FLOATING IN DREAMS

I don’t hate Macs, but they do give me a syncing feeling

This article I found in a retweet by @roughtradeshops and originates from The Guardian. The tweet read as follows:

I happen to totally agree with this article. It exactly states my fear of Iphones, Ipads and Ipods: Itunes. Here are some quotes from the article:

They make you feel good, Apple products. The little touches: the rounded corners, the strokeable screens, the satisfying clunk as you fold the Macbook shut – it’s serene. Untroubled. Like being on Valium.

Until, that is, you try to do something Apple doesn’t want you to do. At which point you realise your shiny chum isn’t on your side. It doesn’t even understand sides. Only Apple: always Apple.

Here’s a familiar, mundane scenario: you’ve got an iPhone with loads of music on it. And you’ve got a laptop with a new album on it. You want to put the new album on your phone. But you can’t hook them up and simply drag-and-drop the files like you could with, ooh, almost any other device. Instead, Apple insists you go through iTunes.

……

Apple’s “sync” bullshit is a deception, which pretends to be making your life easier, when it’s actually all about wresting control from you. If you could freely transfer any file you wanted onto your gadget, Apple might conceivably lose out on a few molecules of gold. So rather than risk that, they’ll choose – every single time – to restrict your options, without so much as blinking.

Can you say frustrating? I’m not someone with only some music. As you all know, I’m a music junkie and I drag around at least 200 albums and over 5000 songs on my player. I can only imagine the pains I’d have to go through to sync my player with Itunes every single time I want to change something on the device. Not to mention having to relist everything in Itunes so it will go into the right categories.

And yet, when I asked people whether to go for a Blackberry or an Ipod, people still told me to go for an Iphone and that ‘Itunes is just fine, it just takes some getting used to’. Why, is my question, would you want to get used to something that is flawed, makes your life hell (i.e. makes you lose your music) and that is only part of Apple’s Big Brother scheme? I don’t get that, I think that I will be opting for the latest Blackberry over the latest Iphone when my contract comes up for renewal in a few months.