• by sondra , September 22, 2011

Now I’m not sure who beat up whom for their lunch money back in the day, but I think it’s safe to say that this rivalry between Apple and Windows sometimes gets out of hand. I was raised in a world of PCs, but ever since my major at Ball State required I have a Mac, I have been a loyal Mac girl. Even before I was a Mac user, however, I had two iPods. The first was a second-generation iPod Nano, which I had for almost two years before buying myself an iPod touch for my eighteenth birthday.

Now, the Nano was great for the whole first year that I owned it, but just after that it began to have a few small problems. The click wheel became completely desensitized and the hold switch didn’t do a thing. So when the iTouch came out, of course I had plenty of reason for wanting to upgrade, or at least that’s how I justified it. I gave the Nano to my younger sister and bought my iTouch the next day. Again, this device worked just fine for the first year, and only for the first year. Around that time, iTunes ran an automatic update on my device that made it impossible for me to see the pictures I had put on it, even though they still took up a good chunk of the memory. Shortly after that, the power/hold button ceased to work, along with the volume buttons – fortunately I could control that on the touch screen. When I took my iTouch into a Genius Bar, they tried a reset – which I had already tried myself, seeing as it’s the only quick fix in the instruction manual – and told me they couldn’t fix it. I would have to get a new one if I wanted my battery life to last more than three hours or to be able to use the full eight gigs of memory I paid for.

Feeling jaded by Apple, I bought a Zune to replace my iTouch. I had two friends with Zunes, and each of theirs had lasted them at least four years already and had no problems. I did my research, chose the one I wanted, and brought it home to set it all up. That’s when I was first struck by the pure hatred that flows out from the Apple-Microsoft relationship. Zune software will not load on a Mac. It’s not compatible. I had iTunes on a PC for years, but a Zune library on a Mac? Out of the question. But instead of giving up, I did some more research and installed a program called VMWare Fusion, which is supposed to run Windows in a window on your Mac desktop. It does, and I was able to install the Zune software, but it is painstakingly slow just to import a CD or to put a song on my Zune. It took 4 hours one weekend to put 10 albums on my Zune. And yet another problem with this brilliant fix: the Zune software automatically imported all of the songs on my Mac, except for those I actually bought on iTunes.

So now I have an iTouch I can’t turn off or hold, therefore giving it an almost useless battery life, that I use when I want to listen to songs I bought on iTunes, and a Zune for when I want to listen to the few songs that did transfer programs. The Zune has had amazing battery life, considering I rarely charge it due to how slow it makes my computer run. So I guess all of this boils down to: why can’t Apple and Microsoft just get along, if only for the frustrated customers?