I am soooooo sick of trying to repair, recover, upgrade, whatever, my daughters' iPods I could scream. An iPod must be the single most user unfriendly device ever when it comes to problems. Sure, Apple nailed the user interface when everything works well, but heaven forbid there be a problem. What happens when there is a problem? You get "Generic error message #42" or in iPod speak, a folder with an exclamation mark in it indicating you should go to www.apple.com/support/ipod for some totally useless advice. Diagnostics? What diagnostics? If you are fortunate enough to be able to get your iPod into "diagnostic" mode (and I use the quotation marks as it can hardly be called a set of diagnostics. Diagnostics are those things that point out what is wrong with a device. Every failing iPod I've come across has always had all the diagnostics indicate everything is great. Yet the device won't function, refuses to associate with the computer, and even in disk mode won't act like a normal USB hard drive. Back the rant already in progress...) the "diagnostics" never indicate a problem. Reminds me of the old Digital VAX/VMS diagnostics. They would find no problems, yet VMS wouldn't boot because of some hardware problem.
I mean really Apple, how hard is it to tell the user what's wrong with the device? If the boot loader can be smart enough to tell you to go to www.apple.com/support/ipod, can't it at least give out some hexadecimal error code that I could look up? Even Microsoft software can do that! And what's with a disk mode that doesn't let you access the device? How hard can it be to emulate a USB hard drive? Even a $19 device that includes an enclosure and power supply can do that. Yet my daughter's $300-400 60GB iPod photo seems unable to do that.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment