Extremely Lame

In the beginning, there was QuickTime. A media player designed to play Apple’s proprietary formats on their proprietary computers. Shortly afterwards, it was released for Windows computers as well, so they could easily watch things in these formats as well.

Then came iTunes. This allowed you to easily sync up your Apple iPod to your computer. Of course, they make it so you’ll have a hell of a time syncing your iPod with any other program or syncing any other player with iTunes.

Oh, we can’t forget the Apple formats for their iTunes store, .aac and .m4a. Yeah, you can’t listen to those on any portable device but an iPod. Of course, you could take that format (some data lost during initial compression), burn that to an audio CD (no data lost), and then rip that CD into the format of your choice (more data lost if you go to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis). So, not only do you lose more data in the process, it’s a pain in the ass as well. Thankfully the Amazon has been starting to sell high quality DRM-free MP3s for about the same price as iTunes music files.

Soon afterwards, any time Quicktime updated, it’d try to push iTunes on you as well. It’s now progressed further. Now that most everyone has iTunes on their Windows machines, Apple decided that Quicktime and iTunes just wasn’t enough. Now they’re pushing their web browser, Safari, on you whenever you update iTunes. Do we really need more web browsers on Windows, seriously? Internet Explorer 7 is so much better than IE6 that it’s hard to believe they’re just different versions. There’s Mozilla Firefox which is free and open source. There’s also Opera, which is what I’d use if they had FARK widgets and themes like Pimpzilla, both of which are available for Firefox.

I’m just curious at what the next part of the “Apple Experience” they’ll start to push on Windows users. The dock?

This article written on an Ubuntu Feisty machine in Firefox.