|
|
| Saturday, November 22, 2008 12:21 PM |
| (Last updated on Sunday, November 23, 2008 09:34 AM) | | This Apple Is Broken |
 by Fëanor |
So, as happened once before, I have come to the end of the space on my current iPod. (UPDATE: I had a 60GB and upgraded to an 80GB in April of last year. That means I've filled up that extra 20GB in about a year and a half. Now I'd be upgrading from 80GB to 120GB, giving me an extra 40GB of space. Assuming I fill it at the same rate, I should have a good three years worth of use out of the new iPod. Although that also assumes the new iPod will actually continue working for three years.) I had been filling it up slowly for quite some time, but I had become mostly complacent about it, believing that the end was still a ways off. Until a friend of mine at work shared his iTunes Library with me, and I saw a bunch of stuff I liked. He then brought in an entire external hard drive full of music and told me to take whatever I wanted. As I was merrily copying away, I suddenly got the dreaded message: there is not enough space to copy all the songs you've selected. Nooo!!!
Anyway, I did manage to clear off enough space to get on all the new stuff I wanted from Matt's collection, but since then poppy had me rip a bunch of CDs for her, and now I've already got a huge backlog of stuff that won't fit on my iPod. That means it's time to upgrade from 80GB to 120GB.
As I was thinking about going through this process, I felt certain that if I went into an Apple Store, they would have a way to copy all the data from my old iPod onto my new, blank one. I might have to pay a little extra, certainly, but I was willing to do it for the convenience, and for the feeling of security that would come from knowing it was being done by experts, and that none of my data would be lost in transit. But I called up the Apple Store this afternoon and spoke with a man there who told me this was not possible. Apple, the company that makes iPods, actually has no way of copying data directly from one iPod to another. Or, if they do have such a way, they're not going to let you use it. The guy at the Apple Store told me it's a privacy issue. But whose privacy are we talking about? They'd both be my iPods!!
This is absolutely flabbergasting to me. I have a device with data on it and all I want to do is purchase another version of the same device with more space and copy the data from the first device onto the second. This should not be difficult. It should be absolutely elementary. I'm certain that many people want to do this. And yet there is no good process in place. They actually expect you to have some mythical computer with iTunes installed that is exactly synched up with your 80GB iPod, so you can then simply drag all of that music onto your new iPod from iTunes. But who the hell keeps a computer sitting around with 80GB worth of music on it? That's insane! You'd have room for nothing else! I have an 80GB iPod so I can keep all the music on there and not on my computer.
I do back up my iPod occasionally, and the other night, after realizing I'd filled it up, I knew it was time to do that again. But that infuriates me, too. Apple doesn't really offer you any good way of doing this, either. I had to buy an unofficial application just so I could copy music back down off of my iPod and onto my computer. That is utterly ridiculous. The process of backing up the iPod, even with this software, is lengthy and painful and takes something on the order of 12 hours. Of course, most of that time I didn't have to sit there watching it, but still.
So yes, I do have a way of doing this. I have backed up my iPod (onto an external hard drive which I bought pretty much specifically for this purpose), and I can buy the new iPod and copy the music onto it. It's just incredibly frustrating to me that doing this is a very long, counter-intuitive, complex process that requires a computer acting as an intermediary between the devices, with third party software installed on it. That is totally unacceptable. |
|
|
|
|
| Tagged (?): iPod (Not), Music (Not) | |
|
|
|
|
Jim Genzano's books on Goodreads
