Funny I started with an Apple - but a PC has been my constant companion for the past 15 years or more.

Ya know... That sounds just like some of the whiners complaining that their Google Page Rank dropped inexplicably. You gonna sue Apple now? Doubt it. Tag=Rant... appropriate.

How many people do you think were scarred because they couldn't catch the back issue of all their favorite podcasts for all of a few hours? Um, thinking of a number less than 1.

Did you have alternate links to the podcast media? Perhaps in your RSS enclosures maybe? If not... you might rectify.

C'mon man. You're getting grumpy for no good reason. If you don't like iTunes for distribution don't play the game. You now know what could happen.

Oh geez, the mouse. Ya know when you buy a Windows machine you know you'll have to spend time removing the bloatware? Mac users know when they buy a Mac they'll have to buy a mouse. No doubt it's the dumbest mouse on the market today.

Yeah, believe me -- I'm not saying that Windows machines are somehow superior. Both of them have their flaws. And some of my best friends have Macs :)

Macs just never caught on with me in the past, though I'm seriously considering getting one of the new Intel laptops and having some fun with dual boot.

Gerard, unlike the PageRank complainers, I'm not suggesting that Apple owes me anything. Nah, I'm not going to sue them for shutting down the store. But it's still lame.

It's not an issue of people being unable to download their shows for a few hours. It's an issue of people not being able to subscribe.

If you wind up on someone's site, see a podcast link, you're going to want to sign-up then. If you click and can't -- do you remember to come back?

If not, that person (who worked with Apple to put up a specific iTunes link) may have lost someone. And they lost that person because Apple had to do all this in the middle of the day to protect the big "secret" of video downloads?

I do have more than iTunes links listed -- I have alternative links for everything. So Im hardly iTunes dependent. Nor is it a major loss in the grand scheme of things. But you'd think there would have been another way.

One thing I wish Apple would do is make the music store web based rather than iTunes based. Having to go into the iTunes software to access music, subscribe and so on just feels like another form of walled garden.

You insulted Apple! OMG WTF! ;)

I'm an Apple fan, and I do like the way they make a show of presenting new products.

However, I hadn't ever considered the problem you point out with people subscribing to 3rd party podcasts. That does suck.

New Apple's do come with a 2 'button' mouse, but the laptops still ship with a single button, which will hopefully change soon.

Of course Apple is lame, nothing has changed in 25 years I've had deal with Apples and the most popular thing they ever built was a little MP3 jukebox and not their stinking computers.

You know what we used Apple ][s for back in the 80s?

... yanking out the RAM chips and upgrading a more useful computer.

However, you could almost make an Apple ][ useful by plugging in a Microsft Z-80 software and running CP/M except the disk speed blew.

They could've owned this market once upon a time but Woz made the stupidest disk controller known to mankind instead of getting a REAL disk controller to load data fast as the rest was history. They even repeated the same damn mistake with the early Macs, couldn't teach 'em crap.

The only reason we have an iPod is someone gave it to my wife as a gift and the controls are a joke and you're locked into getting iTumes music... yawn.

I'll keep my PC and Zen Micro and be very happy with it.

Besides, isn't PodCasting what invading body snatchers do to dispose of the leftover pods?

I like a five-button mouse: the usual left and right buttons, forward and back buttons, and the scroll wheel which is *also* a fast-scroll button. Microsoft makes mine. And I'll never go back; anything less just seems like a limited mouse.