S'Mac in the Face

My disdain for all things Mac is well-documented. Although I always have problems with mine at work, this week has been particularly frustrating with InDesign and InCopy crashing every half-hour. (My loud cursing would probably have gotten me fired anywhere else, but everyone else working on the Macs in my section is yelling too, so I kind of blend in.) But this isn't even about that. As regular readers know, Michael (sweetly) got me an iPod for Christmas 2005. It died after 10 uses and Apple promptly sent me a new one. But even though I only travel three stops on the subway with it, every time I dare to use it something goes wrong. Each time, I've ended up bringing it home and putting it on the speaker-station my mom got me and it seems to be working fine again, so I convince myself that the problem is me (I hadn't charged it enough, I hit the wrong buttons, etc.). So Michael and I leave for Rome last month and I make sure my iPod is fully charged (the little green battery indicator assured me I was good). I ended up reading and sleeping on the plane ride there, so I didn't pull out my iPod until five days later on the way home. Lo and behold, it's completely dead. The screen lights up and hieroglyphics appear for a second and then BAM! Nothing. Back when I was "slumming it" I could bring my portable CD player and listen to as many CDs as I wanted. If the batteries died I always made sure I had some backups. For reasons that are unclear, Michael's older iPod was working fine even on the way home, but when I asked an iPod enthusiast at work if he had any idea what was going on with mine (did I get another lemon?) he said that the batteries frequently lose their charge even if you don't play it. HUH??? Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of having an MP3 player with you on a trip? I don't carry around a computer with me (can you imagine?) and even if I had had the station, the plugs are different in Europe, so I still wouldn't have been able to play it. Again: when it comes to Mac products, I just don't get

iConfused

Being the music purist that I am, I've never bought anything off of iTunes before. I like having the artwork, the disc, the whole thing in my possession. (Despite what you've heard, 80 percent of music sold is still on compact discs, so I know I'm not alone.) Nonetheless, I was aware of the litigation going on in Europe and elsewhere regarding songs purchased from Apple not being compatible on other players. I wasn't entirely sure how that manifested itself, but I figured there had to be a reason why people were calling it an antitrust violation, monopoly, etc.

Skip ahead to Christmas 2006. My brother Bill got me an iTunes gift card as one of my presents. After spending nine hours trying to figure out how to redeem it (that's another post, but let it suffice to say that these Apple shysters have deliberately printed instructions on the card that do not correctly tell you how to retrieve your prepaid songs, which I believe is an act of fraud in and of itself), I finally was able to figure out how to "purchase" something.

As regular readers know -- and people who have read this far now know -- I'm a PC person. I have an extensive collection of music in my Windows Media Player, so that is my preferred place to play my music. So just to test the whole thing, I burned a CD in iTunes of my newly purchased song (an obscure Tracey Thorn track from 1982 called "Goodbye Joe") and then ripped it into my Windows Media Player. Voila! Incompatibility solved. Admittedly this sounds cumbersome but it could be done in bulk and it's really no different from what I go through when I want to put my WMA songs on my iPod (I have to convert them to the AAC format).

So either I'm missing something or I'm back to not understanding what all the fuss is about with people saying songs bought in iTunes can only be played in iTunes. It's not true.