Link: Microsoft/Creative Labs "Plays For Sure...".
There is nothing forcing Creative to continue selling a product to me and you and our kids, based on claims that it will work with Napster, when that might not be true. I consider this akin to robbery.
Apple's closed system is wrong and likely doomed, but you must admit, it does just work. That's the biggest difference I've seen since "going Mac". Plug it in and it works. In the end, that's what really matters.
I'm a candidate for poster-child as an Apple convert. I bought a pre-Windows iPod and used 3rd-party tools to get it to work with my firewire-equipped Sony laptop. It worked, but it was a huge pain-in-ass to eject the CD tray, insert a CD, rip it, eject the CD, and get it all sync'ed to my new iPod. The iPod was great, but the process was no better than with other flash-based MP3 players I'd experienced. So I bought a (gen 1) flat panel iMac.
I'd used NeXT computers in a previous life and had seen the value of a good GUI-on-Unix. I was immediately at home in Mac OS X. More importantly, I could insert a CD, have it auto-launch iTunes, rip the CD and even eject it, as I happily watched television. I ripped CD after CD, dozens each night, until my library reached the 10Gig limit of my (gen 1) iPod. The sync to iPod, via iTunes, was completely smooth, fast and painless. It just worked. No downloads. No visits to a website. No tech support calls. It just worked and continues to work to this day. Since then, I've acquired a 12" PowerBook G4 and iMacs for my family and extended family.
I work with technology every day. Perhaps because of this, I've lost tolerance for the sort of thing that The Fat Man encountered. The Microsoft world has much going for it, but 10 years after Windows 95, they still don't do a good job with the fundamentals: open the box, plug it in, enjoy it. For all its faults, Apple does. And isn't that why I bought the music player or signed up for the music service in the first place?
P.S. - As a technologists, I know the arguments for why Microsoft doesn't "just work" as Apple does: backward compatibility, lack of control of the hardware, different vendors, etc. In the end, as a consumer and user, I don't care. I just want it to work. The Microsoft solution does not. The Apple solution does.
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