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Stop the Noiz

It's Not the iPod's Fault

Frank Fox - 2008.03.31 - Tip Jar

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The other day I bought a new toaster. This thing is amazing; it can toast a piece of bread faster than any other toaster on the market. Everyone I know has this brand of toaster, so I bought one too. At first I thought it was really cool how well it could toast bread. It was truly better than any toaster I ever owned before.

Now I'm not so sure.

The other day my space heater went out. It has been really cold in the city, and I couldn't live without the extra heat. I got the brilliant idea to use my toaster as a space heater. My space heater was only rated at 15,000 BTU, but my toasted said it could do 20,000 BTU. I figured that I'd be even warmer than before, until I read the fine print. It says that I can only use it as a toaster. Leaving it on for long periods of time may be dangerous.

Now I hate my toaster: It really let me down when I needed it. Sure, it still makes great toast, but I can't use the heat to keep my feet warm. That is just totally wrong. It's just a heater after all; why didn't they just design it to stay on a little longer.

This whimsical story was penned to make a point about wanting one product to do the work of another.

Tony Dennis rants on the Inquirer's website that his computer's hard drive crashed and he couldn't restore his music collection from his iPod. Tony, I feel your pain of having a hard drive crash. It has happened to us all. Because it is so common, you should have planned for it and made a backup copy of all the important content, including your music.

I am assuming that after the hard drive crash your iPod still had all the songs on it, and that the iPod continues to work fine in every aspect, but nothing from Apple has ever claimed that you could restore music from an iPod. If you thought it did, you were simply wrong about how it worked.

Yes, it should be capable of restoring your music, but Apple didn't design it that way. Wishing that someone's product worked differently doesn't make you right. No one lied to you about the abilities of the iPod, and it is still works the way Apple sold it.

Tony, if you had wanted to, you could have used the space on your iPod to make a backup of your hard drive. This backup would not have been playable, but you could have restored any data, music, or other files.

You obviously didn't use this feature. Instead you think it more appropriate to cry to the world how wrong Apple is and how the iPod isn't good enough. It is Apple's fault that you had to pay for a program to fix your problem.

Tony, get a grip. There are many backup solution you could be using: weekly backup software, hard drive RAID, burn a copy to CD or DVD, or buy Apple's new Time Capsule. (As soon as I could afford it, I stuck two 500 GB drives into my computer and turned on Apple's built-in RAID software.)

Apple really has gone out of its way to help people like you and me back up our data. I hear Time Machine or .mac and the new Time Capsules are great backup solutions. Tony, Apple helps all it can, but in the end you are responsible for your own backup plan.

Recent Stop the Noiz Columns

My Windows 7 Launch Party, 10.23. "The final surprise was that things started to slow down during my demo. I had XP Mode running, several open windows, and a half dozen other apps running."
Windows 7: Bait for Windows XP and Vista Users, 10.19. While Win 7 is competing with OS X in features, it's target audience is Windows users, not Mac users.
Windows 7 vs. MacBook, 10.14. A free copy of Windows 7 leads to installation problems and two days of frustration, like no 64-bit Boot Camp Utilties.
Moving Data at the Speed of Light (Peak), 10.02. Intel's new Light Peak data transfer protocol is designed for 10 gibabits per second, with plans to push it to 100 Gb/s in the future.
More in the Stop the Noiz index.

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