The only decent thing about iTunes might be the quality of some codecs used. But then there are equivalents that are just as good, that are freely convertable. As for the iTunes site there is also allofmp3, because if you want to pay for your downloads, why not download them as unprotected huge quality files in a format of your own choice? You must be crazy to prefer the protected iTunes format.
Also, read this. I don’t care much about Gnome (I like KDE more), but I see the parallel with Mac OS X, mainly the lack of a default explorer-tree mode and the lack of customization of the system colors, or the almost impossibility to do those things. Quite seriously, the dumbed-down UI for navigating folders is ridiculous. Sure, huge 128×128 icons, single-click operations and myriads of folder windows opening up everywhere are supposed to be easier for newbies (who then would need to buy huge LCD-screens), but heck they’ll overgrow it quickly (and personally I think it makes for a messy desktop that I find annoying and harder to use than a single-window open-in-place interface like for example that of TotalCommander). Simply put, the explorer tree is the perfect paradigm to navigate through a hierarchical file system. And don’t tell me that’s a concept that is hard to grasp. Hierarchies have always been drawn as trees in Real Life[tm], for example genealogy trees or military or corporations hierarchy charts.
Then of course system colors…
What can be more elitist than preventing the user from choosing the color he/she likes? Of course at least Mac OS X comes with the color inversion mode for not-quite-blind people. It is not exactly usable in my opinion. I would be better off with being able to select a black background in the apps I want it for, or system wide and have applications actually respect the color scheme I want. Surprisingly the dumbed-down worse-than-everything-else foolish Windows OS just does it right, and modern apps respect colors just fine. So why switch or go away from Windows 2000 (which is really Windows 2005 by now)?
Oh, not to mention the surprisingly rich variety of themes on Windows and custom apps that can customize the desktop. Hey even Microsoft sells a pack of extra themes. Why? Because people love to customize what they own. For the same reasons cars come in various colors and even mini iPods do too. Give back the freedom to let the user choose whatever colors they want — if it’s crappy, ugly or unusable, it’s not the designer’s problem!
Want another reason?
iTunes versus WinAMP. I can’t customize iTunes bloatware, while WinAMP is 200% customizable. More than I even want to know. Some might say the default WinAMP skin is ‘ugly’ but I have rarely seen it more than 2 seconds, which is the time needed to fetch and install my favorite skin! iTunes is bulky software (20 MB download), and it forces you to use the huge Quicktime suite (which we non-Mac users don’t even need, in fact, the alternative loads a lot faster, and has no phone-home crap like the Mac one!). iTunes also has this stupid big minimized mode that gets in the way and uses annoying colors. No, Apple, I don’t like everything to be white and shiny blue, I’d rather keep my vision for some more years thank you very much. Whereas WinAMP’s minimized mode (that fits in the window title height) is really great!
(Another lesson the GNU/Gnome or Mac OS X guys could learn if they allow themselves to look down from their throne first..)
WinAMP barely uses any CPU-power at all, iTunes is taking up 50%. WinAMP uses almost 8 Megs of RAM when loaded and playing, iTunes uses around 40 Megs, depending on how many codecs you have loaded and how big your iTunes window is. Really, iTunes-software developers seem to be a bunch of amateurs compared to the guys from nullsoft, who pretty much started it all when we’re talking about playing audio on computers.
What is it they said? 5% market share, wow, incredible! They must be doing everything right then!