onetonnemusic

So, this morning, said coworker comes into work with a shiny new iPod. Slightly disappointed and annoyed, but nontheless willing to plonk down the cash to enjoy iPod related music listening. The point is coming soon folks. So he had a bunch of music that he has purchased from the iTunes store. Now here's the thing that bites. Even though when he realized that he no longer had a copy of the music on his desktop - (and subsequently lost the copy on his iPod obviously) and when he went to Purchase another copy of said music - the apple store recognized that he had previously bought it. And advised him to goto: Advanced > check for purchases.

Which informed him that he had all the purchased music available to his account. Less of course, every goddamn album he had downloaded off iTunes. It seems that even though the Apple store recognises that he has purchased the music in the past, he simply cannot download another copy to his machine. Music he copied onto his iPod which died after a year and 3 months.

I often hear stories about iPods dying, and being an office nerd, I also spend a lot of time helping folks with thier iPod problems. In a department with about 50 people working in my immediate area, I have had to troubleshoot 6 (maybe more) iPods, 3 of which had irrecoverable hard drive problems. I have an iPod myself, and this worries me slightly. It seems you don't have to ask far to discover someone who has had an iPod and had a bad experience. It seems when they work, they work, great. When they don't...

What I think is important to take from this: even the more flexible DRM systems still suck absolute goats balls. Secondly, buy Apple shares. These guys are absolutely minting it on products of questionable quality. And still they come up smelling of roses - Apple still have an amazing reputation. Which I find absolutely incredible.