Dear Apple

Dear Apple,

iTunes is a pretty nice music app. I have all my MP3s in it. I even use it for podcasts. I have it installed on 4 computers. I’ve bought songs once or twice from the music store.

I’ve never bought a music video.
I’ve never listened to iTunes radio.
I’ve never bought a TV show.
I’ve never bought a movie.
I do not own an Apple TV
I do not own an iPhone.
I have 2 iPods, a 3G classic and a shuffle, neither of which can play games.

Given all this,

PLEASE STOP ALERTING ME OF USELESS UPDATES!

Today, the latest ones were iTunes 7.5 and QuickTime 7.3 (which requires a reboot!), neither of which seem to have any features that I can benefit from. Perhaps you could break apart this behemoth called iTunes that seems to do a million things other than play “tunes” and stop nagging me with updates. It seems like every other day I’m being told 4 times about another 100 megabytes of updates which don’t do anything but disable people from putting custom ringtones on their iPhones, a feature I don’t care about on a product I don’t own.

iTunes update

Sincerely,

Jeff Boulter
iTunes curmudgeon

4 Comments

  1. Amen and can we all do a Dance of Redundancy? Add to that list the Garage Band and the iMovie updates because I do neither. I have my iPod Nano from ?? years ago. I like it. My iMac is second-hand and beautiful in its round symmetry. An iPhone is a waste of time and money for most of us — our cell phone reception here in bum**ck North Carolina is sketchy at best and not available at worst, thanks to Sprint. Dear Apple, stop adding needless megs of unwanted code to my machine and stop asking me if I want more more more.

    You are not alone, my iTunes curmudgeon friend. Stand tall! Stand firm! Stand in the place where you live, now face North.

    Valerie MacEwan
    theothermac curmudgeon

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  3. It does say “This release also includes bug fixes to improve stability and performance”, and that’s no lie. Unlike Microsoft, Apple seems to actually /do something/ when I send in crash reports, because whatever caused the crash seems to not be a problem in the next release. It’s a hard thing to say for certain because I don’t always know exactly what caused a crash, but I have been using Apple products on and off for years since OS X was new, and the stability and overall user interface just keeps getting better and better.

    So instead of focusing on the unused routines that won’t even affect you, be thankful for the improvements that you do benefit from, even if they’re not ones you see (i.e. not crashing!).

    The iPhone addition was really pretty minimal anyways. Most of the feature code is shared with what already existed for iPods. And well, though I don’t recommend it, you can always just not install the update.

    Personally, I strongly prefer an actively-developed product over a nightmare like Internet Explorer 6.

  4. Oh, and it’s not really hundreds of megabytes – that’s just because you’re downloading full binary form rather than a patchset. It’s also a lot smaller if you use XSlimmer or another similar tool to remove the Intel or PPC code (whichever one you don’t use). This is iTunes 7.6:

    $ du -h -d 0 /Applications/iTunes.app/
    34M /Applications/iTunes.app/

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