Wozniak calls for open Apple

Re:Wozniak calls for open Apple by Tloewald on Monday May 14, 2012 @08:22PM (#3974141)

The alternative at the time was to buy an mp3 player with no way for normal people to load or buy music. It's precisely because of the lack of hoop jumping that iPod took off. Don't confuse the customer experience with the developer experience. Apple has always considered ease of use for end users a top priority and ease of use for programmers to be a distant nth.

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Re:Wozniak calls for open Apple by vetinari on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @02:22AM (#3975206)

When iTunes came out, there was no way to buy music with it either. It was that way for several years.

Adding to that, when iTunes came out, most people didn't put any thought into ID3 tags. When they imported their music, their library became one big mess.

So much for ease of use for end users.

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Re:Wozniak calls for open Apple by userdeveloper on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @03:18AM (#3975391)

Windows support was not immediate either. It took some time. I used to use a program written by a student at Williams College. I forget the name. It was more simple and faster than iTunes. Then for a while I used a Perl script. I must admit, in retrospect, Apple knew what they were doing. I just couldn't see the point in iTunes. I doubted whether their $1/song "music store", and forcing users to use it by forcing them to install iTunes, would ever fly.

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Re:Wozniak calls for open Apple by StuffMaster on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @12:04AM (#3974830)

Whoah there, iTunes is not ease of use. I had an MP3 player before the iPod was ever relased and it was most definitely easier to load music onto.

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Re:Wozniak calls for open Apple by yardie on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @10:48AM (#3976805)

I had an MP3 player before the iPod as well. It was a 64MB Rio and it held ~10 songs.

The thing was iTunes wasn't designed to be a music loader, it's a music manager. This became evident when they introduced smart playlists.

A few of my friends had Nomads, they were large, heavy and the UI was archaic in comparison.

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Re:Wozniak calls for open Apple by Tloewald on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @12:07AM (#3980434)

Back in the day you install iTunes, stick a cd in your computer, iTunes recognizes the cd, rips it, names the tracks, loads it onto your iPod.

This is back when you had to figure out which Mp3 encoder you wanted to use.

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Re:Wozniak calls for open Apple by jiggy2011 on Monday May 14, 2012 @11:59PM (#3974810)

Dragging something onto a removable disk is hoop jumping?

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Re:Wozniak calls for open Apple by userdeveloper on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @12:19AM (#3974865)

The hoop is not using the software. The hoop is having to install the software.

Why can't the iPod work without iTunes? (It can, but only with a lot of work.)

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Re:Wozniak calls for open Apple by jiggy2011 on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @12:52AM (#3974957)

IIRC correctly most of the older MP3 players didn't need any software beyond what was built into Windows. Of course this was the era of Windows 95/98 so how well that worked overall it's difficult to say.

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Re:Wozniak calls for open Apple by pessimizer on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @10:20AM (#3976663)

And most of the current mp3 players, as far as I know. iPods are the broken ones.

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Re:Wozniak calls for open Apple by slowpoke on Tuesday May 15, 2012 @10:51AM (#3976815)

No matter how much you might try to excuse it, there is no greater user friendliness than a device simply identifying as data storage to the OS. It's ridiculous to have to use a separate program when you could just use your file manager.

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Re:Wozniak calls for open Apple by Tloewald on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @12:05AM (#3980428)

That's a consequence of cutting deals with the music industry. Apple had to block users using their iPods as devices for copying music around to enable the iTunes store to work. There are all kinds of trade off in iTunes design, but in the end it's the only significant end to end solution out there, even after all this time. (Kindle Fire is close.)

Oh and anything that involves the file system is not friendly for a surprisingly huge number of users.

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Re:Wozniak calls for open Apple by slowpoke on Wednesday May 16, 2012 @04:13AM (#3980994)

>Oh and anything that involves the file system is not friendly for a surprisingly huge number of users.

"User friendliness" in this case also includes developers, who could easily write a program that interacts with the device. For example, any media player could be used to synchronize music (if it supports that feature).

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Re:Wozniak calls for open Apple by user-developer on Monday May 14, 2012 @11:13PM (#3974671)

What if a user is also a developer, or vice versa?

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