Bill Gates Bans iTunes From Windows | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates Bans iTunes From Windows

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165 pointsnjrc85 comments

Doesn't this accidentally back up the 'third party frameworks lack quality' argument? iTunes for Windows is generally considered to be a lousy piece of software. Same with Safari for Windows, another piece released under the same approach.

I consider iTunes for Mac to be a lousy piece of software, too. I've found it to be a memory hog with inadequate features on both platforms. I think that most people don't complain about it on Mac because it meets their needs and they don't know any better, as most lay Windows users don't complain against Internet Explorer.

Do you know of any better music player software for OS X?

If you only need something to play music/video files, I would suggest VLC Player; I haven't found anything better. However, if you're big into organizing your music (different playlists for different moods, etc.), you might find VLC to be lacking a bit.

One of the reasons I enjoy iTunes is that I'm not big into organizing my music and playlists-- iTunes does it for me. Will VLC move my music into an organized directory and let me play an album, or shuffle through all songs from an artist or genre without me having to create playlists?

No, it won't. That's what jazzyb was getting at I believe. VLC will play anything, but it's not a music library.

Check out Ecoute. A gorgeous UI "designed to be minimal, small and pretty so it doesn't take a lot of space on your screen. Just what you need to play your library."

http://ecouteapp.com/

One problem is what are your criteria for "better"?

As a for instance, I want a music player that handles flac and ogg files and that I can access in a terminal. Low memory usage is important to me also. I use cmus on a Mac, and I like it quite a lot.

If you're interested, I'm working on a command-line music organizer:

http://code.google.com/p/beets/

It has an MPD clone player built-in, so you can use ncmpc with it if you want. Or just keep using cmus.

There's support, albiet indirectly, for flac in iTunes via Fluke. http://blowintopieces.com/fluke/

Apple's refusal to support FLAC, in favour of their own crappy rip-off (which they refuse to licence to 3rd parties) was, for me personally, the moment they jumped the shark. I feel later developments have borne this out.

I mean you can buy music from Metallica and The Beatles in FLAC format. If Metallica and The Beatles are out ahead of you on some aspect of digital music, it's time for a rethink.

made my day. Thanks

I feel as if Songbird has reached that stage. I guess it's personal preference thing, but I am really impressed with the recent Songbird releases (even though they have been infrequent).

Perhaps may I suggest using QuickSilver or google quick search box with iTunes? QuickSilver lets you add global keyboard shortcuts and oodles of quick access to iTunes without ever going to iTunes.

This is probably the thing I use Quicksilver for most - controlling iTunes without having to look at iTunes, ever. It's so convenient that I've held off replacing Quicksilver for one of its actively developed successors.

iTunes for Mac is totally adequate. One thing you're missing here is that iTunes is the only way you're able to use an iPod, and so - if we're arguing about general market behaviour - iTunes doesn't appear to be a problem for the millions of iPod users out there.

That said, I agree with OP's point about iTunes's performance in Windows. It is - quite frankly - terrible. So much so that when I switched over to OSX, I opened iTunes and marveled at how quickly it could actually do things.

iTunes for Mac is only adequate for music (a.k.a. yesterday's use case), and plenty of other players work very well for music too. In comparison, most people still don't have hard disks big enough to fit their entire movie collections, which is today's new use case for iTunes, and the only current way to push movies onto new-gen Apple devices.

I have an iPhone and enjoy it, but I've only played a movie on it once or twice in the time I've owned it for this reason. This is true of most people I know with iPhones, and it will similarly be true for iPads. It's a glaring problem that Apple's doesn't seem interested in solving; they'd rather you re-purchase every DVD as a movie from their store, and then be locked in to their platform or else lose your content.

I'm curious as to what your objection is to managing moves in iTunes?

I've got most of my DVD collection in there at this point, and I actually find it fairly pleasant.

> plenty of other players work very well for music too.

Well they work well for playback, but I've yet to find a comparable alternative to iTune's music library/organization features. You may have a point about movies and such - I tend to play them in VLC, and organize them according to folder in my external HDD.

Amusingly enough a lot of the 'default' linux music players have similar or better library/organisation features (I would prefer to use rhythmbox if it has a mac version).

I've noticed people complain about a lot of problems with iTunes on Windows that I just never see. In particular, people with much smaller libraries complaining about search and scroll performance problems. It strikes me that iTunes-on-Windows biggest problem is that it's frail.

FWIW: I've got iTunes running now; it's been up for about four hours, playing music and I did a sync of my iphone and ipad. It's bouncing between 45 and 55MB of memory [1].

[1] (library: 14,000 songs; 300 movies)

I think the point is about double standards. Not that I disagree with you.

Agreed, but any Apple software for a PC is horrendous. iTunes/Safari/Quicktime are all colossal memory hogs but worse of all they have so many hidden programs running behind the scenes that they continuously hog memory. I've seen malware infections less intrusive than a single iTunes instance.

The macs I use daily are admittedly old, G4s, but it's the same problem. When something like winamp runs so very well on old PCs you have to wonder if playing music really needs all that overhead.

All the iTunes developers spend way more time fixing bugs on Windows than on OS X. It's not that it's a lousy piece of software, it's just that, yes, generally speaking having developers writing code for a platform they don't "speak" is bad news.

While we're on the subject, iTunes could even do with being remade on OS X. It's a bit crufty and funky feeling (non-Cocoa?).

I think the crufty feeling comes from most of the App Store being implemented using a WebView and custom HTML/CSS to mimic Mac-like UI stylings. This makes it very easy for Apple engineers to update the Store but also makes the user experience a little choppy since it's not using native rendering for the interface implementation.

It is non-Cocoa, AFAIK. And 32-bit. My information might be outdated, though.

Awesome, finally a place I get to tell you guys about when I banished iTunes from my house, in a fit of rage.

Who's dumbass idea was it to put rounded corners on the iTunes window when it is maximized? What a wonderful feature, being able to close the window BEHIND iTunes, jackasses. I don't actually look for the close button, Apple, I just push my mouse forward and right, then click.

So, I push my mouse forward and right then click, then see a pop-up asking to "save changes to my document." In a split, reactionary, second I decided not to save the changes to what I thought was iTunes, not my fucking WORK.

I uninstalled iTunes from all my computers, then bought Media Monkey.

I thought this was pretty silly. Perhaps I've oversaturated with blog posts on 3.3.1.

Please, Microsoft, do this. An iTunes designed for Windows would take 90% of the irritation I have with my iPod away (and would just be a generally classy move on Apple's part—providing the best experience of their hardware, regardless of your choice of OS.)

There are plenty of other media players that work fine with Windows. Some even let you just rsync your media to the device and they figure it all out.

The only people who still use iPods are college kids and Apple fanbois.

I'm a huge Linux and Open Source fan, but my iPod Touch is the best portable music player I've ever owned. I'd say 50-75% of my coworkers use iPhones as their music players too. And we're not all college kids or fanboys.

I guess you guys don't have any music in open formats. My collection is mostly FLAC.

Why would you put FLACs on a portable device without transcoding them first? Do you have TBs of room on your player? (My collection is currently 300GB of average-quality MP3s, and growing...)

If you are fussy about audio quality, a 500kbps FLAC isn't that much bigger than a 320kbps MP3.

Transcoding takes time and more space.

I like my classical music, jazz, and noise music to be of the highest quality possible. The sound quality of most MP3s is distracting.

i can't tell with my middle of the road earbuds.

Crappy earbuds are more likely to expose flaws in lossy encodes than high-end gear.

The psychoacoustic model assumes that certain sounds will mask other sounds so you can leave them out or replace them with something that doesn't sound quite right. If like most cheap headphones you don't have a flat response then the masking sound can be too low to work as intended.

Having said that, with modern encoders it's mostly not an issue, even if you're using 90kps Vorbis created specifically for portable use. What is an issue is that you'll probably want to use the same file for portable and home listening, or you'll have got the file from someone who wanted to be on the safe side, since some songs are trickier to encode than others, so you'll end up with a 256kbps AAC file from iTunes, or 320kbps MP3. At that point the jump to FLAC compression sizes isn't particularly great and the management becomes a bigger hassle plus it allows you to transcode to various other formats and sizes as required, saving even greater space for listening in noisy environments like cars, trains, buses etc.

Do you carry a headphone amp with you? Otherwise, the quality of your MP3s is the least of your problems.

The analog output is probably fine for high-impedance headphones, like DT-880s or the ER-4S.

Why wouldn't I? Disks, even flash-based ones, are cheap when you're talking about storing music.

FLACs use less battery than lossy codecs (at least on flash based devices, since the extra reads don't cause a disk to spin up). It's a tradeoff of course, but if you've got the space (and this is only going to increase) and don't need instant access to a giant music collection then it's worth considering, particularly if it lets you skip a transcode step.

yes. Because i'd totally trade space (cheap, because my phone supports microSD) for battery live

Ok, I'll bite and humor the author.

The reason Microsoft can't do this is because Windows penetration is absurdly high- something in the mid 90%s of all desktop computers. Any action like this would be followed by immediate litigation from competitors crying monopoly.

The reason Apple can get away with this is because contrary to what you would believe from reading the HN front page, apple's penetration in the cell phone market is minute and not a monopoly.

edit: for the person that said apple smartphone market share is 88%, its 14% worldwide, I don't know where you got your figures though you claim wikipedia:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/23/smartphone-iphone-sales-200...

Having a stranglehold of 95% on an entire industry (desktop pcs) is very different than owning 14% of a subset of an industry (mobile phones in general)

Also, Windows doesn't have an App Store. How would Gates ban anything from the Windows platform?

Also, Bill Gates doesn't run Microsoft anymore.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about that: the Pentavirate is now in charge. A secret society of the five wealthiest people in the world, known as The Pentavirate, who run everything in the world, including Microsoft, and meet tri-annually at a secret country mansion in Colorado, known as The Meadows. The Queen, The Vatican, The Gettys, The Rothschilds, and Colonel Sanders before he went tits up.

Oh, I hate the colonel, with his wee beady eyes...

Malicious software removal tool?

Ironically, Windows XP Tablet has become the platform on which I run my FOSS software on a tablet.

It is a thought experiment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_experiment

A pretty lousy one. People are just going to focus on the obvious logical problems of making this comparison.

Thought experiments generally have the expectation that you don't quibble with them; Maxwell's demon doesn't make sense because demonic spirits don't exist, but that's not the point of the exercise.

Hm. I thought a thought experiment required some thought on the part of the person proposing it.

I keep trying to explain apple aren't in the cellphone business. Do you consider the ipod touch, which is outselling the iphone now, a smartphone? What about the ipad?

Apple are in the mobile computing with a centralised app store business. And according to my calculations (based off data from wikipedia) they have ~88% of the market.

Yes, the presence of the ipad is really hindering the slew of android tablets we are going to see this year.

There is a very good reason as to why Apple has the market share it does. Apple makes the market. Once it's been shown to be profitable, others then join the market, but Apple has used it's first mover advantage very well to create and domante a market.

It wasn't the first to make an mp3 player, but it remade the market. It wasn't the first to have a smartphone, but it remade that market too. In each case, they increased consumer choice by drastically advancing the state of the art. Look at the zune now. Look at the nexus one, the new blackberries. Would those even be here if it weren't for the iPod and iPhone?

So, they may have a big share of the market (as you define it), but they are hardly a monopoly force.

Apple is definitely not "minute" in the smartphone market, although obviously how you define the market is key.

It is an interesting thought experiment to think about what would happen if the iPhone OS did start to head up in market share (e.g. if Apple actually released iPhone minis or something of the sort). As they approached dominance, there would be a whole number of things that they all of a sudden couldn't do. Blocking Palm from iTunes, exclusive App Store, this restriction, etc. Strategically if they started to head towards large market share it might even make sense to slow it down to preserve their freedom to operate.

They'd just raise prices.

The important thing is it'd fuck Apple completely while it drags through the courts. It's a shame Adobe, Google, Novell, Unity etc aren't in a position to do anything about it.

>> Apple MUST use native windows controllers such as our in built Windowing system and scroll objects.

... except that the Windows Presentation Framework (the successor to Windows Forms) does allow you to completely redesign the chrome and "scroll objects."

…and pretty much every major application on Windows does this. Firefox, Chrome, iTunes, and even - no, ESPECIALLY - Microsoft's software, like Office and Internet Explorer, all do their own custom UI, custom behaviours. With Windows Vista, you could have a dozen different looks and behaviours for windows, using only Microsoft software.

I get the point they're making, but you know what? Mac users already get that point. Cross-platform toolkits that have targeted Mac OS X have always been shit. They don't look right, they don't work right. This goes for everything I've ever used, from Java to Firefox (which was far, FAR worse pre-3.0, before Cocoa controls were added).

From everything I've heard, iTunes on Windows is shit. Doesn't this make the same point Apple is making?

Good idea, not-so-great execution. I think this would have been better if the author wrote in a more serious tone.

I think the point is that if you want to, you can probably conjure a logical-sounding, professional explanation for just about any 'evil' action by a company. From their standpoint, when isn't it logical to do something that hurts the competition?

I'm not saying the explanation John Gruber came up with (and was later reaffirmed by Steve Jobs) is false. I just don't think it makes Apple's actions much easier to stomach.

This would actually make iTunes for Windows much better.

How about this as a better thought experiment/reality:

Some Linux distro makers refuse to include closed source drivers because they don't pass their idealogical purity tests. It's no good for the end user in the short term because it makes setting up a fully functional Linux machine more difficult. Some people accept this because they believe ultimately open source drivers are better. A company like NVIDIA spends some money to develop these drivers yet they are denied inclusion into most distributions out of the box solely for idealogical reasons -- a choice made by a relatively small group of people who control how the distributions are packaged.

Uhmm...except for I can still install the nvidia stuff if I want to. This sounds exactly like what everyone is advocating.

Allow people to install rejected apps, just make it tiny bit more difficult.

  Allow people to install rejected apps, just make it tiny bit more difficult.

I'd argue they already have. Jailbreaking the iPhone is trivial enough that anyone can do so if they desire rejected or non-AppStore applications.

Didn't Apple argue this was illegal under the DMCA?

http://www.macnn.com/articles/09/02/13/apple.jailbreaking.st...

I'm not sure breaking the law fits my definition of 'trivial'.

Not exactly, they argued that the arguments the EFF put forth for carving out an exception for jail-breaking did not meet the legal requirements for carving out such an exception.

The nature of that ideology makes it possible for you(or anyone) to make a distribution with closed drivers and even sell it, if the driver developers allow that. No one is protecting the keys to the Linux kingdom, you could be one of those merciless tyrants if you really want to.

I never would have thought of making that parallel. Maybe because Windows PCs don't have the limited interaction/input options of a touchscreen phone, nor the limited system resources, making this an apples to oranges comparison?

Also, like others have said, if Microsoft did this, it probably wouldn't be a bad thing. Apple's not going to lose the Windows iPod/iPhone market, so they would capitulate, and we would likely end up with a much better Windows version of iTunes. Awesome.

Yeah....NO

This guy's a dumb-ass. At least use Ballmer so that there's some reality to the satire.

I would love to downvote this. The title is misleading. You find out it's a thought experiment only at the end of the page.

Unless of course you use common sense in which case you would have realized it before even visiting the site.

Common sense? That's being challenged everyday by news you read on this site.

Reading the comments on this page would lead you to think that many believe the headline.

What I mean by "common sense being challenged" is that the recent actions of Apple do not seem to make "common sense" so I'm willing to believe that Bill Gates WOULD ban iTunes. So nothing is surprising anymore. But please, vote me down just for being frustrated by the misleading headline and then all these comments that seem to reflect people's belief in it. This is not reddit or slashdot. There is no way to mark a comment as being "Funny".

I realized my calling in life was to sell hand-knitted red, white & blue beer koozies. Alas, Walmart won't carry them in their store. Can I get some blogger outrage over here?

I'm pretty tired of this analogy. It doesn't even make sense! Of course Walmart can decide what to carry in its stores. It owns the store, and the land on which it's built (presumably). The problem is that Apple continues to "own" part of your device even after you've bought it! If I'm Walmart, and I buy some land from XYZ realty to put a store up, I don't have to take orders from XYZ realty about what I can and can't put in my store, or about how I have to produce the goods I want to sell! Now that's a proper analogy.

Why do you equate the brick-and-mortar store to the device - rather than to, say, the AppStore? Apple doesn't continue to own my device, but it does continue to own its store.

But that's exactly what i did, isn't it? I suggested the app store is like the brick and mortar store. And the device is like the land the store is built on. Why does the owner of the land continue to own the store?

I would say that the land would equate to the server farms. I don't see how the device is analogous to it.

No one is forcing you to upgrade your iPhone. If you don't want iPhone OS4 apps and the licensing garbage that entails, then don't use it. Your phone will still have the same functionality as before. It's not like apple is taking away a feature that phones currently have. It's more like walmart opening a brand new store right next to an existing store. Something like an elite walmart (?) and the products in that section were all produced without sweatshop labor. You could still shop at the old store and get the same stuff. Or you could shop at the newer elite walmart next to the old one and get new shinier stuff.

My understanding was that apple could remove an app remotely at any time. Is this true?

Yes, but they never have, even for apps they've removed from the store for violating their ToS. And for what it's worth, they've stated that they will only do that in case an actively malicious app somehow ends up on the store in the first place.

Yes, of course! Every platform is exactly the same, and any statement that applies to one also applies to all the others in exactly the same way!

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