Mac users swear by iTunes. While Windows users swear at it.
When the Windows version of iTunes was introduced back in 2003, Steve said, ‘iTunes for Windows is probably the best Windows app ever written”. I respectfully disagree.
iTunes on Windows is something that I dread using. Considering iPod users are forced to use iTunes, it makes me wonder how the iPod became the most popular music player in the world. Similarly, mention Quicktime to any Windows user and prepare to be amused with the amount of hate this little application has. Just to be clear, on the Mac one cannot live without Quicktime.
If you take a good look at both the applications, you will notice that both are very similar to their Mac counterparts. What makes them suck so much on Windows and work so amazingly on the Mac? And more importantly, what opinion does this leave Windows users of Apple’s applications?
No matter how much Steve Jobs complains about how difficult the Windows coding environment, the end user finds a buggy, slow application which doesn’t work half as good as the other offerings on Windows. Quicktime is only installed as a necessary evil for when the average user wants to pay a quicktime trailer. iTunes on the other hand gets installed because of its iPod fame. But even a Core 2 Duo cannot render the Cover flow interface of iTunes like a 1.33Ghz iBook G4 does.
Quicktime on Windows of course is nearly non functional. First of all are the ‘Buy Me!’ nags that show on launch (which Mac users never see). Second, hardly any formats work in Quicktime! On the Mac we have Perian and a bunch of other codecs that make playing video very easy. On Windows Quicktime cannot be customised beyond its preferences.
One thing Apple is doing right, is Safari. The browser has proven to be quite a competitor on Windows. Although it lacks support from third party plugin makers, it still is very speedy and feature rich to compete with the rest of the browsers. Most of the non-geeks I have recommended Safari to have spoken only good words for this browser. I was hoping that iTunes 8 would tell a similar tale, but alas, it just gets slower.
However, there’s still hope. Apple is putting Leopard on a diet, and will soon release Snow Leopard (that’s not how it works in nature though). With Snow Leopard, Apple is removing all the junk code, and putting in some new technologies, and rewriting some of the existing code of applications. Basically making it built for speed and the future.
I do hope that in this grand scheme of things, Apple cleans out the code of Quicktime and iTunes on Windows so that Windows users realise what they are missing (and make it more bearable when we are forced to use a PC). Make them feel like the only two Windows applications that are worth looking at, are made by Apple. Make them want to use Quicktime and iTunes, by choice, not by force. Make them want to switch to a Mac and be done with all that mess.
