quote:Lee intoned: ...The point is that a large proportion of the many millions of poeple who bought them got them home, opened them up, and found to their disbelief that despite the large letters saying For MAC and PC on the box, there was no way to connect it to a PC without going out and buying an extra cable.
That is irritating. It'd cost them, what $0.55USD per unit? You're charging how many hundreds of dollars more for a premium digital music player, you'd think they'd include the bells and whistles. My iPod came with a Firewire cable, but that was back before they had the USB2.0 ones. A couple years ago when I bought an EPSON printer that said right on the box that it was Mac and PC compatible, it came with a parallel cable but no USB. I'd planned on using it for both. Turns out it was a crap printer and the heads kept drying up. The HP I bought after that came with a USB cable.
Cartman: Here's another story: A retired old man got really sick of the spings in his old rover's seat poking him in the ass and dealing with all the bullshit and toll-roads and swerving madly around all the spikey obstacles and instead spent a bit more to get himself a nice luxury sedan with plush seats and a killer stereo. The last straw had been when a recall had actually damaged his car and the dealership had been completely insensitive. His luxury sedan wasn't as fast as some of the other cars (but it could certainly keep up), and it couldn't handle all of the other roads (a surprising number of them, yes, but not all). The important thing for the old man was that his sedan would take him where he wanted to go and his ass would hurt less.
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
I am sooo dosapointed that your "dream job" has nothing to do with porn.
(shakes head in dismay)
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Lee: ...despite the large letters saying For MAC and PC on the box, there was no way to connect it to a PC without going out and buying an extra cable.
If I'm understanding this conversation correctly, the iPods come with only a Firewire cable. Since they lack a USB cable, you claim that PC users have to buy extra cables to connect them. The thing is, thats not quite true. Both my current PC motherboard and my old one have two Firewire ports.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Maybe that's a US thing. But most PCs I've seen in the UK and in NZ don't have Firewire ports. In fact I've yet to see one that does - seen a lot of add-in cards for Firewire in online stores and in shops, but as yet having them as a standard motherboard feature is nowhere near as common as you seem to believe.
posted
*shrug* I'm just saying thats its not an entirely unreasonable stance for them and if it saves me $4, all power to them. Besides, don't they normally put what cables and accessories are included on the box?
Registered: Mar 1999
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-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
Registered: Sep 2000
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See, though, for your analogy to be appropriate, the man's car trouble would be due less to the quality of the car, and more to his own inability or unwillingness to maintain it. Say, he went three years without changing the oil, and then cursed it for not running well. So then he goes and buys a new car that costs twice as much, but isn't capable of driving to half the places the old one could.
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Ritten: But they didn't, thus Lee's point.....
Well, maybe I'm missing something, but while he's stated the "for PC and Mac in big letters" thing twice, he hasn't said what else is on the box.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
It is a reasonable assumption. If you bought a printer 5 years ago, you didn't check the box to make sure it included a parallel cable, because you knew that it would. Likewise, if you bought one nowadays you know it would include a USB cable. You don't advertise something as being for a product, and then don't supply a way of actually connecting them. I've known three people in the past two years buy digital video cameras, and each one of them got a firewire card in the box. If they can supply an entire card, I'm sure Apple can splurge for a cable.
As for PC's coming with firewall...almost every case I've seen for the past few years has some sort of firewall socket (or at least hole) on the front, but none of the motherboards have come with it as standard, so the actual port does nothing. Possibly I'm just not buying expensive enough motherboards, but if 10% of PC users have a firewall socket, I'd be very surprised.
And as pointed out, a USB lead would probably cost them less than a dollar a unit, so I really doubt they'd have to change the price to include it. If anything, since Macs come with USB sockets, it'd make sense to take out the firewire lead and just have a USB one in there.
Lee: There's someone where I work who's a bit of a computer, well, nerd. Ponytail, beard, wears black a lot. He says that last year, the iPods were released in firewire and USB versions, and they weren't compatible. So while it might have said "for PC and Mac" on the box, it meant "PCs with firewire and Mac", and that it made that clear on the packaging. Did it?
quote:Originally posted by Balaam Xumucane: I'm going to trust that you aren't intimating that my father is an idiot, Liam.
I would never insinuate that your father is an idiot, Balaam.
quote:He had been using IE more or less exclusively until very recently.
Not at all.
quote:Also AOL.
In any way.
quote:The re-installs were at the insistence of tech-support from Intego, McAffe, AOL and the TurboTax guys.
Tech support will ask you to reinstall Windows if your nose has developed an itch. The first line people are just working off a flow chart most of the time. The trick is to get them to put the problem through to the second line team, or more specialised troubleshooters. THEN you might have found what the problem was.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Liam: I don't know, to tell the truth. I don't have the packaging handy.
But. . . to add insult to injury, you can't actually GET a USB cable for the iPod. What you get is actually a combo USB-Firewire cable, with two cables coming out of the iPod end of the rig. So now I have two fucking Firewire cables!
And also, why the hell does iTunes need to be a 21Mb download? Because it's combined with QuickTime, of course. So you can't download one without the other. So despite the fact I already had QT on my laptop and was quite happy, when I decided to upgrade to the new version of iTunes (Christ only knows why, it seemed a good idea at the time) I had to install the audiovisual abortion as well.
quote:Originally posted by Lee: ...So you can't download one without the other....
Well, you can download and install QT without iTunes. Just not vice-versa.
quote:Originally posted by Lee: So despite the fact I already had QT on my laptop and was quite happy, when I decided to upgrade to the new version of iTunes (Christ only knows why, it seemed a good idea at the time) I had to install the audiovisual abortion as well.
I'm not sure I'd characterize QT quite that way. And in answer to your question here's one opinion.
Registered: Sep 2000
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quote:Originally posted by Balaam Xumucane: Nice. You just dissed my dad. Seriously, do you even have any friends?
Oh, calm down. I wasn't seriously insulting your dad, who I obviously have never met or know anything about. It was just my humble attempt to be mildly humorous. If I failed, then by all means carry on picking out misplaced words in my posts.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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