Mac OS X mistakes and malfeatures | Hacker News Reader

Mac OS X mistakes and malfeatures

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7 pointstjr17 comments

Broken down, the article really only talks about two different things:

- iTunes updates that either stopped 3rd parties from accessing the iTunes Music Store, or only allowed iTunes libraries running current DRM versions to play DRMed music.

- A single quicktime update (7.4) that broke export functionality of AfterEffects. This was fixed in the very next update (7.4.1 [1]).

Using these two (three if you count iTunes as two) examples under the headline "Mac OS X mistakes and malfeatures" is disingenuous at best.

[1]http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1345330...

> - iTunes updates that [...] only allowed iTunes libraries running current DRM versions to play DRMed music.

To put a finer point on it, "iTunes updates which modified the store communications protocols and/or keystore format in non-backwards-compatible ways". The purpose of these updates was specifically to disable applications which bypassed DRM restrictions -- which I strongly suspect that Apple is contractually bound to do.

This seems to be mostly about iTunes and a little about quicktime. Hardly anything about problems in the core of OS X itself.

Aaaaand this is why I don't take the Free Software Foundation seriously anymore.

I have said in speeches that Apple could forcibly impose software changes in Mac OS X, just as Microsoft can with Windows. I heard this in the Mac community, but there is no published information that confirms it, and I now believe that I was misinformed.

Ah, yes, that devious Mac community, always tricking people into making counterfactual statements. Stay classy, RMS.

"Stay classy, RMS."

Well, at least the retraction is reasonably classy.

This would be much better titled "iTunes and Quicktime mistakes and malfeatures". It has many valid points--none of which have to do with OS X.

Honestly, you can't separate iTunes and Quicktime from OS X. In the general sense of it, OS X is as much an ecosystem as anything else. In that ecosystem, iTunes and Quicktime are extremely important. Everything Apple does now runs through iTunes, it's central to the experience. And the underlying technology behind quicktime powers much of what you see on the screen when using a mac. These things ship with the OS, and it's taken for granted that all users have (and almost all use) them.

Neither iTunes nor Quicktime are anything like IE was alleged to be in the '90s. You can work on a Mac system just fine without using DRM-tainted Quicktime code or ever launching iTunes. Everything Apple does does not run through iTunes, and iTunes is not central to the experience.

You're confusing the weirdness of managing a smartphone contacts database through a "Tunes" application with, um, an operating system.

Webkit is far more important to OS X than iTunes is; note that Webkit has also begun to devour iTunes.

I'm not making a technical claim. I know what an operating system is. I'm making a claim about general mac users.

I don't know a single person (even amongst the techies) who has uninstalled iTunes from their mac. I know few people who don't use it every single day. If you use an iPhone, or an iPod, you use iTunes. There is no supported alternative. There isn't even a widely used alternative for just playing music on the mac.

On another level, Snow Leopard, the operating system Apple is shipping, is not just about Mac OS X proper. iTunes ships with Snow Leopard, along with probably a hundred other applications. They come installed. They are part of the product. And to the vast majority of the computer using population, there is no distinction between those two things.

I'm sorry, but your argument that iTunes is "central" to the OS X experience is totally unconvincing. The logic you're employing here implies that Grapher.app is also central to the experience.

If you're not playing music and you don't own an iPhone, you simply don't ever run iTunes. On the other hand, there's probably no Macbook use case that avoids Safari, Finder, and either MS Office or Pages.app.

But there's certainly nothing requiring you to use them on the mac. And you don't need to have anything to do with the features he mentions. Use mpd/theremin/vlc/etc etc. And simply don't buy DRMed files in the first place. You can certainly just trash both Quicktime and iTunes from your Applications folder without deleteriously affecting the OS, except in so far as you actually wanted to use one of the two.

To be fair, QuickTime is used on a widespread basis as an audio/video manipulation library -- it's rather more than a player. However, the DRM-handling components are completely inert unless you're specifically working with protected media files.

iTunes, on the other hand, can be disposed of entirely. There are a few isolated hooks into it (the "Media" section of the Open dialog, for instance), but certainly nothing essential.

I think everyone is aware OSX is closed source software. Most don't care because the open source software community has yet to provide any high quality alternative platform that meets the needs of the broader computer market. Very few people outside of the tech community are going to switch to less functional alternatives on the basis of a political statement. Most people can't even be bothered to vote in our real life elections. OSS can win on functionality, price, availability, customizability, etc but it will always lose on politics an zealotry.

Huge chunks of core OS X code are in fact open source, including several of the most important bits (xnu, webkit).

It should be noted that much of what is open source is that way because it was already open source when Apple started using it. And much of that remains open source for legal reasons, not because Apple cares about open source.

They just open sourced Grand Central Dispatch. They've deliberately chosen to work with open-source projects instead of in-house alternatives --- for instance, Konquerer and LLVM. It's a stretch to say they don't care about open source.

Open source clearly isn't their priority, but then, I'm glad of that, and happy not to be running Linux.

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