No iTunes for you

[mmcirvin]

iTunes for Windows requires Windows XP or 2000. This should not have been a surprise, since recent versions of iTunes don't support old legacy versions of Apple's own OS either. It's a pity, though, because ever since Steve Jobs announced its imminence, I'd been eagerly anticipating the day when samantha2074 would no longer have to use MusicMatch to manage her iPod. Some early reports imply that the user interface is sluggish on older PCs, anyway. Well, she's starting to get a hankering for a laptop.

That Belkin memory card reader should be smaller, prettier, and cheaper, but I want one, since it enables something I've wanted to do for a long time. I take my iPod on vacation anyway; I'd love to be able to take a gigabyte of photos and stash them there. The price does make me hesitate, since for that kind of money you can just buy a hefty second memory card, which gives you less extra capacity, but is also much less cumbersome. I might wait for some independent word on how well it works.

Further thought: You know, it's interesting that Apple added firmware support for external mics, memory card readers, and iPhoto syncing over Firewire, but left the construction of the actual devices to a third party. Given the general pattern of these things, somebody else ought to jump into the game with a better attempt. Paging Griffin?...

Comments

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

It may be folly to wonder, but does Windows iTunes work with other devices besides iPod?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Aha, there is the rub. I do not know, but I strongly suspect the answer is no, except in the trivial sense of manually hauling songs out of the iTunes library without using iTunes.

The situation on Macs was once different-- the initial versions of iTunes supported many third-party players-- but support for other players then rotted away after the iPod became a hit.

It's simple, really. iTunes was once a loss leader for Macintoshes, but now circumstances have driven Apple to change their strategy, and iTunes (including the Music Store) is now a loss leader for iPods. Thinking on this will explain everything. Some analysts express bafflement at such things as lack of WMA support, as if the planned profit center were the Music Store, but it's increasingly clear that that's not the case. The Music Store is not profitable-- though according to Apple, it's not a huge money sink either; it's pretty close to breakeven (I don't know if that includes stuff like TV advertising; I doubt it). So that means they can afford to scale it up massively as a further enticement for iPod sales, which is the real revenue stream they're aiming at.

(This also implies that all of their competitor å la carte download services in the PC market are the walking dead unless the economics change profoundly, with the single possible exception of Dell, which I think is developing a branded version of MusicMatch's new music store to integrate with their iPod knockoff.)

So if I had a Windows PC, I probably wouldn't mess with it unless I had or were thinking about buying an iPod, in which case I'd definitely use it.