Stuff like this is why I’ve been dithering about choosing a tablet for, like, forever.
I can’t speak to your other issues, but I have no problem subscribing to podcasts directly from my iPad or in finding the mp3 file on my computer.
With the iTunes and music apps that come with the iPad or with another app? If there’s a way to subscribe to podcasts on the iPad itself without another app I wish you would tell me how.
Try Downcast. I don’t use it, but I have friends that swear by it.
The OP is trying not to download an app, since that would require him to put answers to security questions in Apples hands. If he could get an app, Apples own podcast app would do the trick just fine.
Why do you hate American capitalism? Can you just move to North Korea if you like its system so much better?
… I’m kidding! … And after jousting with the sophomoric pomposity of the Macintosh development team in the mid-1980’s I’ve never returned to Apple. But I’m also a stubborn asshole, and have resented similar restrictions from other vendors.
(I won’t return to this thread since, from experience, I know that Soon an “economic conservative” who knows little about computers will be along to inform us that, by the Axioms of the Free Market, Apple’s products are precisely the best possible products at the best possible prices. )
Sorry, but I’ve struggled to come up with a polite response to this, and it’s really tough.
Your analogy doesn’t work. At all. It’s a stupid analogy. You have someone who’s bought a tablet form computer, and is trying to do reasonable stuff with it. Copying an mp3 file across is a reasonable thing to do.
Apple lock their tablets down deliberately because they want to control the revenue stream for media. Considering they’re selling the devices at a profit anyway, that’s a bit of a rich demand.
What really galls though is when people try to excuse this behaviour. Sorry, but there is no defence. I’m an apple fanboy with a nigh 30 year pedigree stretching back to the Apple 2. I have no bias against the company, quite the opposite. Unfortunately though they’ve gone from being a market leader with good products to a market leader trying to milk their position. The points the OP makes are entirely reasonable. Your attempt to ridicule his position via idiotic analogy serve only to make you look stupid.
[off topic]For a second I thought that the OP was Mac Tech was really confused for a second.[/off topic]
I use UbiDisk (free iPad app) and that lets me play quite a few video formats… It’s free and it even downloads videos from a certain major video site. 
If it helps any, at the moment I’m in a Fuck The Amazon MP3 Store mood.
I used to buy some songs from the Apple Store, but their insistence on making me sign a new 1000-page contract every time I attempted to buy a song after even a brief absence, plus their lack of discounted and free stuff made me switch to Amazon.
Amazon’s downloads now have been screwed up (apparently by their attempts to get you to default to the Cloud Player), so that every download attempt is preceded by demands that you download the Amazon downloader which you have already downloaded umpteen times, and if I try to download from the Cloud it results in more demands to download new downloader versions plus it takes forever.
<George Costanza>I HATE THE CLOUD!</GC>
Screw Amazon, and Apple too.
I’m just going to write my own music.
I remember back in the day when Apple fans insisted that products from a big cooperation like Microsoft were evil.
I guess the times are a-changing.
There’s no reason to be polite if you don’t want to - this the pit. Besides I’m about as popular around here as the white crayon so my feelings wouldn’t be hurt.
It wasn’t so much an analogy as it was a mocking of his whiny rant. I notice it wasn’t “why I hate the iPad”, no he hates the whole company because one product can’t be shoehorned to fit his special needs. And why not? Mostly because
I don’t have problems listening to podcasts on mine.
Anyway, yeah Apple controls a lot of things that would be nice if they were uncontrolled but they also spend a lot of that profit on R&D bringing us the coolest shit on the planet. In fact the coolest shit that anyone has had in the history of the planet. If the OP had spent about 10 minutes browsing the Internet he could have found out what his iPad could and couldn’t do given his paranoia.
I’m just tired of people calling ultra-high tech companies Evil just because they won’t release all their software for free. The OP is a crybaby and his complaint is a first world problem.
Oh God, I know you’re a power user, but for the sake of everyone else, keep Terminal in your dock. Two clicks is 100% more than what’s really necessary for access to the Unix file system.
If (like me) your aversion* to the Mac OS is the requirement for the mouse, then you can get into Bash with Apple-Space, T, E. Your mileage may vary, depending on what shows up in Spotlight.
(Oh, I don’t really have any real aversions to Mac OS. It’s my preference, and what I have at home. But Work is all Windows, and Alt combinations mean I rarely need the mouse. Except, recently we have been pushed Office 2010, and the only Alt-keys that work are the ones I already know :(. So I guess Windows [Office] is getting to suck for mouse haters, too.)
Seriously? :dubious: That’s why you make up fake, unique answers to the security questions, and do that every time you don’t trust a company with your answers. Shit, the MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic wants security questions from their users because of the sheer number of hacker assholes out there that take over accounts.
Me too. The proposition that a tablet isn’t a computer–and that it shouldn’t be–is strange to me. The logical idea for me is to take all these different devices and merge them into one, so I don’t have to carry around so many things. (I guess this is where ultras are heading.)
But this is also exactly why Apple is so successful. They figured out long ago that the vast majority of consumer electronic device use is more for diversion than flexibility. So with each new device they zero in on the diversions they know most people want, and make them work really well. In the process, they eliminate some other more functional things. Let’s face it: most people don’t want to do those things–most don’t even know how to. The vast majority of users just want to use social networking, watch videos, etc. As they said on the Onion–to “dick around.” (Which is not to say that you can’t do very functional things with Apple products–it’s just not their biggest selling point.) Apple figured out long ago that if you can make devices that do that effortlessly, and put it in a cool package, you can create a niche market with high cache value. And this has been the key to their success, and why they’ve become the highest-valued company on the market now. It’s their marketing innovation more than their technological innovation. (And Jobs really was at bottom a marketing genius more than anything.)
Since the introduction of the Podcast app this year, it is expected to do most podcast transactions through the app.
Most Apple users will admit to limited functionality of podcasts in iTunes.
Hating Apple for a problem they have solved (with the new app) is just being difficult… But that is a you problem.
my biggest problem with iDevices is that they seem to have been “over-simplified.” example- we were doing some Bluetooth testing at work and we were all going to use our phones to play a couple of audio files over streaming to see what kind of variability they had. since I don’t have iTunes on my work laptop, I said they could just e-mail me the files. I got the e-mail and tapped on the first (1 MB) mp3. the preview/play screen opened and started playing the file. I went back and tapped on the second (4 MB) mp3, and the preview/play screen opened and immediately disappeared. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get that file to play. Enragingly, I found these two things:
- I couldn’t download or save the files to play in the Music app
- There was no way I could find to figure out why the second file wouldn’t play. Nothing. Was it because of the file size? Was it because I was on 3G instead of Wi-Fi? Who knows!
for Android’s faults, at least on that platform I have a reasonable chance of figuring out why something isn’t working.
You suck at computers.
You should get over this. Downcast is awesome. It will make your podcast listening much easier and more enjoyable.
Amen.