Cogs can think.

My parents bought their first mp3 player today. They bought the new iPod Nano. I was - obviously - tasked with buying it for them, setting it up, and uploading the first few CDs. This is my first hands-on experience with an iPod that lasted longer than 3 seconds (I’m the world’s worst geek). Two things.

1. You need an iTunes account for downloading artwork. If you don’t have an account, and don’t want one either, like my parents or myself, you need to rely on 3rd party applications to draw artwork from Amazon’s database. Hardly what I call user friendly.
2. I set the Nano up at my own house, using my PowerBook (I don’t wish to infect my Windows box with Apple’s crappy Windows software). Later today, I visited my parents’ to give them the Nano and give them some instructions on how to add albums to iTunes and the Nano - and things went tits up. Apparently, an iPod first hooked up to a Mac cannot be connected to a Windows machine (what my parents have) afterwards. As a geek, I know this is a HFS+ issue, but what about all those normal users Apple always says it targets? Why couldn’t they just format the device with fat32 in the first place, like all other players do? Or, better yet, why don’t they include an HFS+ driver in iTunes:Windows? Why don’t they warn me upon first hooking the Nano up? Give me a bloody choice at least? Now I had to reset the Nano, loosing all the work I had already done!

First iPod experience: EPIC FAIL.