Friday, February 15, 2008

iTunes: why my wife must get Vista instead of Ubuntu on her new laptop

Being a geek, I buy gadgets. For Valentine's day, I bought my wife an iPod. Yeah, yeah, dinner too etc.

For our imminent anniversary, I'll be getting her a laptop. She wants mobility just around the house, and her desktop will be taken over by the kids.

I've been eyeing OLPC's offering, thinking that's what I could get for our 10 year old too and benefit from the networking things that device does so nicely. But since they are not offering the "Buy One, Give One" anymore, that options is gone.

I was thinking about the ASUS EEE PC too, since it's received good reviews and its ultra small. Her fingers are smaller than mine.

But the deal breaker is iTunes. She *must* have iTunes -- it's the thing she's really wanted. Not because it's the best, or cheapest. But it's what she knows, what her friends use, it's easy. Any laptop that doesn't support iTunes will disappoint her. And, fact is, she doesn't need a laptop, the pleasure she will get from having one and using it with her new iPod is the whole point. Everything. Not a "kinda cool, with concessions cause my husband is a geek, and thats really cool, but it comes with caveats*" outcome, I'm looking for here.

Yeah, I know, geek-readers, yo've been using your iPod on Debian or whatever for 2 years without a hitch, or your alternate-MP3-player-that-stores-2x-more-and-cost-.5-less on CentOS, but please see above. It's my wife, dude.

So, unless Apple comes out with an iTunes client for Ubuntu in the next couple days, I'll be paying Microsoft for an OS I'd rather do without. Yuck.

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