Enough of the MobileMe moaning Minnies

Stephen Withers
Friday, 08 August 2008 06:30

Opinion and Analysis

Can we please get a sense of proportion about the various issues being bandied around concerning MobileMe? Everyone from Steve Jobs down realises the rollout was a disaster, but some of the whining is becoming tedious.

I'm particularly contemptuous of a minority of Windows users who got up in arms because the latest version of iTunes added a MobileMe item to their Control Panel.

It seems to me that these individuals have become so used to add-on items such as browser toolbars being packaged with applications that they instinctively classify anything outside the main program as being crapware.

What's iTunes' purpose? Basically, it rips and plays music, downloads content from the iTunes Store, and syncs data (primarily, but not exclusively music and videos) on the computer with iPods and iPhones. That syncing may be done via a USB cable, but in the case of an iPhone it can also happen via MobileMe - hence the control panel.

iTunes also needs Bonjour, because that's how it finds other copies of iTunes on the LAN for sharing playlists, and it needs Apple Mobile Device Support, because that's how it detects that an iPod touch or iPhone has been plugged in.

Think about what would happen if Apple didn't include these supporting services when iTunes is installed: someone would buy an iPhone or iPod touch, plug it into their computer and... nothing.

So they'd install Apple Mobile Device Support, and then wonder why updates from Outlook aren't being pushed to the iPhone. Oh, there's no MobileMe support, so let's mess around installing it now.

What else can go wrong in this scenario? Please read on.