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Comment by mrkrabo | Hacker News Reader

>When the iPod came out, I never understood why I couldn't just drag the music files directly onto the device and I had to get iTunes and use iTune's tedious interface.

Because MTP is utter rubbish.

Really, people complain about iTunes? It's never failed me as slow as it is. Try using MTP...

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The iPod mounted as a perfectly-functional Firewire disk, yet you still had to use iTunes to put music on it for it to be playable on the device. (It was filed away in obfuscated filenames...)

USB sticks became popular more than a decade ago, and not once have I had one fail to copy or remove a file by dragging and dropping.

NO one said anything about MTP. Copying files > anything.

Copying files... how? Emulating a FAT32 disk? That sucks. exFAT? Patents. MTP? Sucks. So how?

Ethernet over USB, FTP/SCP/SMB?

What's wrong with emulating a FAT32 disk?

I mean, the expected workflow is: I hook up the device to the computer, it shows up as a storage medium in my system. I can move files between the device and my computer as if it was an external disk or USB drive.

Anything on top of that is designed to be annoying.

FAT32 is a terribly outdated filesystem and should just not be used today, period. The filesize and name restrictions are awful. Mrkrabo does have a point.

The question about FAT32 was honest; thanks for the explanation. The rest of the comment (presenting storage in a normal, non-surprising way) is separate, and still stands.

Yeah, that's what irks me the most about iOS. Their whole idea of "the filesystem is an outdated concept" just never worked out and they refuse to give up on it. The greatest lie is that your iPad Pro can replace a PC, but you can't easily copy files from and to a flash drive. In the meantime, my wife's Surface accepts USB hardware just fine and she doesn't have to rely on awkward workarounds to get things done.

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