A Christian Apple

This morning I upgrading to iTunes v8.0 which came with a new feature when looking at your music, video or podcasts. It is a grid view that shows many album covers at the same time.

The grid view has a number of options to sort the album covers by Album title, Artist, Genre or Composer. When sorting by Genre, Apple groups all the related music and replaces album covers with buttons to indicate which Genre you have (like Pop, Rock, Alternative and Reggae). Imagine my surprise at what Apple considers its Religious Genre... Christian and Gospel.

That's right, all religious music, be it Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish or other is now Christian. The button has some clouds with light shining through and the words "Christian & Gospel" across the front. Check out this brilliance below.



Nice move Apple. You've got iTunes distributed globally and you don't have the sensitivity to recognize that there's more than 1 religion. Every other Genre's button has the same name as the selection. So why would Apple change Religious to Christian and Gospel?

Did Steve Jobs approve this? Sounds like we need some diversity training in Cupertino, CA.

Apple is our latest Company Acting Badly

iPod unTouched

Earlier this year I bought the Apple iPod Touch. Wonderful device that handles my calendar, contacts, music, web access and so much more.

Apple recently announced an upgrade to its iPhone and iPod Touch products, software version 2.0 that would allow you to load new applications (from third parties) to run on the devices. Apple also announced an upgrade to iTunes to v7.7 that would allow you to search, purchase the applications and load them onto your PC.

Today, timed to coincide with the worldwide launch of Apple's iPhone 3G, Apple released iTunes 7.7 and iPhone / Touch software 2.0. Like thousands of others I upgraded to iTunes 7.7 and searched the iTunes application directory and found many applications that I liked and downloaded them to my PC.

Here's my new iTunes 7.7 with 15 applications ready to upload to my Touch.



The problem is that Apples servers were so overloaded with iPhone 3G activations and issues that the 2.0 software upgrade looped, failed, dropped. iTunes at times recognized that my iPod Touch could be upgraded but would put me in an endless loop of "Learning More" and needing an upgrade. After 14 hours of trying today, I have new applications that I cannot use as iTunes is failing.

Here's the screen acknowledging that an upgrade is available:



Here's the beginning of the loop that went back to the screen above:



Occasionally, I would get this message that implied that my connection was at fault when Apple's network was having issues:



After reading some blogs and news reports, it looks like thousands of people got nailed today by Apple. At least I wasn't nailed like the iPhone owners whose phones started the upgrade, didn't finish and now they don't have a working cell phone.

Here are some related articles of others feeling the pain:

• CNN
• Fortune
• CNET News
  
• Information Week
• Boston.com
  

Unfortunately for Apple, we now have a new lexicon including: iPocalypse and iBrick.

Usually Apple gets its product launches right. Maybe next time they will stagger the launch so that new phone activations start on a certain day and upgrades to the new software start on another day. For over-promising and under-delivering, Apple and it's load capacity honchos joined the ranks of Companies Acting Badly.