I can't believe the pain I've been through up to now, and I'm still not finished setting up the first iPod! I'm starting to think the no-name brand USB MP-3 player's are where it's at.

I honestly believe Apple's entire Windows testing of iTunes consists of installing the program on a clean Vista machine using an account with administrative rights. I have been through hell, and now they're insulting me by asking me to put my credit card details into my 9yo daughter's iTunes store account! There's no option for me not to do this! This is ridiculous.

Here's my angle, without hopefully giving up too much personal information as to see my children kidnapped by Apple...:

  • I have two beautiful daughters, both too young to have credit cards/mobile phones/etc, but they both received iPod Nano's for their birthdays this year, like many their age I'm sure.
  • I have been trying, completely unsuccessfully to install iTunes on the family computer in the main living area, but it just flat-out refuses to start. The install goes fine, but there's no love after that. Searching the internet, I find there's a few people having the same problem. I've tried every one of their suggested fixes, with no luck. So now I'm installing it on my older laptop. For some unknown reason, it installs fine on here, despite both machines running Vista.
  • I, for some bizarre reason, want to protect my children while they're online so I run the parental controls. There's no effective way from within iTunes of working with the parental controls to allow access to the relevant parts of the Apple infrastructure. I did as much as I could through Internet Explorer by going to the Apple website etc, but I still couldn't get access to the latest iPod firmware update. Now the parental controls are off. Not happy, Jan.
  • My girls also received iTunes gift cards. This is the reason for wanting to set up access to the iTunes store. However, there's no apparent way for creating an iTunes store account without entering credit card information! So I couldn't use the gift cards without giving Apple my credit card! Now the girls could potentially buy music whenever they want. We're going to have to check on them constantly when they're on the store now just to make sure. I'm not saying they'd wilfully purchase music on our credit card, but I bet there's no checks in place to prevent it from happening accidentally.

This is really an ordinary experience. For someone who's used to hearing people bang on about how rubbish the Windows user experience is, and how haphazardly their software seems to be thrown together, I'm completely stunned at what I've been through in the last few weeks just to get two MP-3 players hooked up and working with their own software!

Amazing. Should anyone from Apple stumble across this post, I'm more than willing to help sort this crap out, but we both know that's never going to happen...