Apple Sucks! There...I said it.

Before I owned any Apple-brand hardware, their ads used to annoy me.

Since buying an iPod, their ads annoy the ever living fuck out of me.

You see, their main selling point for all their products is how easy they are to use and how they never crash or break.

I call shenanigans. They crash, they break and they’re just as unreliable as any Microsoft product.

My iPod has frozen up at least once or twice a month since I bought it. I’d try to play a song, I’d press play, and the screen would change to that song for a nanosecond before snapping back to the menu.

It was on, I could look at all my playlists…I just couldn’t play any music, which kinda defeats the purpose of carrying it.

The only way to fix it when it did that was to hook it up to the PC, start up iTunes and do a complete reset…meaning every bit of content I had on the iPod would go bye-bye…and I’d have to sit there and wait for everything to re-synch again.

“It just works?”

Bollocks. It’s just like every other piece of consumer electronics out there. It breaks, it crashes and it stops working for no reason.

However, what happened just now took the cake.

I was sitting on the couch playing Uno, when I decided that it was the perfect time to listen to this week’s Webcomics Weekly podcast while playing. One of the great things about a 360 is you can connect an mp3 player to one of its USB ports and stream music through it.

I like it because it puts my iPod on my surround sound speakers and charges the ipod at the same time.

So I turned on the PC so I could sync up the iPod. I hadn’t put this weeks episode of Webcomics Weekly onto the iPod yet.

I plugged it in, and instead of hearing the usual chime and iTunes recognizing the iPod like and old friend and uploading lots of nice podcasts to it, it wouldn’t recognize it at all. I checked the iPod and the battery was dead.

Now, this shouldn’t be a problem. You have to plug it in to synch it anyway and it can draw power from the 360 just as easily as it’s supposed to be able to do from my PC. Only the problem was the good people at Apple hadn’t figured on one thing:

When the iPod battery is out of juice, it won’t turn on via the power button. When it is turned off, plugging it into your computer will turn it on, but because it’s plugged in before it’s booted up, it won’t recognize that it’s plugged in, and won’t draw any power from the USB port.

At least mine won’t.

Great, Apple, you’ve designed a device that won’t charge when the battery is empty.

In the end I solved the problem, but it honestly made me laugh at the ‘ultra reliable, ergonomic and easy to use’ mantra Apple love to recite over and over in their TV ads..

To fix it I had to connect the iPod to the PC, wait for it to start up, then as soon as the screen showed ‘low power’, I had to disconnect it, then re-connect it in less than two seconds. If I took longer that two seconds and the iPod would turn off and I’d have to start all over again.

It took a few attempts, but I finally got it to recognize it was plugged in and got it to draw power.

“It Just Works!” My ass.