My2sents

A quick visit to the apple site yesterday ... "QuickTime 6 was downloaded more than 350 million times. Moreover 98% of those downloads were from PC users, at a rate of over 10 million per month." Wow that sounds impressive ... wait 98% of 350 million means 343 million windows users and 7 million mac users (may be off if QT runs on linux) but in any event there are quite a small number of mac users out there.

First apple wins design hands down, best design for their macs, monitors, stores, websites, icons and ipods. But it kind of stops there. You'd think with 343 million other users you'd try to write good software. My wife was a mac lover and we still have 3 macs in the house gathering dust, even the big G3 is on the shelf. Suppose to be easy to use, intuitive right! Well one thing is for sure they look great. Really good, maybe we should use the G3 as an end table in the living room. Guess it goes back to bleeding edge ... back in the days when every mac designer got the bomb on the screen. They lost all of their work and had to reboot and still none of them complained. For us PC users, we where horrified that anything like that would ever happen and even more horrified finding a bunch of people who did not think anything about it. My wife use to say ... oh that ... yah it does that ... just hold these keys down and ... Aaahhh. Ok early pc's were not perfect either but most of their problems were user errors loading software from the net and other things. But on the mac side these were the applications, these were hard core users, designers you know right brain people, not mom and dad hacks trying to learn a computer for the first time (... look Martha press this button and this cool cup holder pops out ... what will they think of next dear?).

Not to mention Mr. Jobs had the monopoly on the macs either, although its the life long battle pc vs mac, right brain vs left. Sure Bill Gates had a monopoly but not on the hardware just the software. Jobs on the other hand had it all. I remember my wife wanted a 1.4 mb floppy drive for her mac, wow those were the days imagine 1.4 mb. Well on a pc it would set you back $25 or so but on a mac that crashed several times a day it was $250, yep that is correct there was some special chip in the floppy that made it work with the mac. Think my wife's mac II was around $10,000 with a 20" monitor and a laser printer. My pc for reference was $1,500 with a 15" monitor and dot matrix printer.

Then came the ipod, wow another beautiful thing, having one is great, using one pretty good, we'll get to that later. Mr. Jobs hit the hammer on the head again. But the legacy of apple was soon to follow, although not until your battery ran out. When it did it was the $250 floppy all over again. Oops battery dead, send it to us, we are the only ones who can replace the battery and you will pay through the nose for this, maybe even more than the unit is worth. Well when you have a product that's hot, your bound to piss off some pc users who don't put up with the bomb crap. Sure enough they sued apple and won, they got the right to replace batteries themselves. Oh but wait it gets better ...

Ok back to the point of this blog. You'd think if you have 98% more pc users than mac users you'd try to win them and regain back some of your market share. Well not sure anyone at apple thinks like that. I get the impression its right brain only apple, with a brain dead left brain.

Why... got my ipod and love it, then really tried to use it only to find out that the proprietary software does not work very well on a pc. Sure it may work for you but not sure any one at apple has ever used a pc before. XP is a nice os, microsoft has finely got one right, stable just what it should have been well ... years ago, although win 98 was also nice.

Any ways the problem with the ipod is multiple logins in xp, sure all of you single guys and girls out there could care less about this but us parents trying to shield our kids from web porn and phishers. If you are like me and have your ipod plugged in to the pc then have your kid login you see the problem right away, either everything on the ipod will be deleted, happened several times or it will get corrupted. Not to mention itunes will find all of the music again and put more duplicates in your system than you can imagine, I think we have 4 duplicates of every song on the system not sure if they are real duplicates or just errors in the software, will they ever get it right, don't think so.

I have been trying to get someone at apple to help me and listen to me about this but after many email messages that were never returned and messages on the forum's which it appears that I'm not alone on this one. Apple is shedding the blind eye yet again, putting that head down in the sand and only focusing on what it knows sell, sell, sell. Sure Microsoft has problems but as pc users we are use to a certain level of customer support. We expect programs to run pretty well and if not be fixed soon with free upgrades until they get it right. Although the apple programs still seem like the bomb is there its just hidden from view, the hardware is ahead of its time but the software is way behind its time and support forget about it. Sure there are updates but no real fixes just more buggy features.

The policy at apple has always been you buy it you own it, no returns, no exchanges and no support unless you want to pay for support. Microsoft is not much better but its software only so you know they will eventually fix the bugs, good thing they do not have a hardware monopoly, can any pc user imagine not being able to return hardware they do not like. I bought the ipod and probably find it like the early mac users, I have the bombs, my ipod has crashed several times and needed to be rebooted with a goofy holding down of buttons, the simple reboot button would have won us over. The itunes on xp still crap but all in all its still the best thing out there. Can someone else make a great mp3 player that is as cool as the ipod and works better!

Help us please. We hate the Bill Gates/Steve Jobs monopolies!

Thank you openoffice.org, sourceforge.net, avast.com home user license and others who give us a good alternative choice. Oh and if your listening IBM make OS/2 public domain and you can add a paypal donate here button on the website so we can thank you too!