Bono apologizes for that time U2 put an album on your iPhone

The big deal was, in a lot of countries at the time, you paid for data downloads on phones and this album cost people big money. So people were out of pocket (my memory wants to say, in some cases hundreds of dollars).

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Tim Cook is Casey Kasem’s infamous outtake.

Which makes the rest of us Negativland, I guess.

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Call me cynical and/or bitter, I’m not really in a position to deny that today; but apologizing now for something that happened in 2014 and has already been more or less roundly denounced and apologized for seems more like luxuriating in your perceived importance than sincere contrition.

In order for an apology to matter on what’s approaching a ‘historical’ timescale; at least the transgression, if not the transgressor, have to matter on a similar scale.

Maybe I’m being too hard on the guy, and it really does eat at him at night; but from the perspective of the public this seems rather less like a relevant apology and rather more like that guy drunk-dialing his ex who is long over him to make a maudlin apology for being garbage while they were together; frankly unhelpful and overtly about the apologizer rather than the apologizee.

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You are bitter and cynical; a mere empty husk of your former optimistic, youthful self.

(Did I get the rules right?)

Unpossible. Keep it up.

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That’s a new one. I’ll take your word for it, but I thought the album was only available initially in the itunes cloud. All the complaints that I heard were basically “I don’t want this album!” Which to me means… ok, delete it, then.

It couldn’t be deleted. It hung around like a dog turd smeared in the treads of your boot.

Everyone at Apple HQ had essentially the same reaction as you, “who cares if there’s another album in their library?” They learned that a whole lot of people cared, a lot.

I cared because I have never bought a single anything through iTunes. Not one; I find the entire “locked down music thing” utterly despicable. So my “library” was so clean that it never showed up in my iTunes app; the only thing I saw were the discs I ripped on my PC. Suddenly, at the very top of my Music library, was a single album that I did not ask for, want, or would ever listen to. It gave me a giant middle finger every time I opened iTunes.

So I stopped using iTunes. Completely. I host music on my own server (using Plex), and listen using the Plex Music app. It’s not convenient - Apple is actively hostile to apps that replace their apps; they don’t allow you to register a “replacement” app for Music or iTunes (or Maps or Messages or Calendar or …). So Siri is useless for music. But I’d rather rub two sticks together than use their iLighter when they treat me like this.

(And no, Android is far worse than Apple because it’s backed by Google, the world’s largest advertiser who is actively undermining its privacy at every turn.)

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  1. Apple is selling your information too, and undermining your privacy just as much as google is. Just because they’re not as good at it doesn’t mean they’re not doing it. I’d highly suggest reading your terms and conditions, and checking out your privacy portals on apple.com to see exactly what they’re doing.

  2. At least google lets me set all those apps and use their own devices with custom roms and without any of their software, AND stay in warranty. They may be the biggest advertiser in the world, but if my choice is between Apple and Google , one of these allows me to use my devices my way, and the other has repeatedly called it “a crime to jailbreak your phones and that people should be in jail.”

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Wait, are you saying that Bono was unable to actually create anything, but was mean enough to the rest of U2 that they let him take credit for everything?

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To be fair to him (why? It sticks in the craw) but they split the royalties relatively equally. It’s the real secret of longevity in a band. Divvie it up four ways (or six in their case I believe).

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That, and: Sometimes you have someone on a team and it looks like they’re not doing all that much - but then you realise that when they are there the team is very productive and when they are not there the team is not productive at all. Maybe because they are a good sounding board1), or maybe because they act sort of like an interpreter between some of the team members2), or maybe because they bring cake3), or whatever. Sometimes you’ll never know.

1) And that’s invaluable.
2) You know the situaton. Two or more guys - same first language, same field, etc - meaning the same thing, having basically the same opinion, still arguing the same point for days for no apparent reason…
3) “When the food is good enough, the grunts will stop complaining about the incoming fire.”

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Oh yeah. Creating relies on all the people in the room. But paying them shows you respect that.

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Succinctly put.

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Actually you can do this now. Like, you used to only be able to ask Siri to play podcasts in Apple podcasts. But now you can say “Play This American Life in Pocket Casts”. For music you can say “Play Cowboy Junkies” and it will default to the last music app you used, or you can say “Play Cowboy Junkies in Pandora”. I often have to say “Play Rush in Apple Music” because it keeps trying to use Pandora.

I think you may have to implement the Siri API in your app to support this, and I don’t know if Plex has done that.

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I don’t think that he’s just now apologizing. I think it’s that he has been and is still apologizing for it.

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