iTunes for iPad confusing!

[lindafus]

So, a friend and me both have an iPad 3g. We both decided to buy a tv show off of itunes. Easy enough right? Buy on the iPad and it downloads to your device directly to??? Well, they were in the iTunes app as purchased. Well, everything went fine until we decided to sync our iPads to our iMacs. Once synced, the movies are removed from the iTunes app as purchased and were gone! It took customer service over one hour to figure out the TV shows are in your iPOD app! Who knew? Never in a million years would I have found this. I do not use music files so never thought to look for my purchased videos in the iPOD app on the ipad or on itunes on the iMac. I assumed it would stay in the iTunes store as purchased. You can not copy or move them from the iTunes to your ipad. We called Apple separately, so actually, it was a 2 hour fiasco. Only one agent managed to find the movies.

FYI, TV shows you purchase from itunes on your ipad are removed and saved to your iPOD app when synced. Hope this saves another poor ignorant sole like myself from wasting so much time trying to find their purchases.

BTW, no where on Apple did I find this information. Customer service discovered it only by chance and did not have this info readily available to iPad owners.

-Linda

 

[wombat888]

It's too bad customer service didn't say this very early in the conversation - but yes. iTunes is for buying things only ... account management type stuff. All media you buy through iTunes is accessed through the iPod app. It is a little confusing at first.

 

[rorschach]

Yeah, I can definitely see this being confusing.

They really need to rename the iTunes icon to "iTunes Store" imo.

 

[ollybutch]

Doesn't it do the same thing on your iPhone?

 

[Shoesy]

yes it does do the same thing on your iphone and yes it is still confusing, as this does not happen on your mac / pc version of itunes.

first rule of UI - CONSISTENCY.

 

[Peter Harrison]

Hmm sounds weird. You mean if you download a movie using the iTunes app, it doesn't go to the Videos app? It must be played using the iPod app? Very odd.

Anyway, I know it's annoying that you have to at all, but can't you find the video on iTunes (on Mac), Get Info on the file, go to the Options tab and change the type to movie. That should put the video in as a Movie, and when you sync it will appear in the Videos app.

Very odd.

 

[jtara]

It makes perfect sense only if you understand the history of iTunes. iTunes originally was intended as an application for buying and listening to music on your computer, and syncing that music to an iPod. (That is, a real, physical iPod, not an iPod app on an iPhone, iPad, etc.) Prior to the iPod Touch, there was no iPod capable of buying music, as iPods had no way of connecting to the Internet.

For better or worse, on iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad, Apple decided to separate the functions of iTunes and iPod. I guess so they could get people to easily grasp the concept that "there's an iPod in there". iPod is the "music player" on those platforms.

Apple didn't go back and separate-out the functions of the store and music player on Macs and PCs, I suppose, because it would have confused existing users. There was little point in it, as well, because music purchased through iTunes is (or was at the time) DRM'd, so it wouldn't make sense for the user to substitute a third-party music player. And I'm sure they understood the value of having the store in your face any time you want to play your music!

On the iPod Touch and iPhone, there is limited screen real-estate. I assume this is why they made the decision to separate the functions. Combining the store and the music player would have just been too much for that tiny screen.

 

[Night Spring]

It makes perfect sense only if you understand the history of iTunes.

Exactly. And I think it also explains why it took Customer Service so long to figure out the problem. There was actually no "problem" at all, just a user who didn't understand that iTunes app and iPod app have separate functions. But it wouldn't occur to most Customer Support people that the issue is on such a fundamental level, so they spend time looking for the big problem that isn't there. Hopefully they've learned so they can help the next user who has the same problem much faster. While in general Apple products/software are easier to use than Windows, there are indeed many obviousness traps like this, where the usage is obvious to old-timers because they know the history of how things got the way they are, but it's totally befuddling to new users because it's counter-intuitive.