Apple » Sarcasm.com

FUD. apple. annoying.

At the same time that the government is starting to look into anti-consumer activity at mobile service providers, Apple comes out with this little gem:

By tinkering with this code, “a local or international hacker could potentially initiate commands (such as a denial of service attack) that could crash the tower software, rendering the tower entirely inoperable to process calls or transmit data,” Apple wrote the government. “Taking control of the BBP software would be much the equivalent of getting inside the firewall of a corporate computer — to potentially catastrophic result.

Here’s the original Wired article with that text. That was written to the Copyright Office to attempt to counter an Electronic Freedom Foundation request to legalize jailbreaking, or removing application and carrier locks on the phone.

Whenever you want your political way, I guess it’s best to play the fear card. But by that token, Android phones must be a menace, along with all the unlocked WinMo devices. Oh, and ALL of Europe, how’s that work? Do they just have infinitely better security on their cell towers?

You’re being annoying, Apple. Super annoying.

Apple: What are they smoking? Also, Sony and gigantic software updates.

The iPhone could use a few things. I dunno, copy/paste comes to mind. A few thousand other things.

Apple just released 2.2.1 for the iPhone 3G. It’s a 246MB download. It claims to fix some things:

Improves the stability of Mobile Safari
Fixes an issue where some images saved from Mail do not display correctly in the Camera Roll

Okay, so… what? 246MB software update. Fixes what, two shared libraries? And we need to do a monolithic OS install for that? 246MB worth?

While I’m on this topic, Sony is guilty of this crap as well. My Playstation 3 just got an update (2.6) that was really large (140MB) and here’s what that gave me:

Photo Gallery Application – support for the new Photo Gallery application, which gives users a fancier way of organizing and viewing photos stored on the PS3. Sort of. It’s crap, really.
Support for DivX 3.11
Guest Viewing of the PlayStation Store – provides guest access to PlayStation Store, enabling non-PlayStation®Network members to browse the storefront’s downloadable content, including games, game trailers, and demos, along with more than 4,200 movies and TV shows.

The best part of this update? The Photo Gallery application then needs to be installed separately from the XMB, after you update your PS3’s firmware. “To install the Photo Gallery application, go to the Photo section on the XMB, select Photo Gallery and press the X button.” Seriously, what the hell is it with these guys? I mean, my PS3 seems at times to be a progress indicator machine. Don’t even get me started on Playstation Home.

Meanwhile, a real software company like Microsoft can roll out incremental tiny updates to the Xbox 360 that are 1-3M and are pretty darned fast. The only huge update was when they replaced the entire OS with the new NXE. That was less than 128MB, still smaller than the PS3 update and about HALF the size of the iPhone update, and that replaced the ENTIRE OS with all new functionality.

Come on, step up Apple and Sony. Holy crap already.

What are the people at Apple smoking? The 64-bit version of itunes isn’t 64-bit, is it?

I have Vista x64 Ultimate, and I have an iPod Classic 160GB. When I downloaded iTunes 7.6 a while back, it had a handy-dandy 64-bit version available, so I downloaded that and installed it. So that was running fine for two months or whatever, no problems, etc, etc.

So a few days after the horrific iPhone 3G + iPhone 2.0 + iTunes 7.7 + MobileMe launch day (note to Apple, maybe spread this stuff out a little bit), I get that great pop-up from the Apple Updater, you know the one that downloads iTunes+Quicktime and also comes with the Safari checkbox pre-checked. Sounds like tying, but whatever. So I say sure, update the iTunes.

Afterward, I notice that all of the iTunes related tasks look like this:

So yeah, that’s not really looking very 64 bit, I mean the little *32 means a 32 bit process, so wtf. So I figure that well, perhaps the updater is broken, and it downloaded a 32-bit version and installed it over my 64 bit version from before. So I uninstall, reboot as requested and of course the freaking Bonjour service is still there AND the Apple Mobile Device Support is still running AND the Apple Software Update is still installed. So I uninstall each of those, reboot again, and hey Bonjour is still running. I think Bonjour should be considered a virus, seriously.

So then I heads on over to apple.com and I see:

So I download the 64-bit version, install it, and I get the same exact thing, 6 32-bit processes, not a single 64-bit process. What gives, Apple? Is this 64-bit software? The copy on the download page is confusing, maybe Vista (64-bit) means that it’s a 32-bit version of the software that WORKS on Vista x64? The filename is itunes64setup.exe – that also isn’t totally specific about what is 64-bit.

The whole thing is at least marginally confusing.

The 160GB Classic iPod sucks my ass

I plug in my 160GB iPod classic to sync. This process now takes upwards of 5 minutes.

I play a few (8) songs the PC, so all sync has to do it perform a few simple tasks like update the playcounts and played dates for the songs, then eject. I plug in the classic, 20 seconds later iTunes says “syncing iPod” and then iTunes becomes totally unresponsive for 45-60 seconds. Then it’s responsive again for 30 seconds, then unresponsive for another 45-60 seconds. This continues for 5-7 minutes. I can connect my old 60GB iPod and an iPod mini, and do the exact same thing in 7 or 8 seconds without iTunes freezing.

The first update to the firmware did nothing to fix this.

I called Apple Care last night, and was on hold for 45 minutes. Then I got to talk to a “genius,” or whatever they’re called on the phone, and he told me he had never heard of this issue (even though it’s all over the interwebs). Then he put me on hold for 15 more minutes, then came back and told me to reboot. (Wheeeeeee!) He put me on hold again while I was rebooting, then disconnected me. I called back and got to hear a recording that told me to call during their normal business hours.

Hi Apple you suck.

(full disclosure, I am an apple shareholder)

More Apple usability greatness

I don’t like my tray cluttered with useless garbage. The QuickTime tray icon is exactly that. I never actually use the QuickTime tray icon except to turn off the QuickTime tray icon.

Yet, every time that iTunes has an update it installs “iTunes + QuickTime” which, inexplicably, turns the QuickTime preference “Install QuickTime icon in system tray” back on. Why? Just to be annoying? All the other QuickTime settings are saved, just not that one. Accident?

Thanks again, Apple.

Apple, usability

I just installed Safari 3 beta on my Windows machine, because I have a need. Many of our web clients have at least one person in-house that will check their site on “Safari on the Mac” and there are usually a few tweaks cos Firefox and Safari don’t agree on standards all the time. So we have a few Macs on hand specifically for this reason.

So now Apple has decided that they will give up their channel of Mac buyers that need to check web work in “Safari on the Mac” (I know of at least 3 people currently contemplating a Mac purchase specifically for this reason). Thank you, Apple! And I mean that seriously.

However, I know that you THINK it’s more usable to have to resize a window from the bottom right corner only, and move it at the top only, but I disagree with you. So does Windows, the platform that you’ve brought your product to. I don’t find this snobbery and rudeness to be anything like “a glass of ice water to a person in hell.” I find it to be frustrating and irritating and more like shards of glass to a person with soft skin.

Personally, I find it easier to resize from the upper right corner or top edge when I’m up there, and then move the window with the window’s title bar, a few pixels away (not thousands away). But in all of your snobbery, you can’t admit that maybe this other way is better and play nice in your hosted environment?

And you’re going to make me do all kinds of extra mouse moving for no real reason? Or for “usability?”

Thanks, assholes.

Plus, it doesn’t even work. Like at all. It loads up about 1/2 of the Apple homepage before bombing out, and I can’t even type in the address bar. I can click the button that looks like a spider, but that just uses 100% of one of my CPU cores. I’m sure they’ll fix that stuff, but I’ll put a million dollars on them not fixing the usability issues. Cos they know it all.

Edit 6/26: I reinstalled a third time and it works.

Macbook Pro battery not detected under Windows

If anyone can tell me how to fix my Macbook Pro under Windows so it actually looks like I have a battery in the computer, I’d appreciate it. It worked for months, and then one day it just had a big red X over the battery indicator in the tray, and when I mouse over it, I get the message that “No battery is detected.” So now I have no idea how much battery life I have at a given moment, and I don’t trust that I will get warnings if my battery is low, so I’m afraid to use it for more than an hour and a half on battery.

no battery detected

I’ll Paypal you a dollar if you can help me fix this.

Edit: So here was the secret, or at least I think so. I found this quite by accident. I booted into MacOS via Bootcamp, then restarted again into Vista. All seems OK now. Not sure why – I had rebooted Vista a few times and that didn’t help, so some kind of magic OSX battery initialization thing, maybe.