Journal: News & Comment

Saturday, November 03, 2001
# 11:29:00 AM:

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Goodwill is fleeting

Last week, Apple Computer announced a very spiffy (and expensive) MP3 player called the iPod, with an update to their desktop iTunes MP3 software to go along with it. The reaction to the products was mixed but generally positive -- most gripes were about the iPod's $399 (US) price.

Today, Apple made the iTunes 2 download officially available on the Web. Very soon, some of those who downloaded and installed the version for Apple's high-tech new Mac OS X operating system discovered that it could, without warning, completely erase the contents of some of their hard disks. Boom. Gone.

Apple pulled the offending version from their Web servers, but not until about five hours had passed and many people had irrevocably lost data -- all from installing a music application. Inevitably, most of them don't have backups.

So, any goodwill from the announcement of the iPod has pretty much evaporated, and Apple will have to work hard to help those affected. Lawsuits will undoubtedly be filed.

From the looks of it, the problem was that an installer script was written badly, and when it was supposed to be deleting files from the older version of iTunes, instead decided to erase entire disks. So one programmer made a mistake, and the people assigned to test the software didn't try some obvious cases.

Heads will roll somewhere. But it won't help those with missing files much.

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