Dear Steve
You know what I really want from your new service, that's meant to keep the mobile and not so mobile life in order? I want a way to keep all my music files in synch across my home and work machines. Trying to remember and then copy up to .Mac the individual music files that I bought (from iTunes I might add) on one computer or the other, then download and import, is slowly driving me crazy. And that's before I even get into the "is it on my computers hard drive, or on the connected external hard drive" conversation - you need to work out a suitable Apple easy and it works solution for that too so I don't get duplicate tracks, and can easily "checkout" files from my main library so they're on my hard disk when I hit the road.
Baby steps first - how about just keeping track of the music I bought on iTunes and allowing me to download it again at some point in the future if it's not already on my machine? Amazon let me do this with books I bought for my Kindle. And the copyright protection still exists - the files still need to be ran on the machines I've authorized, so it's not like I can do something naughty with it. Please Steve. You normally answer my (gadget inspired) prayers. Don't let me down now.
posted by Aaron at
12:02 PM
2 Comments:
Dear Mr. Patterson.
Thank you for your kinds words. At Apple, we always appreciate feedback from our valued customers. And we sometimes also appreciate feedback from customers like you. This is one of those occasions, and I want to take this opportunity to reiterate on behalf of the board and of our dedicated team of creative and wonderful employees just how much we appreciate *your* feedback.
A lot.
Now, to business. We have worked hard to make iTunes the lumbering unstable behemoth it has become. This is of course because we need to make it cross-platform to run on our own amazing operating system, OS X, and on Windows. Not just one flavour of Windows either, but Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 2000... I could go on, but I'll get my secretary to do that for me because I'm very busy. Furthermore, we find that record labels are more keen to talk with us about allowing us to distribute their music if we make it difficult to do what the client wants. After all, that fits in with the business models that the music industry has adopted for the past 40 years, and we are humbly mere newcomers to the game.
I should point out that just last week, a customer of ours (a Mr. Lycett of the Big Apple) lost all their data on their hard-drive when it destroyed itself in a fit. He had paid for extended Apple care and so we took his machine and confirmed that it was broken. As a result we let him re-download all 1,278 songs he had purchsed from us once we'd replaced his hard-drive. Now, that is only possible to do because we own the machine, the software, the distribution channel, and maintenance. However, it also means that we're able to completely ignore your pleas and make you work the way we decide. After all, we are the experts. You are a mere individual or, as we like to call you, profit source.
iTunes would of course be much better if we made it more responsive, or allowed you to move your whole library without consoldiating it first to our own internal naming scheme, or allowed a user-defined naming scheme. It would be awesome, wouldn't it, if you could be playing a song and build a playlist off that to play once the song was over, like the Now Playing list on the old iPods? It would (and I'm chuckling away at the thought of this)... it would be great if you could do that on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Oh, my sides. But we call that nostalgia. You don't need that functionality any more. No, you don't. It would be brilliant if you could annotate a song, or give it a rating on your iPod shuffle, or flag it so that you could go back and see what it was once you've played it blind from our random set of songs we put on there, but we make our stuff super user-friendly enough, and we know what's good for you.
However, we're too busy to do all that, as I mentioned.
Remember, it's MobileMe, not MobileYou.
Kind regards, and please keep on Appling.
Steve "Mr. Jobs To You" Jobs.
Thanks Mr Jobs. Glad you're (kindof) listening
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