Steve Jobs, the marketing genius (twenty-first century term for “huckster”) is gone. Steve Wozniak, who actually built the hardware that became the Apple I and the Apple II lives on in an apparently normalesque life—or at least as normal as someone with that net worth can. I’ve always wanted to meet Steve Wozniak. A coworker of mine who lives in California but works at various hospitals throughout North America, apparently knows him rather well. Since this friend is one I have trusted, I believe that Woz is an okay guy.
However—and this is no reflection on Woz—why is it so difficult to get iTunes to function reliably? Most of the times it just plain won’t work for me. When it does, it duplicates many of my songs, so I have to go through the duplicate function and delete them.
Imagine if in the sixties the vinyl records came with such errors? How about the seventies with cassette tapes that didn’t contain one—and only one—copy of each song that was on the label. Okay, I admit, in the sixties and seventies there were many people who were chemically disoriented and wouldn’t have noticed. However, the record companies never even tried to pass off such foolishness. Straight, sober, stoned, or drunk, everyone expected that the songs on the media would match those on the label. We listened to music on large, powerful stereo systems that filled the room with high fidelity, stereo sound, all of which was shared with everyone else in the room. Now, each person has their personal cocoon of music via their earbuds.
Unfortunately, the new system doesn’t work. MP3 audio loses a majority of the sound that is in a recording in order to save space. Apple is pretty much the exclusive vendor of music systems; Zune? Rio? Everyone else? Ancient history.
So now we have a frustrating system that keeps us away from our music (or the 10% or so that remains after reducing it to MP3). What happened?
- Apple, being so powerful, messes with us just because it can.
- Apple employees are imposing penance on the masses because they have been made to feel personally responsible for Steve Jobs’s death.
- The top programmers at Apple have been let go in favor of cheaper foreign programmers who are too busy building in backdoors and malware to do a proper job.
The list could go on and on. All I know is that recently I have attempted—unsuccessfully—to get iTunes working on three different computers with no luck. I don’t mean that it has minor problems, I mean my iPods and the program do not speak; they will not even cuss one another out. They merely engage in the silent treatment.
Did Steve Jobs have his folks build in a subroutine so that, upon his demise, everyone with an Apple product would be punished? iPhones would become obsolete so often that no one could ever claim to have the latest model. That iPad you just bought? Sorry, that model is just so yesterday. iPods? Anyone tied to such an old product, has every right to suffer!
But that’s just a theory.
* If “Jobs” were plural, then the possessive would be “Jobs’,” but since it is a singular noun, the possessive is formed by adding an apostrophe s.
sfnowak 