Using an iPod was “frustrating”. Seriously. OK, the first one was DOA, but my father returned it to the Apple Store without incident. But because he didn’t have a music collection, he relied on me to fill his iPod with new music every so often. The first time he went to recharge it, he plugged it into his Mac and iTunes “helpfully” wiped it and refilled it with the few songs that were in his iTunes library. Of course he didn’t realize what had actually happened until he went to the gym the next day and had virtually no music (and certainly no good exercise music). His next thought was that I should refill it, and then he would just copy the music from the iPod to his iTunes library. This led to a long discussion of why iTunes wouldn’t let you do that, and how this was technically different from me letting him borrow one of my CDs, and how if he really wanted to do that there were utilities but not from Apple, and so on and so forth. So yeah, my parents switched to Linux because — among other reasons — it was easier to use with their iPod. That’s how badly Apple has lost the plot.
2008 is the year of Linux on the desktop (…but it didn’t last)