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Dear Apple: As I'm sure you know, I've been a pretty unrepentant Mac fangirl for a while. I like shiny things. I like your laptops. I like your operating system (and I used to like your old one, too). I like my transparent terminal windows. I like not having to run OpenOffice just to read the attachments people insist on sending me. I like Quicktime. I like a lot of things you do. But I've got to tell you, this iPod destructive mind-meld "link" to a specific computer, or whatever the hell it is, is just fucking stupid. So I've got two powerbooks. One's my "real" computer, which has a slowly failing hard disk, and so I've also got a loaner from work. I copied my home directory over to the new one via drag and drop and everything worked very well -- thank you -- such as my shareware apps recognizing my previous registration codes, all my photos and documents and the cruft accumulated over years. Even my Firefox plugins came over (and, it should be noted, that the Firefox on this laptop doesn't exhibit the completely wack-ass behavior that Firefox on my other laptop does -- so that seems to prove well enough that it's not my preferences or plugins or something that's causing it, interestingly enough). Everything was great. ...Until this morning. I had ripped some music over the weekend, onto my external hard disk and added it to the real laptop's iTunes library therefrom. I wanted to listen to it at work today, but my upload speed from home is pretty crummy, so I decided I'd just throw the music on my iPod Shuffle and take that to work and listen to the tracks off of it. I hopped in the car, happily listened to my new MP3s on said faithful iPod on the way in, arrived at work, and plugged in the iPod to my loaner laptop. Whereupon I got a message that said something like "Some songs have not been copied to the iPod 'wee' because this computer is not authorized to play them, including '$song_by_some_other_band_that_was_in_aac_format_but_i_dont_care_about_that_band.'" Okay. Whatever. I have that album on this laptop and I don't know why you're whinging about it anyways, as I didn't ask you to "copy" anything. 'Cos it was already *there* and all. But whatever, I didn't want to listen to that band at the moment (and I can always go type in my stupid iTunes Music Store password if I did). I want to listen to those new MP3s......hey, WHERE THE HELL DID THEY GO? What I'm assuming happened here is that my iPod, named 'wee' (what? it *is*!), had some sort of sympathetic bond with my old laptop, "shiny." It liked shiny. It was evidently involved in a fiercely monogamous relationship with shiny. When I plugged it in to my loaner laptop, "snooty," it decided that, as a part of automatically updating the iPod (why was snooty auto-updating wee if wee is married to shiny?) it would delete the MP3s that were not a part of snooty's music library. Despite the fact that they're not AAC files and had no DRM of any kind. And it's not just that iTunes is not showing them; I downloaded and fired up PodUtil just to check. Then I plugged the iPod directly into my external speakers. Gone, daddy, gone; the love has gone away. Attention Apple: Those were my bloody MP3s. I wanted to play them for myself on my bloody iPod. You morons have just fucked me over because now not only can I not listen to them on my laptop speakers, but you deleted them off the iPod entirely so I can't listen to them in the car or over headphones until I get home tonight. (I would be SO PISSED if this had happened while I was travelling and away from my home computer!) In practical terms, won't someone please explain to me the legal reasons I have *less* right to listen to music I purchased on one set of speakers versus another, to the point where the laptop not only disables the music in question but outright destroys it? You disabled the AAC files that were not authorized. If you wanted to similarly refuse to play back the MP3 files that were not in my currently-connected laptop's music library, why was it necessary to REMOVE them and not simply disable them? I used to carry my old 5G original iPod around with music on it and plugged it in to listen to on other people's computers with some regularity. That was evidently okay behavior back in the halcyon days of, what, 2002? The times they are a-changin'. Suck my dick, Apple. --s. p.s. no anti-IMS anti-DRM advocacy rants need to be sent. I know, I know, I know. I did not deserve what I got in this instance, I don't think, and I'm not ready to pick up a sign and start picketing the Apple Store just yet, but jesus fuck this was a stupid fucking thing for them to do. p.p.s. I'm totally firing up OurTunes and seeing if anyone else on campus has that album so I can pirate it so I can listen to THE MUSIC I FREAKING BOUGHT. You *shits*.
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