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Comment by clapinton | Hacker News Reader

Remember the U2 fiasco, when Apple decided to break into your computer and push their new album through iTunes? It seems like whenever Apple decides to take control of your files, shit happens.

Back in the day, I tried to use iTunes for a while when I bought my iPod. One of the first things that it asked me was to take control of my music, as it would reorganize it by itself. I agreed, but tested it first with a small sample. When I saw the mess it had done to the way I organized my music, specially with the files' names, I backed out of the auto-organize option and preached heavily against it to everyone I knew.

I learned my lesson: never let whatever service control your files. And always, ALWAYS have backup. Remember: The answer to life, the universe and how many backups you should keep of your stuff is 42.

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While the U2 fiasco was a bad move, I don't think that "break into your computer" is a fair characterization of what they did. They added it to your available downloads and, depending on your sync settings, it was downloaded to devices. I'm not a huge fan of having my media managed by the companies I buy hardware from, but when I found a user's manual document on my Kindle I didn't consider it 'getting hacked' by them.

Fair enough. "break into your computer" does sound like getting hacked by them, which wasn't technically true, at least from what I know. Thanks for pointing that out.

A more appropriate analogy than a user guide would be finding Fifty Shades of Grey or Harry Potter on your kindle one day, because Amazon did a deal and decided you should have it, or perhaps having your copy of 1984 erased because of copyright violations. ++ungood.

A user manual is expected on a new device, having media on your device added and deleted by a corporation on their whim is not so pleasant, mostly because it makes their view of your true relation to them apparent.

Apple fundamentally does not understand software. A shame, as the software, really, was their original special sauce with the Mac 128k and beyond.

Today, however, the company really doesn't understand how to make, maintain, or market software. It sees software as a way to spread their control of their hardware further into your life. It's going to be the death of Apple, mark my words.

Out of all the consumer electronics companies, Apple makes the best software.

(Edit: This is not a compliment)

I beg to differ.

Tell that to the author of this post

It's pretty clear that iTunes is one of the worst pieces of software available on Mac or Windows. It certainly makes the top 10.

One of the worst widely distributed and used pieces of software. There are many, many, crappies, buggier, pieces of software out there; it's just that nobody has to use them.

Sad to say, the bar is so low that I agree -- they make the least terrible software of a consumer electronics company.

It's how I've felt for decades as a Mac user: boy they suck, but they suck less than any of the (desktop) alternatives.

(edit: I see you updated your post to clarify -- now this is redundant.)

And it wants you to be a consumer badly. The case described here, is of a producer/artist loosing unique works due to a consumer software rationale, that assumes that all in the reach of the software is not yours and thereby at whims of the license givers/maintainers.

Also Apple only begrudgingly supports Enterprise customers with their iDevices. It seems like it should be a huge opportunity for Microsoft to make a dent with their mobile platform but they decided to focus on the consumer market as well.

I worked with a Google engineer once and he offered me advice as I was considering buying a new phone, namely the HTC One: "Phone manufacturers know how to make hardware. Google knows how to make software. When you marry the two with both knowing their place in the world, things work out. When one tries to make what the other does, you get crappy stuff on top of your system. Stick to vanilla Android, man."

Having said that, I see Apple more as a hardware manufacturer than as a software one. You don't hear Jony Ive and his seductive British accent passionately talking about iOS or OSX as many times as he does about new hardware. It doesn't see software in the same way it sees hardware.

Still, I can't complain about Apple offering free OSX upgrades, including major ones, for quite some time now and also managing to maintain backward compatibility for a rather large span of devices (my early 2011 MBP still flows nicely with OSX El Cap).

You're lucky El Capitan works for you.

Usually with iPhone/iPod Video upgrades, getting the latest version of iOS with an older device can significantly degrade performance. (And I'm sure it's the same with iPads.)

At least on a Macbook you can reinstall the operating system, but an iPhone 4 is stuck like that.

> Usually with iPhone/iPod Video upgrades, getting the latest version of iOS with an older device can significantly degrade performance.

Is this claim based on anecdotal evidence or some other source?

Anecdotal. But literally everyone I know says this including me.

There was a class action lawsuit filed just a few months after an upgrade was released:

http://mashable.com/2015/12/31/iphone-4s-ios-9-lawsuit/#l.Zf...

Edit: I'm not sure if this has been fixed with the later iOS 9 versions.

Probably anecdotal, but I've had the same experience.

It affects iPad, too.

My HTC One has gotten dreadfully slower since release from Android releases. I don't think it's exclusive to iPhones - in fact I think android phones are more prone to it.

I guess I'm also lucky to have the latest 6.0.1 on my Nexus 5 running smoothly. Yes, it did get a bit slower after some updates, enough for me to notice it, but considering it shipped with 4.4, I'm still pretty happy with it.

But you're right: it's definitely not exclusive to iPhones. Planned obsolescence, some would argue.

El Crapitan has so many problems it's ridiculous. They broke not only all kinds of Open Source software with their overly paranoid system protection, but also a bunch of hardware by messing up the USB drivers. There are now tons of musical instruments, Arduinos, and other USB devices that don't work with El Crapitan. Apple's response was: ... there was no response.

Us hardware manufacturers are still looking for a fix. Our customers are angry at us and blaming us, and we can't do anything. There's no way for our customers to even tell Apple what's wrong, either.

USB Overdrive is as close as you'll get to a solution. This is the company that can't even make iTunes usable with 16 years of work.

Maybe Apple should hire one of the many software engineers and UI designers who are visionary in the same way that Ive is in hardware.

If they did, they'd quit shortly after learning that, if they wanted to move around inside Apple, like to a different group, they have to interview and be evaluated just like an outsider. Apple is so secretive, people cannot even change groups.

This is very difficult.

If you’re a great software designer, you probably want to work for a company that says, “Software is in our DNA.” A company where the CEO gets up on their hind legs at every all-hands meeting and announces “Our success depends upon shipping the world’s greatest software designs.”

Why would you want to go work for a company where at every such all-hands, you have to sit through executive after executive talking about their hardware logistics prowess, and their hardware design prowess, and their hardware margins numbers, and so on?

It would be the same thing going to work at Google. Here you are, the Jony Ive of software design, being told that the stock price depends upon the math that drives ad click-through.

I recall a softare designer few years back publicly rage-quitting Google because Google didn’t believe in design, they wanted to A/B test everything in the belief that you could hill-climb to a good-enough result. It was almost as if they believed that human designers subtracted from design rather than created it.

Whether you agree or disagree, why go to work at a company that thinks what you do is a distraction or even an outright harm to their main product?

> I recall a softare designer few years back publicly rage-quitting Google because they didn’t believe in design, they wanted to A/B test everything. It was almost as if they believed that human designers subtracted from design.

I am convinced that an A/B testing algorithm error is responsible for Google Maps.

I know Google have scads of data about how people use maps. I can't understand how they get from all that data to the product which can be incredibly frustrating to use.

A/B testing data is only as good as the samples provided. They may have done wonderful A/B testing, but that the alternative designs were just so bad that the current design version made it through ;)

A/B testing is, fundamentally, hill-climbing. A/B testing will select the fastest horse, but never the strange wheeled box belching noxious fumes.

You're thinking of Doug Bowman. http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html

Yes, it's difficult. It's less that Apple needs to hire a famous designer and more that it has to give a designer (there are many badasses in-house) serious authority. Apple has to realize it's lost the software leadership that it used to take pride in for that to happen.

Defense in depth is a good thing as well. In my case, the first line of defense would be ZFS snapshots on my homebuilt NAS. If malware scrozzles my NAS, a rollback to the last snapshot can be a quick way to fix it.

Other systems get backed up to the NAS, and the NAS drives are periodically backed up onto a second ZFS pool that is normally kept physically offline.

> Remember: The answer to life, the universe and how many backups you should keep of your stuff is 42.

EDIT: (incomplete submission)

Oh, of course, great idea! I thought 4 was enough!

I've survived for 20 years now with zero backups (across at least 10 mechanical hard drives, some of them Seagate) and have never lost data.

“There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.”

Look Mum(Mom) No Hands!

I've survived for 48 years eating too much steak, drinking too much beer, and exercising too little. In your opinion, does this give us useful information that tells us that I should keep doing these things, because obviously, I will live forever?

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