Taken alone this might be unfortunate, but given Apple's long-standing trend of upselling storage at hugely inflated prices it's pretty damning.
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Devil’s advocate— 1.25gb additional storage for 2500 songs isn’t really with the effort to scam people, particularly when you’re already one of the most profitable companies in the world
The other advocate - that’s exactly how they’re one of the most profitable company in the world. Fleecing customer - by making them buy chargers, earphones (ensuring its wire gets dirty faster than any other), extra storage, open repair hostile devices. List is quite long really.
Besides that’s not the only place they eat storage. Actually it’s so opaque you don’t really know what’s “really” happening.
> by making them buy chargers.
I'm still using the charger I got with my 2008 (pre-unibody) MacBook Pro for my 2014 MacBook Pro, which is perfectly operational in 2021.
I'm using a Spigen 48W USB-C + USB-A charger (and a 60W, 2m Baseus USB-C to USB-C cable) to charge my Macbook Air M1 2020.
I'm using a Belkin wireless charging mat for iPhone X.
So, no.
> earphones (ensuring its wire gets dirty faster than any other)
Making rugged plastics requires a lot of nasty chemicals. Either be nasty and durable, or be less nasty and be less durable.
Also none of my Apple devices' cables have frayed (incl. a 30 pin connector cable for my now lost iPod Nano 2G). How come?
> extra storage
I think their 200G plan has good bang for the buck, and even I can't fill it up with normal usage.
> Actually it’s so opaque you don’t really know what’s “really” happening.
System preferences -> iCloud provides pretty good rundown of which application is saving what, including the ones you can't see in your drives (i.e. game saves, application stuff, whatnot).
So while Apple is not the best company out there, it's not that worse either.
P.S.: Repairability is a problem. I have nothing to say about that, but at least battery change program is very good. They've even found and changed some damaged parts in my phone, for free, when I sent it in just for a battery change.
For chargers I believe they're referring to the fact that apple stopped including chargers with new iphones.
> Either be nasty and durable, or be less nasty and be less durable.
In my experience apple cables are both nasty and less durable than most other cables I own. I have multiple old 30 pin cables that are frayed at the connector, my old ipod headphones had electrical tape on the cable where the rubber was breaking, and all my apple cables are a gross yellow color, while similarly old non-apple cables I own are all still perfectly white.
> I think their 200G plan has good bang for the buck
It's average at best. It's the same price as google for monthly payments, but google is cheaper if you pay yearly.
Probably true.
I'd argue, though, in my experience working at a large tech company, the impact of a particular decision on the company's overall bottom line rarely comes into play for a decision like this. Instead, it's a mid-level manager who has been given a goal to increase a particular number, and will be rewarded based on quarterly performance against said arbitrary number.
Which manager put in their OKRs for the year to grow usage of Apple's Music Library using a primary metric of total storage consumed? Now, they didn't necessarily cause the insertion of blank space into the files, but they'll be damned if they let some engineer make a change that makes it significantly harder to hit their growth goal for the year.
Organizations don't cause things to be the way what they are: the dynamics between people inside of organizations cause things to be the way that they are.
Never attribute to malice that which you can attribute to incompetence.
That's a good maxim for dealing with people you meet in real life. It's a useless maxim for dealing with trillion dollar multinationals.
Having briefly worked (as a grunt with no visibility into exec decisions) in the maelstrom that is apple, I think the only sinister thing that could be happening is no one has an incentive to fix things like this, they only get exposure / promotions on shipping new features or large quality bugs. And so if they weren't bothered by it, and no execs we're bothered by it, it would just go unfixed.
I'd say "dangerous" more than "useless." Big companies have plenty of incompetence to go around, but they also have plenty of malice disguised as incompetence, because children learn how to play dumb before they can talk and don't get worse at it when they grow up to become megacorp employees.
Sure this 1.25gb:2500files is not massive - But if this little conspiracy theory is true it is easy to imagine them doing this sort of file padding in other systems as well. A little bit here and there adds up quick.
"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
Personally, I think it is likely the padding was created for future use. Maybe tagging or some other meta data.
They explain what the padding was used for and why it was initially introduced in the article. This isn't something that needs to be theorized on.
The article is only guessing at what 99% of the padding is there for.
For Apple Music it's probably a case of Hanlon's razor, it's been buggy and busted forever.
My vague understanding (just from reading blog articles) is that iTunes became an insane metamorphization of the Eye of Sauron, an infinite pit of quicksand (blub blub) and Yes™, Inc (all things to all people).
Y'know, iPod (and later iPhone) sync, music browsing and purchasing, (payment handling), intelligent media organization (or some approximation thereof), working with giant media libraries...
I get the idea that everyone just feature-piled on top of the SoundJam code without fully scaling the design to the point of being able to coherently load-bear the additional functionality. So basically failure to adequately PM where it counts. That requires PM that understands engineering, which is sadly a tall order out of the gate and generally the most crucial before projects get big and the need for support becomes obvious.
*IFF* that happened in this case (I have absolutely no concrete idea), my question would be a) where "Steve really wants this - put a good PM on it" and/or b) where "this code explosion is killing everyone, we need PM help", ended up.
iTunes history anybody? (Genuinely curious, wondered for a while)
Curious as well. All I can add is that iTunes also needed to run on Windows (and I believe QuickTime had, in effect, the old MacToolbox running cross-platform). So add throw that on the pile.
iTunes had to move fast. There was not time, from what I understand, to step back and refactor it in any meaningful way.
There never is time to refactor.
Adding on to this, I heard a rumor (probably here) that iTunes for Windows was ported by Apple porting Objective-C and Cocoa to Windows, which is part of the reason it acted so funny. I have no idea if that's true though.
Safari for Windows was a side effect of the porting work that was happening on the Store to move away from a custom renderer to just using WebKit. And the reason iTunes on Windows was the way it was, and indeed, why iTunes on Mac stayed in this hellacious status for so long, is that it was built on _QuickTime_, which brought most of the Mac Toolbox over to Windows, and then -- eventually -- Carbon.
Objective-C and Cocoa for Windows dates back to the NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Rhapsody days, but yes it’s true. Safari for Windows also utilized this, perhaps to a greater extent, because its UI looked significantly more like its Mac counterpart than iTunes did, to the point that even the text rendering was the same between Windows and OS X.
Yeah OPENSTEP Enterprise (OSE) was a commercial product sold by NeXT and briefly by Apple. Also later versions of WebObjects that ran on Windows provided much of the same tools.
Yea, the idea this is some concerted effort to sell more iCloud storage is kind of funny to me.
I'd love to see those discussions - "The OKR was to sell more iCloud storage so the Music team added half a meg of junk to every song file"
"Great!"
... I mean... weird shit has happened, but... I dunno, I've worked at quite a few companies and I just don't get the sense that that's Apple's MO. The bad publicity if it became public that they actually did this on purpose would be terrible, it seems pretty conspiratorial in this thread.
Also, Music is a real shit, buggy app that constantly annoys me.
What if the incompetence is maliciously decided upon? Hanlon's razor works for individuals, but falls apart for larger institutions.
It also falls apart any time there is a legitimate responsibility to do something. Negligence is malicious even if it’s convenient to blame incompetence.
Incompetent management wouldn’t be able to be consistently incompetent. That’s the big issue with incompetence.
Apple is unique in that their product marketing has a big role in the product design process. If you step back and look at what they do objectively, there are a few journey mapped “happy paths” that Apple designs to. They actively remove features that distract from the true paths.
It’s noticeable with them as Apple has no sympathy for legacy. But you can see it with other companies. An easy one is Google Drive/Docs - they make it easy to find a file, but didn’t consider that you may want to see the folder context of where the file is.
Less true in music. For example, iTunes Match is still a thing, even though it’s (mostly) obsolete if you have Apple Music.
Sorta. I'm an iTunes Match person. They sort of integrated it as Apple Music lite.
They wrecked the UI completely. Which makes sense - I imagine that the program management of iTunes Match is probably a low priority. Basically, i use search history as a sort of playlist.
I believe that you may be significantly underestimating the incompetence of most organizations.
If all of the individuals are acting without malice, how could the institution act with malice? Isn't the institution just the collective will of the individuals?
I could see it playing out like this, incompetence causes the problem, incompetence fails to identify the problem, incompetence fails to fix the problem.
> If all of the individuals are acting without malice, how could the institution act with malice? Isn't the institution just the collective will of the individuals?
I think we are on an unproductive tangent, but these are quite important questions. An institution doesn't have its own free will, so I don't think I can claim it can have "intent to cause harm", but it can certainly cause harm.
An institution is not just a collection of people, it is also the business processes and policies. While these are created by people within the institution, they stick around over time. As the world changes around the organization, well intentioned policy can begin to harm.
Individual employees following policy and normal business practice (i.e. just doing their jobs) can behave maliciously without their own intent to do so (sorry, my hands are tied).
An institution needs not only non-malicious members, it needs to constantly re-evaluate its practices. Importantly, when harmful outcomes are observed the institution must re-evaluate and adjust, otherwise the harm will continue.
It's not enough for members to conduct their own behavior without malice, they must also observe outcomes and actively fight against the inertia of existing policy.
That betrays the cooperative principle. Such an institution could not survive.
It’s not a good sign for a company when these allegations become more plausible over time, which is definitely the case for Apple.
Why would ripped CDs not exhibit the same thing if this was intentional?
The fine article addresses this point.
Not really. the article posits that this space was originally reserved for album art and when that was moved to external storage nobody remembered to remove the reserved space. OP is suggesting apple did this intentionally for some sort of profit motive.
Where?
> I believe the 500 kB block was originally reserved for album art. Apple’s servers would inject it on-the-fly into the metadata at the time of delivery.
This absolutely seems like the most reasonable explanation.