Stephen Withers
Friday, 08 August 2008 07:30
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 4
Or a friend comes round with a notebook and wants to play some music from its copy of iTunes. Our original mythical iTunes user has a good set of speakers attached to their PC, so the friend turns on iTunes sharing. But the share doesn't show up. Why? Our user opted out of the Bonjour installation.
All of that goes against Apple's "it just works" mantra. (Please don't misinterpret that as an assertion that Apple products always work flawlessly.)
None of these functions are unrelated to iTunes in the way that the Google or Yahoo! toolbars are unrelated to printer drivers, or that StarOffice is to a Java update. They are integral features of the software - it's just that they are most sensibly implemented externally to the main program. That's especially true of Bonjour, which is used by applications other than iTunes.
The complaint is that these 'unnecessary' extras use CPU cycles and memory. Well, as that's not really an issue far as I can see. The CPU consumption is negligible (0 percent on my Windows system), and code that's loaded but not being used gets swapped out into virtual memory. Yeah, it's taking up some disk space, but have you looked at how cheap storage is these days?
Now, about MobileMe itself.
Yes, the rollout went very badly. If you want to read what Steve Jobs told his troops this week,
Ars Technica (among others) has what it claims to be the full text of the Jobs-o-gram, and we're not aware of any question about its veracity.
In particular, he said it was a mistake to introduce all of the MobileMe functions in one go instead of a phased rollout.
Find out how I fared with MobileMe on
page 3, then share your experience in our forums. (But no "MobileMe is a POS" comments, please! You can do better than that.)
