iTunes 8.2.1 Kills 'Bugs' Such As Palm Pre Sync Comments

I wonder if they've resolved the issue where when iTunes is downloading 2-3 Podcasts it becomes almost totally non-responsive.

Good riddance to the Pre users.

this is exactly the sort of thing which annoys me about apple. if MS did this there'd be an outcry. saying that i can't stand the bloatware that is itunes myself and use songbird to sync my ipod.

So petty removing Pre access. Makes no sense to me, why restrict your market? Anyway, I dropped itunes years ago...

@Bagpuss - I've been holding out for iTunes to fix issues like that for ages. At the top of my list is why iTunes only renders album covers once they're on the screen (rather than rendering ahead of time off the screen) so if you're scrolling through your library by grid view it's slow and jerky.
Overall, the user experience of iTunes is a bit slow...

@ ravmania Totally agree. But then who chooses to uses iTunes over the many other better solutions.

take note EU, THIS is anti-competitive behaviour! Including a browser that you made with an OS you made while allowing anyone to install ANY other company's browser of their choosing is NOT anti-competitive when contrasted by "fixing" a media suite you make to only work with hardware you make and not allow another company's hardware to work.

And while we're at it, why haven't Apple been stung/classes as a monopoly on Macintosh machines in the same way that Microsoft has been classed a monopoly on PCs. Surely by Apple's own admission a Mac is not a PC (or those "I'm a Mac" adverts wouldn't make sense) and so can't be classed as a minority producer

/rant

Apple things for Apple people :D Yep, it's very 'my way or the highway', but you wont catch me crying for the Pre users - with Apple you get the biggest benefits by embracing the whole concept. If you just want to pick and choose the bits you want, great, but Apple wont help you and, if they think their competitors are taking advantage of them, they'll actively declare war.

And who can blame them, the Pre is practically a Chinese iPhone knock-off :D Well, ok, it's a bit more than that, but still.

CptKirk: On the contrary, good riddance to iTunes. Now Pre users have to find alternatives, they can see what proper software looks like.

Media Monkey syncs to both devices and is a great alternative.

@ChaosDefinesOrder - good point. It's at least 5 minutes since the EU fined some company. They must be quaking in their boots wondering how to keep topping up their slush fund.

Remind me again, exactly how much of the millions they've extracted from companies in fines has actually been distributed back to those who were supposedly wronged?

Why can't apple release a patch for itunes, instead of having to download another 80mb of the same program i downloaded only months before hand.

Sam

I think this is fair enough, after all everyone else pays to license software, like Apple did with activesync so they could support Exchange on the iPhone. Part of the appeal of an ipod is the whole experience, I'm not sure Palm deserve to just get it for free.

That said, I hope the Pre does well, WebOS certainly looks impressive.

@scotw
Fair point but it's not like Apple actually has a licensing scheme for it.

iTunes: Great on my Macbook, a monstrosity on my Quad Core Vista machine. Unfortunately it's the Quad Core that holds the music library.

@scotw: That's only a valid argument is Apple allow other devices to use iTunes with a fee. Remember that the iPod requires iTunes but iTunes doesn't require and iPod. It's quite conceivable someone would use it to buy and/or manage multimedia without having an iPod - especially as it's bundled with all of Apple's PCs.

tried out itunes on a bootcamped whitebook. under mac os, it's as smooth as you like with the visualisations, and the album arts. throw it into windows mode, and it's as slow as hell doing anything.

funny thing is you don't see microsoft castrating the performance of microsoft office, and back in the days windows media player and internet explorer ran just fine.

iTunes is like xBox live in a way. Everybody on the interwebs applauds xBox live over it's superiority over PSN, but they fail to give any reason... It, apparently, just *is* better, and that's that, so there.
Likewise, so many people berate iTunes and try to convert people to whatever unheard of software they use, but generally fail to give decent reason.

I have iTunes running on a MacMini that runs 24/7 working as our audio/video media server, has over 30Gb of music, mostly with artwork, probably 10Gb of video files at any one time, and it's an absolute joy to use. Search is instant, whatever I'm looking for, if you zoom through cover flow it takes a mere fraction of a second for the artwork to display... The mix of Genius, iTunes DJ, and the Remote app for the iPhone has changed the way music is listened to in my flat! I don't have a complaint about it.

Regarding the article at hand. Like others here, I think Apple are missing a trick by not licensing iTunes use to other companies, they clealy have their reasons though as they do with a lot a apparently illogical choices. iTunes is Apple's software developed to be part of the iPod ecosystem. Damn right they should be able to stop other people writting hacks to get their hardware syncing with it!

It's not anti competitive. If Epson released a new printer with software which was nothing more than a hack to allow the printer to work with HP's printing suite, would people rant and rave that HP were anti-competitive by stopping this?

Palm were lazy, and they somehow, somewhere along the long, must have thought they would get away with it. Tough.

Fanboy.


Damn, sorry, couldn't resist.

In my many comments on this site, I've never denied that, DrDark. Unlike most though I do try to ensure that logic and reason persist throughout.

Should I assume that's the only counter you have to my comments ;-)

@Cub: So how would you suggest someone who's just bought a Pre gets their iTunes playlists onto it?

@Cub: The printer analogy is completely redundant. I may have potentially spent £100s on music in iTunes why on earth *shouldn't* I be able to access it from whatever device I choose - don't forget people may have built up a large iTunes library without ever owning an iPod. What Apple are basically trying to do is force you to buy an iPod since you already have iTunes - this is practically the dictionary definition of anti-competitive practice.

@Cub - I agree with most of your comments, but my point about the jerky scrolling it true. I've had a long running thread on Apple forums about this (I originally thought it was my machine that was getting unstable) which is why I know the artwork is only rendered once it is first on screen.
The reason you don't experience this problem is because yours is always on and so the artwork is still in current RAM. Try closing down; re-launch Mac-Mini then iTunes and scroll by album grid view. Until you've scrolled through the whole lot they will only render as they come on screen.

Anyway, that said I absolutely support the fact that Apple products and apps tend to be the best on the market - I just sometimes get frustrated if I compare them to how good they could be with some sensible and easy tweaking.

@Xiphias - Those poor people were lied to by Palm. If I had just purchased a new Nokia phone I wouldn't be able to do it either, Nokia owners aren't up in arms here though! Being a user of iTunes, I know that the only devices I can sync to are iPods/iPhones.

@Joe - Hold on, I've purchased a number of tracks from the iTunes Store in the past, this is pre-iPhone days, and I managed to get them on my old Sony Ericsson with very little trouble. You can't not do anything that Apple said you could do (I hope that makes sense), in effect - Apple haven't lied about anything or hidden anything from you.
Yes, they have a closed ecosystem where everything works marvellously together - that's half the appeal of the product and why so many people become part of it. You can call me a fanboy (I won't deny it!) but millions, and millions of people can't be wrong...

@Dan - Fair point, we can all only speak from personal experience. It gets restarted every couple of weeks, I did this over the weekend as a test, and while there was a delay as I scrolled through, it certainly didn't interfere of irritate in the slightest.

Everything could always be better, everyone has things they don't agree with or things they would do differently. If you don't like iTunes, or the iPod, or even Apple as a company, then don't buy their products!

I really can't see what the problem is here.

Apple has a piece of software that they have used to reignite their entire business model and are rightly protective of it.

Apple have always controlled the entire ecosystem very carefully when it comes to their machines and software and this sits within that model.

1. People shouldn't be surprised that apple likes to keeps things running their way - it's been like that since day one.
2. Pre were actually steeling and as such Apple are well within their rights to stop them in any legal way they see fit.
3. Pre were idiots to think this wouldn't happen. As such all they have done is pissed off some of their users (early adopters who always pay more) by now having a phone which they pushed as having iTunes capability not having one. Not very good marketing or customer expectation management.

This is the 'make or break' moment for Palm and every single eff-up, no matter how small is just one more reason why people will look elsewhere for their hardware. I'm not too sure what can save Palm, the Pre looked pretty good apart from the woeful build quality (which won't bother business users but WILL put off consumers) and little niggles like this are thorns in the side of building a successful brand that can grow again.

As for iTunes having it's issues, yup it does and so does every other piece of software but when you consider the pros compared to the cons it is a good bit of kit that delivers the kind of experience tha majority of users want and that's the key. Keep most people happy and you grow, keep just the fanbois happy and you go nowhere.

@Joe - you are a free minded consumer - don't bitch about using a system that is closed when you actually have to choose to join it. Nobody forced you to buy into iTunes, you could have used other systems but you CHOSE to use iTunes. It's tightly controlled for numerous reasons and because of all of these it has become popular enough to be the market leader, offers a LOT of content and is safe and reliable (in nearly all cases). MOst importantly it managed to appease the lables and the consumers with a compromise that both found acceptable.
It's not anti-competitive because there are many other systems you can CHOOSE from. It doesn't force people to use it. You can import and export various file formats and you can use it to manage non-iTunes bought music. What you can't do is use it to control non-iPod players. Your argument is like saying that Games console A (market leader) is anticompetitive because you can't play their games on console B (a smaller concern).