News Monday morning dose of Apple

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/01/16/wow_macbook/

 

hmm iv read about the new itunes thing somewhere. And people have tracked and researched that it is apple not "looking" at our music collection, it only talks to the server with their libaray database or something like that anyway.. I could be wrong though

 

why do I get the feeling that if it was revealed that Microsoft or Google were scanning your music collection to provide adverts there would be an uproar. but because it's the jolly nice Co-op, working for the peasants, Apple, it's not such a big deal?

 

You're not the only one.

Welcome to the forums btw.

<A88>

 

According to Apple, the data is apparently not "collected by Apple" but rather used simply to search the iTunes directory and give suggestion in real time. Now I would be alarmed if it wasn't for the simple fact that disabling the mini-iTunes store results in itunes no longer sending any information, verified.

IIRC WMP has a similar funtion in that you can have to search for album art and a simple click of a button means it searches it's music store. Now consider the mini-iTunes store as having this button clicked all the time to save you the hassle if you like that sort of thing. No store = no click = no data sent anywhere.

Now I agree about the Dell/Apple comparison. I guess it says more for where a few big investors think Apple is heading than where they are now. Dell are still a far bigger company when looking at revenue, profits and employees but the market seems to think the future for Apple is significantly brighter. Either that or Dell is very undervalued.

 

not to be an apple crusher - but is itunes all that great - I was using it for the Ipod, and found it hard to use - no clear way to get music OFF the iPod, and every time i was goin thru the library selecting music, by holding down CTRL and using the arrow keys, I would hit delete, and it would delete my music. As soon as i hit the arrow key, it immediately moves me to the very top, unlike WMP 10.
I also didnt find that editing the names of stuff was easy either

just my $.02

 

You're not supposed to be able to take music off the iPod, obviously to prevent filesharing. That's intentional. However it takes all of a minute to get winamp's ml_ipod plugin, or something similar, that can indeed take music off the iPod. Editing is indeed a bit tedious, but usually it can CDDB stuff accurately as it's ripped so it's not needed on everything.

As to the store/data collection - as Apple said, they don't do anything with it. They take your shopping cart info (or I suppose past purchases, I haven't bought anything) and scan their store for similar genre/artist/etc. It's akin to any store online asking whether you want blanks to go with the DVD burner you just bought (or added to cart or whatever). I could definately imagine it being much more of a controversy if it were Microsoft doing it, but anyone who thought about it sensibly would realize that adding stuff to a cart has an odd way of sending off data to a server, and any intelligent store would make recommendations based off of cart/past purchases.

 

I personally prefer iTunes over all other players, but that's been discussed in other threads before.

As to this little issue, I know I'm not upgrading any time soon. I'll leave that little feature off my computer for a while longer. Not that I'm paranoid, just that I'm paranoid.