There, I’ve got your attention now!
Like so many of us, I love my iPod. It liberated my digital music collection from the desktop and moved it out to my BART commute and into my running routine; someday I’m sure it will plug into my car (but I wouldn’t buy a BMW just do do so even if I could afford to). It looks great and sounds far better than I would ever have expected. I can forgive my iPod its flaws (the well-known battery problems, the fact that my early-model version’s flywheel has now lost its bearings a bit so that the volume drifts unless I lock out the controls); nothing is perfect.
But the iPod’s roach-motel design — songs check in but they can’t check out! — is a small outrage, a deliberate crippling of a natural technical capacity for the sake of a legal-commercial agenda that runs directly counter to the interests of the device’s users.
Here’s what I mean. I run Windows for my day-to-day affairs (obligatory bow to the fact that I lived on a Mac for a decade until Apple dropped the operating-system ball in the mid-90s and my Macs starting eating my work), and when I first bought my iPod two and a a half years ago, there was no sanctioned “Windows version.” I bought a simple utility called Xplay that allowed me to connect my Windows 2000 filesystem to the iPod. It treats the iPod as what it is: a portable external hard disk. Put music on; take music off. And that’s the way I’ve grown used to thinking of my iPod.
My wife works on a Mac, and I got her an iPod recently as a birthday gift. She doesn’t have any digital music on her computer, and I do, so I filled up her iPod with stuff I thought she’d like. These are, I should be clear, all legally obtained MP3 files, most of them ripped from my own CD collection or purchased (as non-DRMed MP3s) from EMusic. A decade ago I shared music with her by making her mix tapes; today, I copy files to her iPod.
You iPod veterans know where I’m headed here. As far as I can tell — and I freely admit that I’m no OSX expert, so if I’m wrong, correct me! — there is no simple way to get that music off her iPod and onto her Mac. Yes, I can download one or another of a variety of little renegade utilities that Apple has been trying to stamp out (each time Apple upgrades iTunes it tweaks the code to break these programs). I tried a couple, but they were awkward and counter-intuitive.
The point is, I shouldn’t have to hack my way through the software jungle just to share music with my own spouse. As it is, if we sync the iPod to iTunes on her Mac, the files I’ve moved onto the portable device get overwritten. It’s clumsy and rude: the syncing should be two-way.
A hard drive is a read/write device; there is no technical or moral reason why the iTunes software should not be able to copy my files off an iPod and onto a Mac. But, apparently, in the world according to Apple — the particular deal-with-the-devil that Steve Jobs seems to have made in order to get the cooperation of the record companies in licensing songs to the iTunes music store — what we want to do, even though there is no conceivable ethical argument against it, is so wrong or dangerous that the technology has had to be deliberately broken in order to prevent it. The music industry is obviously afraid that a two-way-syncing iPod would become their worst file-trading nightmare. Memo to music execs: Your nightmare already exists. It is called the portable hard drive, and the college students who pass them around are your future customers.
So I’ll think twice before buying another iPod. Beautiful as the whole iPod/iTunes combo is in so many ways, it is flawed in a way that says to the user, “You are not in control here” — a message that directly contradicts the fundamental promise of personal digital technology. You’d expect precisely the opposite from Apple, which has long benefited from an image as the user’s champion; but the company’s dedication to usability broke down somewhere between the DRM scheme that limits your ability to use purchased iTunes music files and the roach-motel approach to the player’s hard-drive. The future only holds more, and worse, along these lines, as personal video recording becomes more commonplace.
Bonus links: Apple sues the media; users sue Apple. No one here is winning except the lawyers.
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