Apple

Although I have to admit that some of their products are pretty good I still dislike Apple as a company. I have an older 30 GB iPod, I guess they are calling it an "iPod Classic" now. The battery has always been problematic, I mostly use it in the car where it is plugged in to my outlet and the battery can usually last for the hour or two I am at the gym, though just barely.

It takes, on average, one and a half hours for the battery to go from full to half-empty and when the indicator says half-empty the iPod shuts itself down.

I have replaced iPod batteries myself before, and it is a relatively easy process, but I can't afford to buy a new one right now so prefer to not take any chances.

I know that Apple has a program where they replace the batteries. I call the local Apple store and they tell me that they do NOT replace batteries but I can "recycle" the iPod and get 10% off of a new one.

So then I call the Apple Tech Support. They tell me that they can in fact replace the battery, he tells me it will cost $59 + $7 shipping for a total cost of about $70. The guy then suggests that it would be better for me to just buy a new iPod than to repair the perfectly good one I have. He says that this iPod is old and may break soon. He suggests I trade in my fully functional 30 GB iPod for a refurbished 8 GB iPod Nano, which would only cost me $20 more than replacing the battery. And that I buy an extended warranty on the new iPod Nano.

Really Apple tech support guy? I should pay an extra $20 to get a new, tiny iPod Nano that barely has enough space to store my audio books? I have 80 GB of live concerts on my computer, I have to constantly swap them in and out of my iPod. That seems like a terrible idea to me.

I think after all of this I may just get a replacement battery and do it myself again. I could send it to Apple and have them do it but after hearing two separate people tell me that I should just spend a couple hundred dollars on a new iPod I don't really want to give Apple any of my money.

Apple iTunes and Windows

I hate Apple. Why can't they make products that work for me instead of making me work for them? Why do I have to switch my wireless carrier to use their phone? Why can't I just use iTunes to give them my money without having to upgrade my OS or use their hardware?

My specific complaint is with iTunes on Windows XP x64, a stable, usable platform that has been stable for years. The only 64 bit Windows OS Apple supports is Vista, which is an unstable mess of a failure. Microsoft has all but disinherited Vista.

Not only that but in order to try to buy a single stupid song I had to uninstall a hacked, but working version of iTunes to try to upgrade, which I did on the incorrect premise that Apple had maybe finally written a 64 bit version of their installer, spend hours trying to rehack the 8.1 iTunes installer before giving up in frustration.

Now I have no iTunes on my machine, Apple didn't get my $1.99 or whatever for the song. Luckily Winamp has written an application which actually works which allows me to manage my iPod without iTunes, as I was never able to get iTunes to recognize my iPod with my hacked installer.

One Last Apple Update

It's not actual money Apple is giving back to people who paid the $200 "stupid tax" on their iPhones. It's $100 store credit. Like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs didn't get rich by writing checks.

Even More on Apple

Apparently NY Magazine shares some of my reservations about Apple and Steve Jobs. And Wired. Theirs is not so much about the company but also the whole iPhone repricing thing. And another one at Wired. Jobs is worth $4.9 billion so what does he care? Here is his interview on the subject...

Excerpt:

Q: Many people already have Beatles music on CDs. Will they really buy it online if they already own it?

A: I do expect them to, yes. That's been the case with other music, as well.

I own every Bob Dylan album ever, but I buy a lot of it on iTunes, because I guess I'm just too lazy to rip it from the CD.

Or maybe that's because the $9.99 for the album doesn't really matter much when you have $4.9 billion of them. It does for those of us who don't have billions.

Update - Apparently Apple agrees with everyone's complaining about the iPhone price cut. "We want to do the right thing for our valued iPhone customers," Jobs said. "We apologize for disappointing some of you, and we are doing our best to live up to your high expectations of Apple."

I still don't think Apple is in a good place. And I don't think Jobs feels at all apologetic about this whole thing. He's probably trying to count how many of his billions of dollars are going to be spent refunding the customers.

More on Apple

Just read an article in the WSJ about how Apple's price cut for the iPhone has "shaken investors." Apple got rid of the $499 model and lowered the price of the $599 model to $399. This will undoubtedly piss off everyone who waited in lines for hours and paid full price for something only to have the price reduced a few months later. And by "everyone" I mean the Apple fanatics that make up the core of Apple's market.

This move reeks of desperation. Eliminating the lower priced model makes sense, and reducing the higher priced one to the lower price could make sense as well. At least it could be rationally explained: the lower priced model wasn't selling so they eliminated it and reduced the price of the higher priced model to the lower price. But going lower than the lowest price just underlines how desperate Apple must be.

I really think that Apple is in for a big downturn.

Update - This news from yesterday was apparently Apple's big news that everyone thought would involve the Beatles catalog. They also announced the new iPod touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the phone. And a new iPod nano that doesn't have the shuffle "feature."

Is it enough to save Apple? I think not.

And some guy likes old Macs.

Apple News

Apple announced a new iPod or something today? I didn't even catch this in the news, I read it on a blog. I am very bored with Apple lately. Everyone I know (which is really just 1 person I ran into once) loves their iPhone even though I've heard not so good things about them, but the new iMacs seemed lackluster and once everyone has an iPod how are they going to keep selling them?

I know, I know... More and cheaper storage. I have a 15GB iPod and I can store about half of my MP3 library on it. A lot of the library is stuff I don't even like and have never and would never listen to. And a lot of it is 2-8 hour DJ sets, so it's a lot of music.

I think a 40 GB iPod would be about the most I would ever need. Maybe 60 GB. More than that? Who has that many MP3s that they actually listen to? I can see someone having more than 60 GB of music but listening to it all? Nope.

WiFi? The Firewire cable works just fine for me. It's probably faster than WiFi as well. I don't own any Apple stock but if I did I would have sold it after the iPhone news was released. I actually bought Apple at $18 a few years back, and sold it at $30 and then bought more at $90 and sold at $110 or something. If I'd kept the original stock I would have made a small fortune. But after I lost a large fortune in the dot-com crash I would rather take a profit than lose it all. So I set trailing stop-limits on most of my holdings. Better safe than sorry is my opinion, which means I should really be investing in bonds, which I am actually doing more and more.

Anyway, I digress. Apple seems boring. Maybe it's because I haven't been a Mac user in almost a decade now or maybe it's just me being cynical, but I think that Apple's time is up, and I would be shorting AAPL now.

Update - Apparently Jim Cramer disagrees with me. I would trust his opinion more than mine as far as financial markets and capital allocation are concerned, but I stand by my opinion. I'm not going to be buying AAPL but I'm not going to be shorting it either.

Update 2 - However it appears that the street agrees with me.