Horrortaxi said:
People who don't know enough about computers to make iTunes work on their PC don't have enough insight into computers in general to realize they've made the wrong choice. They don't realize there is a choice. I do agree with you though--the store gives them some exposure to Apple products and at least gives them a hint that there are choices.
Hmmm...yes and no. I mean the problem with Windows and even MacOS is that when things *don't* work at all like they're supposed to, except for the most, most, most sophisticated users, we don't know what to do. We meaning we who know how to program multiple programming languages, understand the basics of centralized and distributed application architecture, and could build a PC from components easily, so know HW too.
Like someone posted a story about printing on an Epson photo printer. They plugged it into the Win XP PC and it didn't autodetect. They rebooted and it didn't autodetect. They did manual detect and it wouldn't install. The kicker...they downloaded the installation disk and ran it and *nothing* happened. I might be able to figure it out, but if I solved it, I would have to be honest and say 85% chance it would be dumb luck -- things no more sophisticated than rebooting several times and it works one time even though each try was procedurally identical, or smacking the computer and then trying again and having it work for no reason.
Another story is, I bought a USB IRDA adapter for my PC. It worked -- the drivers installed, the TSR came up, I got an icon on my taskbar. I installed Nokia's sync utility on top of it. Fine. The sync utility could see the phone. But only for a couple seconds. It would lose connection at point blank range systematically, and never stayed connected long enough to sync. I tried tweaking every available parameter in terms of timeouts, signal strength, interference, etc, etc. Nothing. I guess if I spent a lot of time trying to get a free-after-rebate adapter to work, I might eventually, but considering that it was a backup to the sync on my work PC, I gave up.
My point is that sometimes the level of digging needed to fix these things -- and it happens on Mac's too (eg stories of AEBS's that need to be reset every couple of weeks or need you to drop and reconnect the AE card every time you wake the Mac up -- there are several people who complained about this on Macrumors and with our help couldn't solve it and just rolled over) -- my point is that sometimes these are emblemmatic of bad debugging.
And I think there are enough iTunes/PC stories from competent users to believe that's a part of the issue with that product. So, maybe there are a fair number of idiots in the line, who don't even understand a choice conceptually; there are probably a lot of people who still have hope too.
