Sunday, August 09, 2009

Apple's Evil Ways

Jason Calacanis is bright, articulate and successful. He has spent over $20,000 on Apple products, and now he's had enough. I know exactly how he feels.
My budget was considerably smaller, but the bad experience still lingers. I only bought two iPod Shuffles, of which one doesn't work and I can't listen to audio books on the other. Instead, I use my trusty Nokia 3120 phone. I got it with my budget phone contract, so it is essentially free.
If I'm listening to a podcast or audio book the phone politely pauses the file while I'm on the phone, and then cleverly rewinds a short way and continues playing, so I don't miss a beat. By contrast the iPod locks up from time to time and often skips 10 minutes AHEAD if I pause the book. HUH?!
Jason's blog post, "The Case Against Apple--in Five Parts" arrived by email, which is good because this blog is grey and almost unreadable. Just subscribe to his mailing list, which is awesome.

2 comments:

Nebb said...

The Apple Operating System software is fairly inspirational when compared to Microsoft. Could you just imagine if Microsoft had a hand in making a similar product to the iPod. It would play WMV, AVI (with no codec support), MPG and perhaps, when you complained enough, FLAC or something similar. Imagine the startup issues, imagine the freezing, Imagine the constant upgrades and patches. It would probably run on a hacked Windows Mobile Kernel, knowing how Microsoft likes to rebrand old technology. I'm just glad my Windows Mobile 6 phone's Windows Update feature never works. I'd probably need to take out an extra data bundle just to cope.

I for one have never owned a Apple product. I may never buy an Apple iPod, especially since Apple knew their first and second generation iPod batteries had issues, yet never recalled it.

Instead they offered an upgrade at an additional cost. Stick to what you're good at Apple, and if you're want to do something right, do it the way Sony did when they released the Playstation 3. Overkill and ahead of its time.

Donn Edwards said...

@Nebb: I connot agree that Apple's OS software is "inspirational" when it has recently been plauged with several HUGE patches, not to mention the SMS vulnerability on the iPhone.

Microsoft does make a similar product to the iPod. It's called Zune. Interestingly it can't play WMA protected files, but does MP3's fine. It even allows you to share your files with other Zune users.

Apple's Windows iTunes software SUCKS. It's slow, unreliable and bloatware of the worst order.

Apple has one of the shortest warranty periods I have ever seen. I think their standard warranty for hardware is 90 days.