The end of the world's infamous bloatware (iTunes) is nigh!

[VK3DRB]

But wait! There is one piece of bloatware bigger than iTunes: Labview device drivers. Develop a simple Labview application that reads from the serial port and you have to load >100MB of device drivers... for a blooming serial port, because they force you to load almost every device driver for every NI DAQ card! One workaround is to write a DLL in C# and use .NET for sending/receiving data to the serial port.

I would like to see a T-Shirt saying:

"I love Edlin" on the front.
"I love iTunes" on the back.

[HighVoltage]

I was so fed up with iTunes when I wanted to switch from an iPhone 6 to an iPhone 7 (backup and restore) and after hours of frustrating failures, I got rid of a brand new iPhone 7 and promised myself to never use iTunes again.

This used to be a simple task but when the versions of iTunes do not match versions of iOS on one phone or the other it is horrible to say the least. And I really tried hard.

At the end I just gave all my Apple stuff away!
Never again!

[Brumby]

My first exposure to the Apple ecosystem was the iPhone 4.

Despite not having any interest in all the "feature and benefits" offered with iTunes, I HAD to install it in order to enable my brand new phone.  It could not be done any other way.  This went against the grain so much I dare not even try to express my displeasure.

At the end I just gave all my Apple stuff away!
Never again!

Same here.  I sent it all to Dave in the hope it might help with the 121GW App development, but I believe it's OS was too old.  I'm still happy it's gone.

[MrMobodies]

There was a lovely little tool I used that worked until a release in late 2017.

It was called Share4Port and you can bind a sound card over the network and it will appear on Itunes as a speaker and you could also record from it.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/shairport4w/

It was very handy until that release and I read they were trying crack down and none Apple Airplay or certified stuff so it would no appear in the list of speakers.

When it stopped doing that it became all bloat to me.

[tooki]

It made sense if you look at the development of iTunes and the iPod. It began as a music player, then they added video to it. There was no streaming video back then. (Youtube hadn’t even been invented!)

Youtube was founded in February 2005, while the video version of the iPod was first released in October 2005. I recall there was even a "Youtube edition" iPod with a red front. Watching videos on a 2.5" screen was really just a novelty, however.

Oops, you’re right, youtube predates iTunes/iPod video slightly. But it certainly wasn’t the phenomenon it is now. (Remember the trouble many slow computers and internet connections had playing it?) But no doubt if Apple released iTunes video in May 2005, then it had been under development for a while before that.

Anyhow, the red and black iPod wasn’t a YouTube edition, it was the U2 special edition, as in the band, with whom Jobs was chummy. (YouTube and U2 may sound only one consonant apart, but they’re worlds apart otherwise! :p)

And while watching videos on them wasn’t anything likely to replace your TV, it did get used plenty for travel, watching on the bus home, etc.

Regardless, my point still stands: the integration of video into iTunes made total sense in the context of the time when it was done. It’s easy to say in hindsight how we’d do things differently, but that doesn’t make the decisions wrong at the time they were made!

[tooki]

My first exposure to the Apple ecosystem was the iPhone 4.

Despite not having any interest in all the "feature and benefits" offered with iTunes, I HAD to install it in order to enable my brand new phone.  It could not be done any other way.  This went against the grain so much I dare not even try to express my displeasure.

And that was the last model to be that way. The 4S (and iOS 5) introduced the ability for the phone to self-activate.

I’m surprised the iTunes activation requirement stuck around as long as it did. It made sense with the original iPhone, which used a super elegant setup within iTunes that not only activated the phone, but set up the then-new unlimited data plan with AT&T, but once they eliminated the data plan activation within iTunes, I don’t know why iTunes activation stuck around. (The only thing I can surmise is that it had to do with how the SIM lock was applied, insofar as it seemed that the phone was “born” or restored completely locked, and activation configured the appropriate SIM lock, according to Apple’s activation database, and somehow shoved this into the baseband firmware. So perhaps the early firmware didn’t have the ability to self-update, thus requiring it to be done externally? This is all pure speculation on my part.)

[james_s]

I really liked my iPhone 4, iOS 6 was so slick and polished, IMO it was the pinnacle of iOS development and nothing since has worked nearly as well. Unfortunately the hardware just got too slow for the modern world, and it had only 8GB of memory so I was constantly dealing with no space.

My current iPhone SE is very nice hardware but the OS is crap. It has iOS 10 which is the last to support 32 bit apps, that's another thing that really irks me, about half the apps I use are 32 bit and have never been updated or had suitable equivalents made. In removing support for 32 bit apps Apple is attempting to forcefully take away functionality from me, things that are already working. Even after blocking their update server the OS update still manages to download like a virus behind my back and I have to be careful to check frequently and delete it when it does. iOS 10 is incredibly buggy compared to 6, my reminders don't work reliably at all and never have, in 6 they worked flawlessly and I relied on them heavily. Updating the OS would do no good because apparently the issue persists even in iOS 12 along with a host of new bugs that each new version brings.

I never liked Steve Jobs when he was alive, but he must be turning in his grave, if he saw the state of Apple's flagship software today heads would roll. It used to be well worth paying a premium because it was so polished, now it is not really any better than competitors. The only thing keeping me on an iPhone is the lack of compact phones on the market, the original iPhones were the perfect size, pretty much every decent spec phone on the market today is a gigantic monstrosity. The huge size is completely unnecessary.

[apis]

My main problem with iphones is that to make apps for them, even for personal use, you need to buy a mac (for the IDE) and an apple developer licence which costs $100/yr (at least when I last checked). It's also annoying that you must use iTunes to manage the phone from a computer, and there's no Linux version of iTunes and zero open source support. So it's nice to hear they have finally decided to get rid of it, although I don't have any illusions it will lead to better interoperability.

[Electro Detective]

What about the land fill mess from those iTunes crap cards   

future generations will just love remnants of it in their morning breaky and maccas 

[james_s]

Of course they do, I have 2 or 3 in my wallet right now. A lot of people like getting some sort of physical gift, maybe not logical but it's just how it is.

[frozenfrogz]

I still have an old iPod Mini 1st generation that I updated with a 32Gb compact flash card and a new battery.
Used iTunes once and got pretty upset with that POS.
Ever since I have been running Rockbox with no issues.

[RoGeorge]

My only Apple device is an iPod Nano 3rd generation, won many years ago at a promotion lottery.  Even back then I was horrified by the iTunes.  Looked nice, but it felt like it was trying to control my life.   

Ditched it in a couple of days, looked for a free application that also allows to upload or download to any PC without the need of a crappy proprietary iTunes installed on the PC host.  Why everybody can make a player act like a USB drive where one can drag files back and forth, while Apple needs a proprietary app installed on the host? 

The player is nice, very good hardware, I still use it to play audiobooks in a DIY docking station.  Yet, it was incredibly expensive if it were to buy.  For that kind of money one would expect an iTunes that lets you do whatever you like, but no, iTunes was acting like the hardware was some kind of freeware.

Anyways, instead of iTunes found a program called "floola", and using it since.   

Floola was so good that I'm still using it today, without any updates.  Very small program, I keep it in the iPod, and run it from the iPod.  Available for Windows, Linux and Mac.  Let's one move or copy whatever between a PC host and an iPod player.  No question asked, no updates nagging, no firmware push, no data harvesting, no calling home, no other stupid thing each and every piece of software does nowadays.  It just do one thing, and do it well, without asking for attention or trying to "protect" me, or to "enhance" my experience.

[tooki]

What about the land fill mess from those iTunes crap cards   

future generations will just love remnants of it in their morning breaky and maccas 

iTunes gift cards been made of paper for a few years now, FYI.

Their primary purpose is to top up with cash, so kids can go to a store and buy iTunes credit before they have a credit card of their own. What baffles me is why there aren’t cardless cash top-ups, that work the same was as mobile phone top-ups (where the activation code is simply printed on the receipt tape).


As for actually giving gift cards as gifts: I’ve never understood the point of this (and consequently of the racks of gift cards for every restaurant and store chain imaginable, as you now see in US grocery stores). If you’re going to give someone the means to spend somewhere, why not just give them cash, or a Visa/MC/Amex prepaid gift card (since those work online, where better deals are often found)?

[tooki]

To add to my reply above:

What about the land fill mess from those iTunes crap cards   

Do people still use paper/plastic gift cards in 2019?

Yes, astoundingly. More than ever: https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/first-datas-18th-annual-prepaid-consumer-insights-study-shows-growth-trends-in-branded-currency-2018-11-28

In my family, my parents just give me actual cash, or (in the past) a check, or wire the money, or just ask me what gift I want. So the whole practice of gifting actual gift cards is odd to me.


I forgot to say above that despite all my reservations about iTunes gift cards, I actually buy them for myself, paid for with my own credit card (the same card already on file with Apple as the default payment method). Why? Because at BJ’s they sell the gift cards for 5% below face value.

[tooki]

That doesn’t make any sense. We are talking about consumers giving other consumers small-value gift cards. That doesn’t involve accountants or income tax. Nor would it make any difference, since from a tax perspective a gift card is the same as cash or any other non-cash gift. The IRS isn’t going to come after you for a $25 Chili’s gift card or $25 in cash, either way.

[tooki]

Gift cards are, if anything, easier to track than cash. Cash is 100% anonymous. Gift cards aren’t entirely, insofar as both the transaction that creates the card and the transactions that consume it can be correlated.

Tax rules in USA (and in most places, presumably) state that fundamentally, all gifts are taxable (with a few exemptions). So whether it’s as cash or a gift card or an actual object, or from a human person or a legal person (organization, company, or other entity), it’s all the same: taxable income.

Hence my point that gift cards do not, in any way whatsoever, facilitate tax evasion. Cash is always the best for that.

(I’m not a lawyer or tax expert, but I did take a tax accounting class in college.)

[james_s]

As for actually giving gift cards as gifts: I’ve never understood the point of this (and consequently of the racks of gift cards for every restaurant and store chain imaginable, as you now see in US grocery stores). If you’re going to give someone the means to spend somewhere, why not just give them cash, or a Visa/MC/Amex prepaid gift card (since those work online, where better deals are often found)?

Because cash isn't personal, I'm not generally opposed to receiving cash but many people view it as a sort of cop-out, like you didn't even try to think about what the person you are giving a gift to would want. If everyone just gave cash as gifts it would be kind of pointless anyway, I give a family member some cash for Christmas and they give me some cash then it's a bit pointless to even exchange gifts in the first place. I do sometimes enjoy getting a gift card though because it encourages me to go out and do something fun or buy something I want but don't really need, whereas cash would just go into the general fund, I already have plenty of cash in the bank to cover my general needs so while useful it's not really a very exciting gift.