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Comment by oldschooltaper | Hacker News Reader

Precisely. Apple is all about hoop jumping.

Remember your first iPod?

Chances are you were forced to use something called iTunes. Now people do not think twice about iTunes.

But back then there was just no sensible reason, from the user's perspective, not to let a user add/remove music from an iPod without jumping through an additional hoop. People had to spend countless hours deciphering the protocol in order to build programs that could do what iTunes did: add/remove music.

Out of the box, the iPod was literally unusable without first installing some Apple software.

No matter how wonderful the design of an Apple device, the hoop jumping just becomes increasingly tiresome. I'm too tired to do the Apple dance.

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The alternative at the time was to buy an mp3 player with no way for normal people to load or buy music. It's precisely because of the lack of hoop jumping that iPod took off. Don't confuse the customer experience with the developer experience. Apple has always considered ease of use for end users a top priority and ease of use for programmers to be a distant nth.

What if a user is also a developer, or vice versa?

Dragging something onto a removable disk is hoop jumping?

The hoop is not using the software. The hoop is having to install the software.

Why can't the iPod work without iTunes? (It can, but only with a lot of work.)

IIRC correctly most of the older MP3 players didn't need any software beyond what was built into Windows. Of course this was the era of Windows 95/98 so how well that worked overall it's difficult to say.

And most of the current mp3 players, as far as I know. iPods are the broken ones.

Whoah there, iTunes is not ease of use. I had an MP3 player before the iPod was ever relased and it was most definitely easier to load music onto.

I had an MP3 player before the iPod as well. It was a 64MB Rio and it held ~10 songs.

The thing was iTunes wasn't designed to be a music loader, it's a music manager. This became evident when they introduced smart playlists.

A few of my friends had Nomads, they were large, heavy and the UI was archaic in comparison.

Back in the day you install iTunes, stick a cd in your computer, iTunes recognizes the cd, rips it, names the tracks, loads it onto your iPod.

This is back when you had to figure out which Mp3 encoder you wanted to use.

When iTunes came out, there was no way to buy music with it either. It was that way for several years.

Adding to that, when iTunes came out, most people didn't put any thought into ID3 tags. When they imported their music, their library became one big mess.

So much for ease of use for end users.

Windows support was not immediate either. It took some time. I used to use a program written by a student at Williams College. I forget the name. It was more simple and faster than iTunes. Then for a while I used a Perl script. I must admit, in retrospect, Apple knew what they were doing. I just couldn't see the point in iTunes. I doubted whether their $1/song "music store", and forcing users to use it by forcing them to install iTunes, would ever fly.

No matter how much you might try to excuse it, there is no greater user friendliness than a device simply identifying as data storage to the OS. It's ridiculous to have to use a separate program when you could just use your file manager.

That's a consequence of cutting deals with the music industry. Apple had to block users using their iPods as devices for copying music around to enable the iTunes store to work. There are all kinds of trade off in iTunes design, but in the end it's the only significant end to end solution out there, even after all this time. (Kindle Fire is close.)

Oh and anything that involves the file system is not friendly for a surprisingly huge number of users.

>Oh and anything that involves the file system is not friendly for a surprisingly huge number of users.

"User friendliness" in this case also includes developers, who could easily write a program that interacts with the device. For example, any media player could be used to synchronize music (if it supports that feature).

s/protocol/database format/

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