Since a few years, I’m definitely against any Apple product, because of their software restrictions, and the general politic of the company.
But I’ve had my iPod (a fifth generation, 30Gb) for more than 5 years now, and it still works perfectly. I don’t know how many times it fell on the floor (which made some damage to the screen, it seems that some crystals are “broken”, I don’t know exactly how…), but the hard drive (yes, 30Gb 5 years ago, you had to use a hard drive) is still intact and working.
So why a post to say that I’m happy about an Apple product? Because I’m not really happy. A few days ago, I tried to add some music on it, using RhythmBox (the default audio player on Ubuntu), and… well it didn’t work, no error message, but I couldn’t add a single file. I tried to make some space on it by deleting some crappy songs I had, impossible to do it. I tried every player I could think of: Clementine (a port of Amarok), YamiPod (an iPod manager)… Impossible to change anything on my iPod. So I eventually had to use iTunes. But my computer at home is only on Ubuntu (I didn’t install Windows on it, as it’s not powerful enough to run games).
We’re in 2012, and I had to install iTunes on my work computer so be able to update the content of my iPod. That’s the problem. This is the definition of “software restrictions”. Lots of open source developers spend some time working on functional and useful software, but when you have a problem, the only solution is to use an absolutely-not-open-source crappy software to fix it.
Yes, the Apple products are really nice, the hardware is good, they’ve had some visionary ideas, but no, I don’t want to have to use your software! Next time, I’ll buy an MP3 player where I can just drag-and-drop my files to add them. My iPod was my first Apple product, and it will probably be the last. Oh, and by the way Apple,
WHY YOU SO EXPENSIVE?