I don’t change his name. The spelling stays the same. I just sort the names so that I alphabetize all “Mc” names as if it’s an abbreviation for “Mac,” which it is. I want “McDonald” and “Mac Donald” to be alphabetized as if they’re the same name. That is actually a valid way to alphabetize a dictionary, index, etc.
Do you WANT to start trouble between the Irish and the Scottish?
Even as a very, very long time Apple fan and Mac user, I have to say that when Apple decides to fuck up their software, they do it royally. I have an iPod touch (not a phone) that I use primarily for music and playing random non-networked games like Scrabble. So there should be absolutely no reason whatsoever that the iPod should ever bug me to log into iTunes or iCloud or enter my Apple ID. But invariably when I pick the damn thing up, it asks me to do one of those things, often two or three times in a row. The iCloud one is particularly annoying because I don’t have an iCloud account nor do I particularly want one. Now I’d just type in the iCloud password if I actually had one, but the iPod thinks it’s associated with an email account I haven’t used in six or seven years. So I have no idea what that iCloud password would be.
The other evening I made a solemn vow that I would eliminate the iCloud nagging. I tried turning off iCloud. Well, guess what? Because it’s associated with Find my Phone, you literally can’t turn off iCloud without knowing the password. But it gets worse. If you try to turn off iCloud, it says that it will delete all content that was downloaded from the cloud. That was OK with me, because I have no cloud content. But the iPod deleted all music from my iPod except that music that I had bought from Apple. So apparently it deleted all non-cloud content instead? I can’t even imagine how anyone every thought this would be the right thing to do, but a casual Google indicates that I’m not alone and this is a common occurrence.
So…the current status is that I have no music on my iPod and, despite all my efforts to change the password, link the old email address to my current account, or have new passwords mailed to me, I am still getting stupid iCloud prompts.
The mildest thing to say about the iPod software is that in Apple’s quest to make everything connected and cloud compatible (and profitable to those people who sell you stuff via applications), they’ve made it vastly more aggravating. The reality is that they’ve fucked up my favorite device and they can all get mildly singed in a fire.
Also, Apple discontinued the 17" laptop four years ago and resolutely refuses to release a 17" retina Mac Book Pro while continuing to come out with tiny lightweight laptops, ignoring the fact that many people who have ditched desktop machine still need a reasonable amount of desk real estate that you can use without a goddamn magnifying glass. That singing fire should actually be a bit hotter.
What utter nonsense. It seems to me that the only people touting the iPad are those who have never used a GOOD system, so they are convinced that their over-priced and utterly useless applications on it are the best. Poor lost souls…
Yes, I’ve had TWO iPads in my life, but I’ve learned my lesson. I HATE the iPad (my last one was the Air 2), and LOVE my Samsung Galaxy Tab S with its Android OS. Simple to use, easy to drag n drop .mp3 songs, .mp4 (or whatever) movies, etc. That’s drag n drop both TO and FROM the device; no stupid piece of crap iTunes in the way of it!
Ed in Columbus, OH
So I’m reading this about ‘Hounds of Love’ and I think that I should put this on my iPod Touch so I can listen on my commute (my car has a 30 pin iPod connection, and it sounds better then connecting my Android phone through a 3.5mm cable). The songs are already ripped on my computer, and in my iTunes library, so it should be easy to add the songs, right?
Wrong. There is no easy way to figure out how the fuck to do this in iTunes. Manually manage music, sync only checked songs, etc. And the first thing that iTunes does is is start to transfer podcasts that are on my iPod to my computer. I don’t need that, I never listen to podcasts on the computer, just the iPod, but iTunes starts to cheerfully chug away at transferring over 500 podcasts from the iPod to the computer anyway. And only then does it transfer three out of the twelve songs on ‘Hounds of Love’ to the iPod before giving up. That’s it, it’s done.
Well fuck. I decided then that maybe I should just use my Android phone and deal with the lower sound quality of the 3.5mm cable. It’s literally just drag and drop. I didn’t even have to specify a folder on the phone, I just dropped them on the root folder that was on Windows Explorer and had no problem playing them using using the Google ‘Play Music’ app. I went back and created a ‘Music’ folder on the phone and added a different Album to that folder, and sure as shit the Play Music app showed them both.
Now, I’m going back to read the iTunes iPod users guide to see just what I need to do to get the songs on the iPod, but the difference of the ease of use of the two systems is huge. iTunes is just frustratingly difficult to use.
On the plus side, it did finally delete U2’s ‘Songs of Innocence’ from the iPod. It took four tries, but it looks like that album is gone (for good!).
So what actually happened when you tried to drag the songs to the iPod? Are the songs in a format the iPod can’t accept? There really isn’t anything that you have to “figure out how to do.” You should be able to just drag and drop them in iTunes.
It eventually did let me do just that, but only after it spent about 30 minutes transferring podcasts from the iPod to the computer (which is useless to me, as I only listen to them on the iPod). But I had to drag them song by song, and just the ones that iTunes failed to transfer. The most frustrating thing was about half of the things I did try resulted in a message “This will result in erasing everything on the iPod. Do you want to continue?” Well, no, I don’t want to do that, I’m just trying to transfer one freaking album. But thanks for asking before erasing everything, I guess.
Most of my use of the iPod is podcasts and streaming music from Rhapsody, SOMA FM, Pandora, etc… I just don’t use iTunes as a music source and rarely use it, but when I do it wants to update the hell out of everything before it lets me do anything, despite having it set for manually managing the music. And the entire time I’m thinking to myself ‘Just let me do what I need to do and be on my way, rather than spending time doing things I don’t need’. And that’s what’s frustrating, you want it to do one thing and it starts to do something else.
I’ve got an iPod that I use for listening to music in the car. I don’t even bother updating it any more because A: iTunes is such a pain in the ass and B: I don’t want to install iTunes on my new install of Windows. I am just going to buy a 64GB microSD and put it in my (Android) phone.
My daughter recently wanted to enable iCloud on her iPhone, which involved upgrading to iOS 8.x. Trouble is the update process didn’t work and at some point her phone would only boot to a screen with a “connect to iTunes” graphic on it. Not sure why updating a smartphone OS should need a computer. And, she wasn’t anywhere near a computer with Internet on it. The next day she did finally get her phone onto a PC at a library and it took a couple hours to install iTunes and get the phone to finish updating.
This is on standard Apple hardware too, I can understand why PC/Android stuff doesn’t always work because of the millions of hardware combinations out there.
I considered an iPhone when I was phone shopping in May, the 6 looks nice and I had an iPhone a long time ago, but the need for iTunes is a deal killer. I will not install it on my PC. I thought with the Cloud that the iPhones didn’t have to get connected to iTunes any more. Is that not the case? Do they still have to have the umbilical updates and get physically connected to iTunes to keep updated?
Fuck you itunes cloud