#FF00AA

There’s been a lynch mob over at MacDailyNews because some tech columnist complained about his difficulty installing iTunes on a Windows PC. The author started his rant with an “Apple cultists” joke, because that’s what columnists are paid to do, write rants and try to be humorous; sure enough, Mac fans were quick to prove him right.

You know what? Apple is widely known for making cool machines (from computers to music players or even defunct PDAs); they’re insufficiently known for making a great operating system; what they’re not good at, however, is making Windows software. (And why should they? They’re Apple! Well, they should because they want to sell iPods to PC users.) More than once I’ve been embarrassed after I recommended to a Windows user to install iTunes, because it’s so cool and convenient and well designed or whatever. Sure, the program’s design is the same (except for iTunes 6’s menubar that ridiculously ends up in the middle of the title bar), but the most striking difference, besides resource usage (never really compared, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Windows version was even more of a resource hog), is the installer: it takes eons, it forces QuickTime Player on you, and more often than not it fails.

Oh, I’m sure on a brand-new PC, or a very clean Windows setup, the install would work just fine. (When I was on a PC, I never had a problem with it. I actually used Windows XP for years without a real hitch.) But the thing is, real-life Windows setups are anything but clean. That’s the way the world is, that’s the reason we bought Macs, there’s no changing it, and, more importantly, most other programs manage to get around it. How is it not Apple’s fault that iTunes fails to install on a system that manages to install and run Office, the Adobe CS suite, Firefox and Thunderbird, and whatever other applications average Windows users have? What’s so low-level about a freaking music player that it’ll trigger unfathomable incompatibilities with anything but the cleanest Windows systems? (Oh, I know what: either QuickTime — and if iTunes for Windows is coded in such a way that it actually requires QuickTime, then it’s poorly designed — or the Rendezvous / Bonjour runtime — and then why don’t they just disable it, make it optional or something, if they can’t get it to work? it’s not really the most important functionality for someone who just brought an iPod home.)

Everyone’s been talking about the iPod halo effect: making the iPod so representative of Apple’s perfection that it’ll make PC users want to switch. Well, if PC users are judging the quality of Apple’s software from iTunes for Windows, there isn’t going to be much more switching than there’s already been.

(And, of course, when Apple users do behave as cultists, it doesn’t help, either.)