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Category: Software.
Overall, I like Apple. I think that they have done some pretty innovative things, and someday I wouldn’t mind owning a Mac G5 and an iPod. There is one thing, however, about Apple that drives me crazy. Let me explain.
Last week we got Christina a Dell laptop so she can work on her thesis during her 3 hour daily commute. We updated to the latest Windows service packs, and installed Firefox, AdAware, and MS Anti Spyware. When you install Firefox, you have to reinstall the versions of the media plug ins (like Flash and Quicktime) that work with Firefox. So, I went to Apple.com to download Quicktime. I learned that Apple now only bundles Quicktime and iTunes together. You can’t get one without the other. In fact, when you download Quicktime, the installer is called iTunesSetup.exe.
I’ve used iTunes a few times, and it seems to be okay. I don’t love it. It bugs me that it makes copies of all my music in the iTunes folder (taking up twice the disk space for my music), so I don’t use it unless I need to. I do really like Quicktime, though.
Here’s my question: why can’t Apple bundle the products separately? Why can’t I just download Quicktime without iTunes? If they are really two good pieces of software, people will download them independently. Apple, please don’t force iTunes down our throats just so we can use Quicktime. Let your individual products stand on their own merits. If people like them, they’ll download them.
October 29th, 2005 at 10:29 am
My biggest complaint about iTunes is that they don’t minimize to that useful little player toolbar like MediaPlayer. I think you can set it up not to copy your music into iTunes, at least my iTunes never did that on either of my computers.