You may get a kick out of Guitar Hero for the C64.
I could list several reasons off the top of my head, but the major one is I don’t want to synch my music. Full stop. I don’t care. I just want to copy all my music onto my MP3 player, hit the “random” option, and let it provide me with music.
Most other “casual” music users I know (ie people who don’t live an breathe music the way everyone here seems to, but still like to listen to it on the bus/train/etc) feel the same way.
There’s simply no need for iTunes to exist, except for Apple to make it a bit harder for people to use one of their products.
I haven’t read the whole 4 pages of responses, so here goes my candid response to the OP.
Macs are about several things. Image is definitely one of them. Macs are made to look pretty. Hell, they are pretty. That part they got right. Just like people buy cars based on how they will see them in their drivewars and Consumers Report be damned, people think of computers as fashion accessories. Sometimes a black plastic box won’t do while a silver wafer will. YMMV.
I would not say they are about status. You can buy them at Walmart and everywhere. Ugly kids have white earbuds in their ears. If the status thing was once true, it no longer is. Not even close.
I think a big part for some users is a little about making a “Fuck Bill Gates” statement. I am currently a Windows user and after switching to 7, I swore I would never give another penny to Gates & Co.
Another big factor, I think, is quality. Macs are made right. They might still be made in sweat shops in China but they have a stringent asshole at the whip.
Ease of use as in “it just works”, well, that really needs to be seen through the right glasses for it to be true. The Applesphere is smaller and much more tightly controlled. This means less conflicts among peripherals and all that. This is also mostly true if you marry to a specific PC vendor. If you get all your stuff from one place, they cannot just point at the next guy and say “it’s their fault”. They have to make it work.
Ease of use as in “grandma can use it blindfolded”, another set of special glasses needed. They give you less options. That leaves less chances for error.
Price considerations, I think that Macs are priced right at launch and then they spend a whole year at the same price while the competition cuts theirs in half. Buy Apple at launch day and you get a good deal.
So, is it just image and status? I think not. It is a complete mindset that you either share or cannot fathom. It works for some people, it doesn’t make sense to others.
Absolutely all of my friends in the software industry have macs and they tease me endlessly. I develop for windows at work and use Ubuntu/Windows at home. I have a lot of colleagues who use their own macbook at work rather than the employer-provided thinkpad.
I bought a mac mini for my wife because I needed to edit a video and it was cheaper to buy a macmini with iMovie than buy a firewire adapter and editing software for my PC.
Suddenly all of my family PC admin responsibilities vanished (can you upload my photos? My email is not working! I have a virus!). We still have mostly PCs but no one uses them any more and we argue over the mac.
When you compare the cost of a PC versus the cost of a Mac, it’s reasonable to put a value on the iLife apps if you plan to use them. GarageBand and iMovie alone are worth the price of admission.
I am jealous of my wife’s mac and I won’t ever buy another PC.
iPod → Music Tab → uncheck “Sync Music”. Copy your music to the ipod. Hit random. Full stop.
The fact (and problem) is that you need iTunes on your computer at all, whereas with most Windows-based MP3 players it’s a simple drag 'n drop procedure to get the music from your PC to your MP3 player. No “special” software required.
I purchased my first Mac in '93, because the specific piece of software I wanted (Final Draft), at that time, was only available on Mac (it’s long been available on Windows now as well). Even today, the main software package I use (Final Cut Studio) isn’t available on Windows. Sure, there’s alternatives, and I’ve used some of them, but I keep coming back to FCS. I’ve been a loyal (but not fan-boyish… there’s many things Apple has done over the years I haven’t liked, and I have no problem critiquing them) user every since. I love the ease of use. I love the stability. I love the OS. I love the look and feel of the OS, and of the hardware. Yes, I like that the computers themselves are stylish (although that certainly has never been my main reason in buying them).
The question “is it mostly just image and status” is kind of a silly question. They’re real computers. Real work is done on them. From industry professionals down to grandmothers using them for nothing except to answer email. Speculating that it’s “mostly just image and status” implies that there’s nothing really beyond that, which is inherently not true.
The difference, as has been stated here, is personal choice. I have no problem admitting a good reason I use and prefer Macs, is because it’s what I’ve been using for so many years. I have a lot of experience on Windows as well. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Windows. I was out of town a few weeks ago, and had to do some work on my brother’s Windows 7 laptop. I was pretty impressed with it. There’s virtually nothing you can do on Windows that you can’t do on a Mac, and vice-versa (yes, the game market for Mac can’t hold a candle to the one on Windows, true enough).
Seriously, anyone who is still saying “Macs suck” or “Windows sucks” clearly hasn’t used the other system very much, if at all, or in a very, very long time.
For me, it’s all about the OS. The security and ease of use are the main points. I’d prefer if I could get Mac OS on cheaper hardware. Macs are nice, but I’d much rather save a buck if I could. I also don’t like that the only viable home Mac (Mini is lame, Mac Pro is ridiculously expensive) has a built-in monitor. I wish they would build a regular tower computer. I tried to build a Hackintosh not too long ago, had some trouble, and then gave up and sold it when a family member gave me another Mac.
Ah. Yeah, I can understand that. I know the reason Apple did that was as a concession to the music industry, knowing they needed their cooperation for the iTunes store (especially when it was first getting under way), and wanting to not make it easy to just copy music willy nilly. But yeah, it would be nice to just drag and drop to the iPod. I admit that.
Still, even with that said, I don’t understand the ire iTunes draws. I admit I haven’t tried to use it on Windows, but on the Mac at least, once it’s set up (and you turn off syncing, the first thing I did), it really is as easy as dragging and dropping what you want. I guess I just don’t mind doing it from an organized application, rather than the Finder.
iTunes does do some things that annoy the hell out of me. I have it download podcasts, which I move right to my iPod, where I listen to them. After a few weeks, iTunes decides I don’t want to download the podcasts anymore, since “You haven’t listened to it in a while”, because it doesn’t know I’m listening to them on the iPod instead of through iTunes. I have to click to get it to start downloading again. That’s very annoying. But overall, I like the program. Maybe it sucks completely on Windows, I dunno.
iTunes ties into that “vendor lock-in” thing someone mentioned earlier upthread. Because of all the dicking about and having to use iTunes to get MP3s onto your iPod, it “encourages” people to buy their music from the iStore… and because (I’m told) iTunes-bought music is DRM encrypted (so you can’t easily put it on your non-iPod MP3 player), there’s another discincentive to use something that’s Not Apple.
A while back I posted a thread about how it was nearly impossible for me to purchase a non-iPod 4gb MP3 from a retail store here in Australia. The responses in that thread were… generally unhelpful, being largely (IIRC) of the “Suck it up an buy an iPod like everyone else” or “Buy it on eBay!” variety. But I believe my point is valid; Apple’s marketing and appeal to image-conscious teenagers and uni students (and I used to be in electronics retail management, so I know who the major market for iPods is, and it’s not middle-aged accountants) has basically meant that if you want an 4Gb+ MP3 player in this part of the world nowadays, it’s an iPod or an (overpriced) Sony Walkman.
My major issues with the iPods aren’t so much price or features (recently they’ve become a lot cheaper and now include an FM radio, which they should have had years ago) but rather that there’s still that element of Apple trying to control where the purchaser’s music comes from and making it just that wee bit too complicated for most people to get their music (legitimately) without going through iTunes.
Almost all music on the iTunes store is now available DRM-free. Apple only does (did?) the DRM because they were forced to - Steve Jobs essentially said as much. It’s all standard AAC now (.m4a file).
.AAC isn’t “standard”, IMHO- MP3 is “Standard”.
Fonzie listened to .mp3’s. The world has moved on to AAC:
I’ll give you the “it’d be nicer to just drag and drop songs onto the ipod rather than have to go through an application to do it” argument, but this I’m gonna call foul on. I’ve had an iPod since the 1st generation, well before the iTunes store opened. In all those years, I think I’ve spent 20, maybe 30 dollars in the iTunes store. And I have a huge music collection. There is absolutely no road block to getting music into iTunes from other sources than the iTunes store.
If you put a new music CD in the computer, iTunes will automatically rip the music into your library (if you want; you can turn this option off, or have it ask you before it does so). And, by the way, you can set this to import using an MP3 encoder if you want; AAC is the default, yes, but you can switch to MP3, AIFF, Apple Lossless, or WAV.
You can also easily drag files from the Finder into the iTunes library. When you install iTunes, it offers to scan your hard drive and import any music you already have on your drive into your iTunes library.
Does Apple want you to buy music from the iTunes music store? Sure, just like any company wants to make more money from their products and services. Do they advertise and push the iTunes music store? Of course they do, again, just like any other company would. But it’s simply not true that they make it complicated to get music into iTunes from other sources.
Just because iTunes sells lots of AAC format music doesn’t make it the “Standard”. I doubt most people (ie, non-SDMB users) even know what AAC is, for that matter.
MP3 works with everything, but not everything plays AAC music. So I’d argue MP3 is still “standard” (in that pretty much any digital music player can play MP3s).
AAC is fine, although it’s still not as widely supported as MP3.
What i think is ridiculous is that i still can’t buy from the iTunes store without installing the iTunes program on my computer. The idea that a commerce website requires a specific piece of software simply to make a purchase is fucked up. And yes, i get just as annoyed at sites that insist i use Internet Explorer in order to gain access.
The world has not moved on to ACC or even digital downloads. The majority of music is still purchased in hard form although that should change in the United States this year. The US market leads the world in number of songs purchased digitally.
Mac’s don’t hold much of the world market because few people benefit from the added cost/value of the computer. More people use computers for gaming, business, internet surfing and email than use them for video editing. There is nothing that a Mac does that a $400 PC can’t do for the vast majority of people.
Go tell that to Bill Gates.
He’ll laugh at you, and he’ll be right to do so.
That was certainly my experience in South Asia. Low Yat Plaza in Kuala Lumpur is supposed to be one of Asia’s biggest IT malls (comparable to Sim Lim Square in Singapore) and it was packed full of places selling PCs, PC Hardware, PC accessories, (Legitimate) PC Software, Laptops, and so on- five stories of Digital Cameras, Mobile Phones, and Computer Stuff. I think I saw one store in there selling Macs, although to be fair, I did see at least two modern and trendy-looking “Apple Premium Reseller” stores elsewhere in KL.
I didn’t see anyone sitting in Suria Park (behind Petronas Towers and KLCC Suria, a posh shopping mall) using a Mac. I didn’t see people at cafes or Kopitiams using a Mac. Of the people I was interacting as part of my internship, one of them had a Macbook, and they were pretty much exactly the Mac target market- young, funky, socially active university age type. Everyone else was using Windows PCs or Laptops because they were cheap, parts were easy to get, and everyone either had a family member or knew someone who could fix them if anything went wrong.
Even in Singapore (Which is, along with Hong Kong, Asia’s IT hub) I didn’t see anyone using Macs in coffee shops or in the parks. Doesn’t mean they weren’t (There were some Macs for public use at Changi Airport, for example), but I quite frequently see people sitting in Starbucks or in the park or the library here using a Macbook and I just wasn’t seeing that in Malaysia or Singapore. I can’t imagine significant numbers of people in India or Thailand or Indonesia use Macs for “everyday” computing, either.
Let me re-iterate that I’m not saying “Macs are useless!” or anything like that. But I am agreeing with the OP that despite Mac’s usefulness and proclivity towards specialist use, the fact remains they are horribly expensive and Apple themselves actively promote “Image” as one of the main reasons to buy a Mac. If Apple shifted away from advertising targeting the funky hipster student crowd and more towards “everyday” users (combined with the introduction of a Macbook Basic that was comparable in price to an entry level Windows laptop) I think their market share would increase quite noticeably.
What’s Bill Gates got to do with Apple selling music in a (comparatively) weird new format?
Gates was well known for enforcing the Microsoft standard through market dominance.
Apple’s got a big enough chunk of the music business, that what they say is the standard is the standard.
Fortunately for us, the AAC standard also happens to be an improvement over the MP3 standard it replaces:
Big whacking hunk of Wikipedia on the improvements AAC Standard makes over MP3