Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Escaping The iTunes Prison

One of our sons completed his escape from the iEcosystem yesterday when we bought him a Galaxy S3 for his birthday, replacing his iPhone 3s. A month earlier, he had ditched his MacBook for a Windows 8 laptop so he could run his engineering software. He feels that the move, even using the much-maligned Windows 8 OS, has been extremely positive.

One of the best parts for him has been the move off of iTunes and onto Google Music. On the way home from Costco last night, where we had bought the phone, he was cranking up the car stereo, playing his music from the cloud over his S3.

He originally got into the Apple ecosystem because it was cool. He liked that the MacBook because it came with Garage Band and iMovie. When he got into his harder EE classes at school and needed to use circuit design software, cool didn't matter any more. Besides, he'd never really used Garage Band anyway.

His move makes 5 out of 6 of us in the family in the Google / PC world. Apparently, we're not all that uncommon.


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9 comments:

tim eisele said...

So, speaking of the "Much-maligned Windows 8", what do you think of it? My wife has a very old laptop running Windows XP that is on its last legs, and I'm wondering whether Windows 8 is OK for routine work as it stands, or if I should wait until after the first set of patches come out to take the plunge on a new machine?

K T Cat said...

Our son likes it. It takes a while to get used to it, but since he hasn't read any of the hit pieces on it, he didn't know he was supposed to hate it.

Jeff Burton said...

Timely post for me. I recently bought a new laptop with Windows 8. This morning I woke up thinking that I could actually conceive of switching to Apple. That's how bad it is. Every bad review you've read? Right on.

Yesterday I setup a new pc for one of our employees so she could do some compatibility testing. She was puzzled when the start screen came up. She said "It looks like a Microsoft phone."

Yup. Good luck with trying to get actual work done on a phone interface glued on top of a desktop metaphor.

K T Cat said...

Jeff, that's what I thought. I figure if I ever need a new PC and buy one with Win8 installed, I'll just scrub it clean and install Win7. I love my Win7 machines.

Anonymous said...

Eight is touch oriented; some functions are harder with just a mouse. If you get W8, try and get a laptop with a screen that supports touch.

Jeff Burton said...

Well, it might be time to start stock piling Windows 7 licenses, because they are hard to come by (new ones).

Mostly Nothing said...

I'm a hybrid. I recently found google music and transferred all my music from iTunes into it. And I really like 90% of google docs/google drive. I have 1 spreadsheet that I have password protected. You can't do that with google docs. They, falsely, believe that you don't need a password to encrypt a document because you have the password to get into the google drive to start with. That just isn't happening.

I have had an android phone since the day the original Droid came out. On my second, and I'd probably get another. My thunderbolt is seemingly fine, but it has a few issues. Like it reboots sometimes while using Waze.

My MacBook Pro is nearly 7 years, and I think I've been able to get it fixed. I had overheating issues for over a year. It would crash nearly daily, so it was like using Windows. But I disassembled it, got new thermal sensors and fans, and re thermal pasted the heatsink to the chips. It has been completely stable for 2 weeks now. Oh, I also ditched Google Chrome, as it was what would crash the machine. That and it just being 32 bit, made me give it up. Said, because I really liked it's features.

Lastly, I bought myself an iPad a couple weeks ago. I decided I really wanted a tablet. And I agonized over android tablets. I think I would have got the Nexus 10, had it not been sold out. And I really liked the Asus TF700T. But it came down to, I couldn't get any verification that the VPN software would work with our concentrator at work. It should have, it may have, there was a lot of work done that it would. But I couldn't verify.

Now it seems that I won't be able to connect the iPad through my phone without paying another boatload of money to Verizon.

As to Windows 8. I downloaded the beta as soon as I found out about it, and put it in a VirtualBox. So yeah, it runs. The interface is absolutely infuriating. I didn't spend a lot of time with it. It wasn't worth it.

MacOS X is much superior to any Windows out there. And so I put up with a bunch of the Apple antics because of it. Then again, I don't need to run engineering software.

I prefer android to iOS, iOS seems a little long in tooth. But the tablet is pretty nice. And it just works.

Mostly Nothing said...

typical. I talk about it and now my Mac just froze up.
first time in several weeks.

B-Daddy said...

I don't think Windows 8 is a good OS unless you are on a tablet; it is very oriented towards touch. I have a hybrid house both Android and iOS on the phones, Windows and Mac machines as well. I also keep a Windows machine running inside my iMac so that I can run Quicken and Outlook, which I think are best for their functions. I finally gave up on OpenOffice and run Office for Mac. There is always a back and forth on this technology stuff. The best move is not to be dogmatic and use what works best for your situation. I opt for ease of use, so my hybrid iMac with Windows on VMWare Fusion along with Office for Mac works best for me.