My Experiences with Apple
by St.Lucifer
Apple does not make good software. Case in point: that horrible iTunes they keep pushing on you. It's just as you said. It makes extra copies of the music you already have. It comes packaged with that horrible Quicktime player that only takes up space on your hard drive. I remember one time, if you weren't careful, it would fool you into downloading and installing their craptastic Safari browser. I remember a friend who bought a Macbook Pro. She wasn't very happy with OSX. She took it to me and we installed Vista on it. If you recall, Vista was supposedly the worst Microsoft had to offer at that time and it worked smooth as butter on Mac Hardware. After installing Vista I never saw her boot the machine to OSX as far as I remember.
My brother had one of the 1st gen shuffles. Somehow the firmware died and it got used as a glorified USB drive. I have a 2nd gen shuffle. I won it at a Xmas raffle. I used it for 2 weeks and went back to my Creative Zen MP3 player because of iTunes. The 2nd gen iPod is sitting in it's original packaging somewhere in my closet gathering dust.
The same friend who had a Macbook Pro (she's a rich girl) has been using an iPhone 4s. She said she jailbreaks it for it to work properly. Recently, she just gave me her iPod classic (5th gen) since she isn't using it. I did a little research and it turns out you can install custom firmware (Rockbox) on that iPod. After installing Rockbox it became a joy to use (it can now play FLAC).
My conclusion from my experiences with Apple are:
1. If you buy cheap, you get what you pay for.
2. Apple software is crap. Stay away from it.
3. If you can afford some of the higher end models and aren't afraid of modifying them they can be great products.