Apple's Staggering boldness in consumerunfriendliness

Terxpahseyton

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Recently, I have been extremely agitated by Apple's product policy. So angry, that I had to write them. Now I am interested in what others think. Am I over-sensitive? Am I some freak consumer not worth the consideration? What are your thoughts and experiences?

Here is what I just wrote them to start off the thread:

Staggering boldness in consumerunfriendliness

I have had my I-Pod now for several years and with the Pod itself I am very much satisfied. With the exception of some occasional trouble with the navigation due to sensitivity issues of the physical surface, it is a great high-quality-product. The energy lasts and despite me dropping it more than a few times, no harm done whatsoever. The navigation works well, too.
However, I am increasingly displeased with I-tunes up to a point where I felt - without wanting to get dramatic - just dumped on, on conscious purpose.
The strategy of Apple is without a doubt to not only to lure but force people to organize their whole music in the Apple environment. Of course this starts with the fact that one has to use I-Tunes to get music on ones Pod. Which can be incredibly frustrating. In the new video explaining the new I-tunes it is talked about attractive and easy ways to organize music. Comfortably switching between organizing music by genre or artist, drag-and-drop etc.. But alternative means of music organizing are merely supported by the existence of customizable play lists - and that is it. Which rules out the many advantages a simple folder structure to organize music can have, especially if one has large quantities of music. A structure way more flexible and at the same time not a wee bit more difficult. A structure where things like "control" and "shift" and "drawing windows" offer useful tools I-Tunes lacks. Moreover, I-Tunes is incredibly resource-hungry when compared to a simple folder-structure or alternative music organizing programs.
Those are all things I was bothered by, but not to the point of acute frustration. One can adapt to the I-tunes environment for the purpose of getting music on ones Pod.
What breaks the camels back is the untransferability of playlists from say Winamp. Given that this is hardly a biggy to implement, the only logical conclusion is that consumer preference is purposefully taken a dump on in a most crass manner. Many people have extensive Winamp play lists, fine-tuned in many hours. And who prefers folder structures and the simple Winamp to I-tunes may very much want to keep organizing his or her music there. I can not imagine that Apple isn't aware of this. All I can conclude is that Apple as said takes a dumb on such interests for the sake of enforcing its own environment in as much totality as possible.
And this is the staggering boldness in consumerunfriendliness I am talking about. There are many Apple-haters out there, but I found their extreme opposition always rather odd. Now, I am starting to understand them. In deed, if Apple keeps this policy of denying exterior playlists to be used, I will have to be one of them.
Relying on my I-Pod in many ways, you surely can imagine how angry this all makes me and for now I am sorry for any penny I have given to the company.

With regards
XXXXXXXX
 
Your are a freak customer not worth the consideration. :)

Apple is adored for the polish of their user experience and infamous for rigidly defining how their users are to interact use their (Apple's. They just let their customers use them... for a time ;)) products. Those aspects go hand in hand, and it seems to work out well for Apple.

There's much I like about their devices, but the arbitrary limitations make me antsy.
 
I have no problems with iTunes whatsoever. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
I've been saying this, or similar, about Apple for years. It's a large part of why I've never bought an Apple product - they behave in a monopolistic, pro-lock-in manner, with iTunes and iPods being a prime example (and even more so when it had DRM). The curated app store, including many requirements designed to prevent competition with existing functionality (often, Apple's own products) is another example. And the "Gatekeeper" "feature" in Mountain Lion is another step towards monopolizing application sales on OSX (and thus receiving a hefty 30% of software revenues).

However, you can't really hope that they will change due to letters from consumers. It's too lucrative. They might due to the slowly-increasing number of anti-trust lawsuits they are facing.
 
The great thing about the iTunes store is the DRM, DRM, and even more DRM. Now I know it used to be worse in years past but I still refuse to buy anything from that store.

I had an iPod, never used it much, it just wasn't flexible enough, too much syncing required for my tastes. A year later I got a Walkman and loved it, I have over 2000 songs on it and I carry it with me like a phone.

Even the ear-buds which came with it were better then Apples. Apple's ear-buds had rubber of some sorts around each ear piece and it deteriorated after two years so I had to throw them away. W2G Apple! Keep your customers coming into your stores to buy junk like this which is make in china like every other ear-bud but costs 2x more.

Yes their support is good though, they will tell how sorry they are you are having such troubles with their products but won't do a damn thing to remedy it.

And don't even get me started on a valid iTunes music card which I forgot about for 2 years and when I found it Apple refused to give me credit for it. What a rip! :@
 
Anything with DRM in it is a big no-no for me. It's my stuff, I bought it, I'm going to use it how I want. If you forbid me from doing that then I'm not buying it from you. I don't use iTunes for this reason. But I'm blessed with being able to buy most new music off Bandcamp/Soundcloud/etc or directly from the band at gigs...
 
The bright side is, according to my brother there is a principle technique to without any loss get anything DRM-free no matter what. Stop. That is any audio.
He got two audio cards or something in his pc and they are digitally (in contrast to analogical) connected. And what he then does is having the one audio card "listen" to the other. And in practical terms, that is a 100% clean transfer, free of any crap it was wrapped in before. That for instance is useful for a certain audiobook store with awesome prices but annoying DRM.
 
I didn't think Stereo mix was available on new intel chipsets (vista and later)

Music companies where afraid of ppl ripping music off internet radio sites... imagine that! :crazyeye:
 
My Core 2 Duo PC has it, but obviously that's a really old chip.

You can always get a cheap lead for £3 or something and connect your "line out" to your "line in" on the back of your sound card. That's the low tech solution I guess.
 
The real remedies against DRM are never to buy anything being sold with it, and to push for making it illegal or, better yet, denounce the whole legislation of copyright privileges.
 
I would expect that apples issues with making products comparable with third party applications is similar to its issues with supporting flash. That is: they don't want updates of third party software breaking things. Consider that they did support Winamp playlists. Then Winamp changes their format slightly, and suddenly iTunes playlist imports stop working, and people blame apple (when it is not their fault).

May not be a great reason, but it is plausible.
 
As a programmer, I can understand that - the less functionality you give your users, the less can possibly break.. especially if that functionality relies on a 3rd party product or file format (that can change).

However, Apple is known for trying really hard to NOT have their products play nice with others. That's what I don't like.
 
@ainwood
After some further research I just deinstalled the latest iTunes and downloaded and installed an older version (10.22). Now everything works fine (which is awesome :D!). So Winamp hardly seems to be at fault in this case. Though one needs to keep in mind that the winamp playlist needs to be saved on another drive than where the music is at - otherwise winamp doesn't save the drive and one would have to edit it in (which makes sense though because without drives and given the same folder structure playlists can be transferred between different computers without bother).
 
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