The Dark side of the Apple iPod
February 12, 2008
The Apple iPod is a quality product which is popular all over the world. Staring off as a digital audio player, the iPod now has video playback and its size keeps decreasing day by day. But there are a lot of things that most people don't know about the iPod. The iPod has such a strong brand image and that is why it has done so well all over the world. Today there are other MP3 players like the 'Creative Zen' which is also a high quality product.
To load songs on the iPod, the user has to use the iTunes software. Almost 99% of all other MP3 player brands allow you to directly copy and paste your songs on your mp3 player which acts like a mass storage device while connected through USB. I personally feel that the worst and biggest drawback to the iPod is that your cannot copy songs directly onto the iPod but instead have to use iTunes. There are people who have developed hacks to overcome this but this isn't a long term solution and has a lot of drawbacks such as losing all your songs! iTunes is attached to the iPod but wait!, there is something worse which is attached to iTunes.
And this is apple QuickTime(audio/video player software). iTunes cannot function without Quicktime. If your using a MAC, then this may not be such a problem but as there are so many Windows users, apple QuickTime as I put it, hijacks your computer.
1) Every time you run Quicktime is adds itself to the list of Startup programs so that it runs in the background of your system when you start your computer.
2) QuickTime tries to access the internet without any permission or alert to the user.
3) QuickTime takes over all your multimedia content on web browsers like internet explorer or firefox. Every time you click to download a video, the video is played automatically in quicktime(browser plugin).
4) If you select the option "save as" while viewing a video on the web, quicktime says that this option is only possible in the PRO version of Quicktime (which is expensive). I personally feel that this is one of the cheapest things a big company like Apple can do.
Even though the iPod has so many negative aspects one much remember that the iPod is a rock solid and high quality product and the iPod is from Apple, the Kings of Multimedia computing.
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