Mac Mini Sold, XP Media Center PC Bought and iTunes Pisses Me Off

A few months back, I bought a Mac mini for general messing around and for hooking into the home theater. After several attempts to adjust the video output to match my HDTV in my home theater, it sat, unused.

After not even booting it for 4 months, I decided it was wasted tech and threw it up on Craigslist for $350 for the first person to come and pick it up. I had 2 sales fall through and ended up relisting it, finally selling it this morning. With said $350, I headed over to the Dell Outlet Center and found myself a Windows Media Center PC for about the same cash.

If you ever look for Dell machines and haven't checked out their outlet center, you owe it to yourself. They've got the same basic workstations that they sell for $300-$350 on the front page going for $200-$250. I picked up a P4 3.0Ghz, 512MB, DVDRW, 80GB, Radeon 128MB (DVI out) for $350 plus shipping, meaning I didn't really have to "spend" any new money to go from something sitting idle to something I'll use.

Ever the pragmatist, this is a win in my book. I use whatever works without any real loyalties to any one platform.

Of course my joy in the swap also probably tapped into my recent frustrations with iTunes on Friday. There was an album where iTunes was the only digital version I could get. I bought it and planned to do what I've done with dozens of other iTunes albums: burn to CD and rip to MP3.

I hit the burn button and was told that it wouldn't fit on one CD.

Fine.

So, I grabbed a CDRW, figuring I'd just do the first half, rip it and then do the second. Apparently Steve Jobs had other ideas.

See, the disc was apparently already full of data. No big deal I thought. That's why I use CDRW's: for disposable stuff. Every CD burning app I've ever used just asks permission to rewrite it. Not iTunes.

Nope. iTunes doggedly insists on a "blank" CD. So, I trekked over to the office and grabbbed a real blank disc. It then got about half way done burning only to tell me that my drive couldn't handle the burning speed. What? All of the recent apps I've used set the burning speed to automatic and adjust as necessary to keep things running smooth. This is a problem that was solved like 5 years ago.

I dug around in the options until I found the burning speed and slowed it way down. Of course now I had a corrupt CDRW, so I had to use another tool to erase it before iTunes would try again.

It finally burned the first half of the album and I was set to open EAC and rip it and then erase it with some other software. iTunes then ejected the disc and kept ejecting it every time reinserted it.

I made one more trip into the office for another blank disc and finished. Only then could I finish the task.

That's part of the Mac experience that bugs me. If you do things in the prescribed manner, things are amazingly smooth. However, deviate a bit and you're on your own. Underneath, they've made it much more hacker friendly, but the surface, the interface, is still very "wizard" like offering a single path for many things without handling the inevitable exceptions.

Maybe that's why I get really sick of hearing Mac zealots saying "it just works". Because, for stuff like this, it doesn't. For stuff like this and for pretty much every interaction I've ever had with Macs (and yes, I've had a lot), it's just another computer. It's prettier and manages some common tasks really well, but it's no miracle. It's just another computer.

In other words, if your life can fit neatly into the iLife box, you're probably going to be happy with the iLife way. If not, no amount of white plastic is going to make up for it.