can't replace the battery on. He's using both iPhone/iPad and Samsung Galaxy phones. Pretty soon I guess he'll be buying Samsung...

Apple produces goods which sit somewhere in the bottom half of the top end for reasonable goods. For extremely inflated prices.

Apple also have always been totally draconian about their little world of appleness. If you are happy to live within the bubble, then you have a good experience. If you are not, then your experience is one of constantly warring with Apple to do what you want. Mac mini's are a case in point. I have a friend who spent nearly a decade telling me that all I would ever need was a Mac Mini for my media playing on the TV. After all, all I needed to do was download handbrake, spend weeks ripping all my data to different formats with huge quality loss and loss of all my subtitles then spend a small fortune on the "right" network storage for the mac mini and my life would be perfect.

Not sold on it, I asked him a while ago what he was using for his media streaming. I was told a PS3. It was the best thing since sliced bread you know... The Mac Mini long forgotten and not even the slightest hint that it could cope with current day media requirements.

I, on the other hand, over that same time, have always used a windows machine to serve my files for streaming. I have full quality and full subtitles. I've had to upgrade from time to time, certainly, mostly because our DVD library is a moving target. The main big change was when I stopped using a media centre PC to stream to the TV and bought two £60 Netgear devices to do the same thing. About the size of a thick softback book, extremely low power, no internal drive and able to play just about every media format I've ever thrown at it, including BluRay Ripped discs.

Today I'm looking at replacing those two boxes with two Asus O!Play one's at around £70 each. More capable than just about any proprietary players like WD Live or Apple TV, but simple and cheap. My server? It's virtual now, any upgrade will only be drives unless I need to upgrade my virtual server host. Then all my VM's will get a boost.

I just get tired of the Apple Bubble from time to time. I got some idiot from Carphone Warehouse on the phone trying to get me to upgrade early on my Vodafone contract.

"Do you want an iPhone" he says.
Now I'm truly sick and tired of being asked that.
"NO I wouldn't take an iPhone with a £1,000 incentive says I"
"How about a Galaxy S4"
"Why would I take a smaller phone? This one is not big enough"
"Well how about a Galaxy Note4 then"
"No, I want the next generation of the Sony Z Ultra and it won't ship till mid next year. Go away please"

But these idiots ALWAYS start with the iPhone as if they're conferring a favour from the gods..... I get a bit unreasonable when they do that.....