Tuesday, April 12, 2011

iBooks, the mystery

I still don't get it: why is iBooks not on the Mac too? Why can't I read my iBooks-purchased ebook on my Mac (or indeed Windows machine)?

Also, why is the iBooks store separate from iTunes, which otherwise is a mish-mash of all kinds of stores. And why is the apps store separate from both of them?

Why can't I buy ebooks from my Mac when I can buy music and TV shows and movies, not to mention audiobooks?

Why is "iTunes" a completely different beast on my iPad than on my Mac? On my Mac it plays music, on the iPad, it only buys it. If I want to play music on the iPad, I have to use the "iPod" app. It can play video too, but so can iTunes, and so can the "Video" app, god knows why that one exists exists at all.

Confused? You probably will still be after Apple's next OS update.

2 comments:

Bruce said...

Apple definitely has it's quirks and traditions, and you have found some big ones.

Partly I think they are trying to trade on what people already know, to make new things seem familiar. This is why Microsoft calls their new phone OS Windows. Remember Apples new phone OS was called OS X for a while.

Good point about reading iBooks on the Mac. Probably Apple would have to renegotiate with the book publishers to make this happen.

Here's another quirk for you. Why does the iPad have a separate on-off button? The close button turns on the iPad. A long press of the close button does - absolutely nothing. That could easily be used to turn the iPad off. You'd have to use a combination of keys to do a cold shutdown - perhaps volume down and close - but I don't see that as a problem.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Good point.
I suspect the argument is that many people would never find out how to turn it off/sleep, and would just leave it on until it did it itself.