>> I think he means tied up more in the sense of its 'difficult' to move it for the average user. sure you can pull out your content and sync it to android if you know what your doing (read - tech savvy-ish) but the vast majority of the users use iTunes and have never used anything else.
That's just BS, you can simply select all your music and videos and whatever in iTunes and drag it to a folder. Probably there's even an export function, but I'm not sure, because I've been 'locked in the Apple ecosystem' long enough I never had the urge to move my music around (it's been sitting in an iTunes library on a Linux AFS share all this time, which is also accessed by my Squeezebox. Talk about being locked in :-S). If all else fails you can just type 'iTunes' in Spotlight and it will come up with the folder that holds all your music, so you can copy it from there.
As for all the other content that 'makes you part of the ecosystem' on something like iOS or Windows Phone: all these iOS and WP apps are built for their respective platforms, so you wouldn't be able to magically transport them to an Android phone (or whatever platform) and run them anyway. You can move them between different phones and tablets that run the same OS if you want though.
The comparison with a DVD player that only plays discs from a single vendor is kind of stupid. A DVD player is like a fridge or a television, it simply performs one single function and that's what people buy it for. A HD-DVD never worked in a Blu-Ray player, and a VHS tape never worked in a Betamax player either. I can make up useless analogies all day.
It's not really clear what the author of this article actually proposes would be better than having a few 'ecosystems' like iOS, WP or Android. A one-size-fits-all ecosystem that everybody is forced to use? Many different ecosystems that somehow all have exactly the same features so you can use all your applications and content on every device?
Na I don't think it is BS, especially if you've spent time rating your music. I've had an IPod since they first came out and I've been rating my music ever since, and then using playlists to ensure anything I rate poorly doesn't get transferred. I really wouldn't be happy losing that information in a move to Android.
>> Na I don't think it is BS, especially if you've spent time rating your music. [..]. I really wouldn't be happy losing that information in a move to Android.
That's a tad specific don't you think? Do you really propose that every piece of software in the world should be able to use every single bit of metadata ever used in any other random piece of software, on any other OS and any other device? Most of the iTunes metadata is in the ID3 tags, so it gets transferred. Not sure about ratings, but if they are not there it's probably because not all ID3 tag versions support it, or because different players interpret these fields differently. Anyway, tools exist to export this data from an iTunes library, nobody is stopping you from using them.
I don't really see how this is different from moving your music + ratings from Android to any other OS anyway. It's not like I can export a music library from Android or WP and preserve and import all their non-standard metadata into iTunes, right?
Tried a while back, the experience wasn't great and I didn't find any approach that I thought was viable. I probably will try again soon though as I've since moved to Ubuntu so really need to get off ITunes.
It isn't very different that moving from Android to another OS. Just to be clear I'm not criticizing Apple specifically, I'm just saying that the process of moving is not quite as painless as you might hope for.
I do think it is in the big players interest to consider making it easier to move. I know why they don't but I do think a company like Apple, confident in their hardware and software, would stand to benefit as much as lose out from such standardization. People like me might give up on ITunes for a year or two until the retina airs are more reasonable then switch straight back, where as right now if I do take the pain of switching I'm unlikely to be back any time soon.
Some image formats have lousy meta data. iPhoto has a lovely face tagging feature that's easy to use and really great way to index photographs. Moving that information among accounts on the same machine is weird.
> I don't really see how this is different from moving your music + ratings from Android to any other OS anyway. It's not like I can export a music library from Android or WP and preserve and import all their non-standard metadata into iTunes, right?
That's kind of the point. Very few people are building open eco-systems anymore. Everyone is happy to lock in users by creating weird software.
That's just BS, you can simply select all your music and videos and whatever in iTunes and drag it to a folder. Probably there's even an export function, but I'm not sure, because I've been 'locked in the Apple ecosystem' long enough I never had the urge to move my music around (it's been sitting in an iTunes library on a Linux AFS share all this time, which is also accessed by my Squeezebox. Talk about being locked in :-S). If all else fails you can just type 'iTunes' in Spotlight and it will come up with the folder that holds all your music, so you can copy it from there.
As for all the other content that 'makes you part of the ecosystem' on something like iOS or Windows Phone: all these iOS and WP apps are built for their respective platforms, so you wouldn't be able to magically transport them to an Android phone (or whatever platform) and run them anyway. You can move them between different phones and tablets that run the same OS if you want though.
The comparison with a DVD player that only plays discs from a single vendor is kind of stupid. A DVD player is like a fridge or a television, it simply performs one single function and that's what people buy it for. A HD-DVD never worked in a Blu-Ray player, and a VHS tape never worked in a Betamax player either. I can make up useless analogies all day.
It's not really clear what the author of this article actually proposes would be better than having a few 'ecosystems' like iOS, WP or Android. A one-size-fits-all ecosystem that everybody is forced to use? Many different ecosystems that somehow all have exactly the same features so you can use all your applications and content on every device?