ipod

5 Things I Hate About Apple

by Kev on 21 July, 2008

  1. Having to pay for software service packs. The latest is the upgrade to version 2.0 of the iPod Touch software. This costs £5.99 in the UK and, whilst it does include some nice little extras, is essentially a service pack that most other companies would give away for free: especially given that the device itself costs around £200 in the first place.
  2. Artificial Scarcity. The two “coolest” companies on the planet are Apple and Nintendo. Both make outstanding hardware and both trade on scarcity. In fairness, Nintendo is the worse of the two since it seems to have little regard for demand in the UK: I recently found the Wi-Fit board available at both Amazon France and Amazon Germany (from where I bought it, incidentally) when it had been out of stock everywhere in the UK for months. I’m afraid neither company can use the excuse that they underestimated demand: this would result in a lack of stock after some time whereas what actually happens is that iphones, Wiis etc are out of stock before they even get onto the shelves. It smacks of a complete lack of respect of the customer
  3. False Smugness. I own several Apple products including a MacBook and an ipod. I think they’re excellent bits of hardware but I don’t find it necessary to take a fundamentalist approach to gadgets (ie if you don’t have an Apple you’re an idiot). I can tolerate it when it comes to the ipod which is, without doubt, the dominant product in its market. But the Mac? Come off it: looking at passyourtheory’s server stats around 3% of our visitors are Mac users: the remaining 97% doing just fine without. The main benefit of OSX, it seems, is that it’s easy to use as it comes with most of the software you need built in. Except that it doesn’t. And even when it does, you tend to get a choice of one. Oh, and by the way, my lovely MacBook runs Windows XP: Apple; Fantastic machines, shame about the software.
  4. Interminable iTunes updates. Even when they’re not charging for updates, they foist upon us 80MB downloads every few weeks (only Adobe Acrobat is worse) whilst simultaneously trying to get us to install Safari (why???). Talking of which…
  5. Quicktime. What a total piece of sh*t. Completely pointless, bloated and buggy. No, I’m not talking about a Microsoft product here but Apple’s biggest single crime. And of course, we can’t have iTunes without it. Why?

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