Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

It has to be said–Apple iTunes sucks. It’s freakishly slow on Windows. I don’t know what the problem is, but plugging in my iPhone into a USB 2.0 port to sync it causes the whole system to come to a drag. I’ve got 3 Gbs Seagate drives, 4 Gb of RAM, and I’m still running Windows XP so I can’t even blame Vista.

That leaves Apple holding all the blame. It’s not just syncing either. These are all slow:

• Importing new songs into my Library of 15K items (probably due to parsing, editing in place, and writing to disk a 10+ Mb XML file for each song) [who uses XML as a database...]
• Searching through my Library
• Playing any kind of high bitrate media or encoded video (I have an nVidia 8800 with 512 MB of RAM… it should be able to play a little 720p video smoothly)

Suspiciously, Mac users don’t complain iTunes is slow. Either Steve Jobs literally makes them duller so they tend not to notice the passage of time, or it’s just iTunes on Windows that sucks.

This is interesting, and at the same time scary. According to Engadget, Apple’s Fairplay (TM) DRM has been hacked for the new iPhone 3G App Store, and the applications themselves are appearing on torrent sites:

There’s also a more traditional crack which allows apps to be stripped of DRM and shared without using iTunes, although you’ll have to jailbreak your phone to do it. The first app to be widely pirated is Super Monkey Ball, which isn’t surprising, and it seems like several other apps have followed it out onto various torrent sites. In addition to the relatively simple jailbreak procedure, running cracked apps requires you to open up SSH access and do some mucking around, so unless your time is worth less than $10, it’s probably not worth it.

The latest apps appearing on a torrent search for iPhone include Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D, Super Monkey Ball, iBeer, and Enigmo, a total (so far) of $32.96 of potential revenue destroyed by hackers.

The original post at Haklabs, Super Monkey Ball iPhone – Cracked, explains the motivation for the hack:

After the WWDC ‘08 Keynote, everyone wanted this iPhone game, it received almost as much hype as the iPhone itself. Super Monkey Ball from SEGA definitely has some good qualities, however it does have some bad qualities as well. First off, this game costs $9.99 which might be a little steep for some.

1. Make sure you are on firmware 2.0
2. Download the Super Monkey Ball Cracked file and extract the .ipa file from the archive to your desktop.
3. Drag and drop the Monkey Ball.ipa file into the iTunes application folder and wait for it to install.

So because an irate iPhone user believes the Super Monkey Ball game costs too much at $9.99, he creates a hacked version and gives it away for free. I actually paid for Super Monkey Ball, because it’s one of the few applications worth my $9.99, and I advise you to as well. If there’s no financial market for creating great iPhone applications, the entire market will suffer, and we’ll have crappy apps to run on our $400 phones.

Reading Spat with Rogers leaves Canadian Apple stores without iPhones on Apple Insider leaves me with a sense of unease. It’s certainly Apple’s right to send shipments of the highly desired iPhone 3G where it wants, but to screw an entire country because it doesn’t like the action of one carrier won’t help it’s reputation with Canadians, who now suffer arbitrarily:

Apple, disgusted with Rogers Wireless for dumping egregious service plans on would-be iPhone 3G buyers, has decided that its Canadian retail stores will have no part in helping the carrier market the new handset to customers, AppleInsider has learned.

As a result, Canadian Apple Retail stores won’t be selling the new 3G touchscreen phones come Friday, representatives for the Cupertino-based company said during a private conference call on Monday evening. Instead, it will be up to Rogers and its partner Fido to lock subscribers into steep 3-year contracts that require a minimum monthly payment of $60 for just 150 minutes, 75 text messages, and 400MB of data.

So because Apple doesn’t like Rogers’ unfair pricing, they’re not going to sell their phones in Canada, with this snarky quote “We have nothing to do with the service plans. Those are Rogers’ plans.” On the other hand, iPhone Atlas suggests that Apple never intended to sell the iPhone 3G at any retail location, which would make this fight nothing but FUD.