Member Since: 6/20/2011
Posts: 6,575
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Do we need endless iTunes updates?
Do we really need all those endless updates to iTunes?
They're doing too much. I had to update iTunes because I updated my iPhone (reluctantly) but was terrified it would mess up my 2000+ album library, 99.9999% of which I store on a hard drive and have organised meticulously over the past decade - it even includes vinyl which I've recorded myself and do not want replaced.
Fortunately when I installed the latest iTunes, it gave me the option to 'merge' my libraby which I hastily DECLINED.
EDIT: Synced my iPhone now and went from less than 200 mb of 'documents and data' to over 1 GB
I don't want to waste MORE hours restoring my iPhone and waiting for all my music to sync back on.
SO NOT syncing my ipad with its 60 GB+ music
Quote:
“What’s happened to the song list?” Complaints of that sort have been loud and long since Apple updated iTunes in October. The new version is officially iTunes 12 – though there have been so many tenth-, hundredth- and thousandth-decimal releases since it was first officially unveiled in January 2001 that the real revision figure is probably in the hundreds.
[...]
Now, iTunes has come a long, long way since its first incarnation, when it basically played songs and did visualisations. As time progressed, it added syncing with iPods, then handling video and TV shows, then syncing with iPhones, then buying from the App Store, then syncing with iPads, until now it is a gigantic front for all sorts of content that struggles to coexist on a single desktop screen. It’s like a grocery store that has become a gigantic shopping mall, but never been able to stop to think about the best design for its current incarnation.
[...]
Even so, look at how relentlessly iTunes gets updated, even when there’s no real change: nine updates in 2014. Support for operating systems, sure. Support for new devices, OK. But it often feels as though iTunes gets updated just because it needs to show some sort of forward motion.
[...]
But how often to update? This is the problem product managers wrestle with. Leave a product alone for a year, and people – even those who love it – assume it’s been forgotten. Keep updating it every month and people can’t cope with the change. Even companies such as Google and Facebook, which can update their products silently (Google updates its search algorithm more than once a day, on average), are cautious about making obvious changes. They tend to fiddle around the edges, which even then brings moans from people who do notice the differences.
This is the real question about software: what’s the perfect interval between updates? What’s the right trigger for a new version? Do you update to incorporate each new social network that springs up? Does the rise of mobile mean that desktop apps should mimic them?
There aren’t any obvious answers. But when you’re next cursing a snail-like update progress bar, remember: the idea is to make you think that the product hasn’t been forgotten. Updating is how programs show you they’re still alive – even if their purpose has been superseded.
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