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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Saturday, September 08, 2007

iTunes 7.4 obsolete after 48 hours

TUAW:

There are apps that age gracefully, staying functional and relevant for months or years with no changes at all... and then there's iTunes. We had only hours to get used to a new version with support for all the iPods coming down the pike, and then in don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it fashion, 7.4 was gone and 7.4.1 was here. Wheel in the sky, keep on turning.

Apple hasn't listed specific changes between 7.4 and 7.4.1...

OK, I get it, you think I'm an Apple basher. Whatever. It does crack me up that Apple fans are the first to rag on everything Microsoft does wrong, but Apple gets a total pass with their shoddy software, which is often updated, again and again, after new versions are released. (Witness the rapid succession of iLife '08 updates this past month.)

But iTunes is unreal. I use it regularly, and have come to rely on it, but... My God. And it's not just the bugginess. The performance is miserable, across the board. Double-click a video file and wait... and wait... and wait.. while it loads. The worst, of course, is photo sync with an iPod. Not only does iTunes create completely different "optimized" photos for each iPod you sync with, the process is agonizingly slow. I started syncing the iPod classic last night at dinner time, and when I got up this morning, it was about 1/3 done. Seriously. Yeah, there are a lot of photos. (8000 or so.) So what? It shouldn't take that long. Now I'm going to do it in batches over a few nights so the iPod's screen doesn't burn-in or burn out (it stays on and displays a static screen during this entire process) and so my computer is usable: The thing just kills performance while it's syncing.

I don't think it's bashing to point out very real problems. I like iTunes quite a bit. But as with Firefox, I'm concerned that a tool I use regularly is getting slower and slower and slower as it gains more and more new features. This is a serious problem.

And why the heck do I have to restart my computer after upgrading from iTunes 7.4 to 7.4.1? Good grief.

Labels: iTunes

[ Posted at 1:10 PM | Permalink ]