Decades later Apple put U2 on everyone's iPhone and people got mad... (/s, yeah the album was a gift on people's account, ready to download to the phone but not taking space otherwise, but I would've found it obnoxious too).
This video was also on the CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc .. holy smokes, let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal!
Sony wasted several gigs of the very small (32g to 120g) and very expensive ssds of the time with 2 copies of a Spider Man 3 movie pre-loaded onto several different laptops. One copy in the normal installed fs, another copy in the recovery partition.
And you couldn't even watch the movie unless you also paid to unlock it.
You could delete the normal copy if you even knew it was there and then also used a disk usage util to FIND the actual file. But you couldn't do anything about the copy in the recovery image except delete the recovery partition and basically wipe & repartition the drive and do your own fresh install.
I've sworn off Sony products - well, as much as one can do so - for the past, what, 20 years? - because of that. It's kind of funny to me because I don't usually have a high opinion of "wallet activism", but one day when I was 20 I found out I had a rootkit installed on my computer by Sony and now they are _dead to me_.
I still hate that they got away with deleting my linux partition on my PS3.
That was a completely useless instance of linux and I think it was only ever done to get around some kind of tax or tarrif on game systems vs generic computers, but those are both beside the point.
When I gave them the money, I no longer controlled the money. It remained and still remains fully functional for them after that and I did not get to reach into their bank accounts and remove part of it or even just control what they can and can't spend it on. They got 100% of everything expected out of an exchange of ownership. And they also got to retain partial control of the PS3! What a great gig!
The perception was: my iTunes library is mine, and it's invasive for Apple to put something in there without my permission.
Whereas: the Windows 95 CD is Microsoft's, Microsoft is free to put what they want on there. I bet most people who weren't nerds or curious kids never even found it!
Music videos on the Windows 95 CD didn't occupy space on your hard disk, either. As long as the operating system still fit on the CD-ROM, it didn't matter what other extras were on it.
And at the same time, Apple claimed it was the biggest ever album release by number of downloads, or something like that. They were not only messing with our libraries, they were claiming we wanted it and were in fact U2 fans.
If you had Spotify running and then pressed the quick-play on your phones it would continue where it was, but after a reboot the iPhone would auto-play from Apple Music instead if Spotify hadn't been started.
So tapping play on your headphones would start those damn U2 songs "by accident" because it's the only thing that was on the Apple Music accounts we aren't using.. yeah no thanks.
And Siri still plays it for me when it doesn't understand me because I have nothing else in my music library and it's still not possible to remove it :( :( I hate U2 and I don't have homepods to play music. But deleting it from the library just puts it back
There was something about iTunes at that time where every time I started my car it would connect to my phone and start playing that U2 album regardless of what I had been listening to earlier. It just would not go away.
There's still something about CarPlay that does that kind of thing but not tied to a specific song. I'll be in my car listening to the car's radio, with my phone on its mount but inactive and all is well. The phone connected wirelessly to CarPlay when I started the car, but I'm not using any CarPlay features on this trip.
Then I need to activate the phone (say I'm pulling into the McDonalds parking lot and need to look at the McD app to get my drive thru pickup code for my order), so I tap it and swipe up...and the car switches to playing in whatever app I last used in CarPlay such as Podcasts or Spotify.
If I hit the media button to bring up the car's media selection screen and switch it back to radio that plays for a few seconds and then it switches back to CarPlay.
If on the phone I go to the now playing thingy in control center and hit the gizmo for selecting where to play I can explicitly switch it from CarPlay to iPhone Speaker and then it stops messing with the radio.
Some Googling and some asking LLMs turned up that a lot of people have problems with CarPlay overriding the car's entertainment system and apparently nobody has a fully satisfactory way to deal with it. Some people have addressed it by using Shortcuts automation to pause playback whenever the phone wakes up. They still get interrupted, but at least it doesn't keep interrupting.
I have a 2010 Honda. I found a usb port in the glove box. When I plug in my phone there is a 50% chance it will start playing my iTunes library alphabetically. (I get a Neville Brothers song, which isn’t so bad, I put it in there)
It was much worse than just adding it to your library as a gift. The cover art for the album[1] would appear in seemingly random places on your phone. And there was literally zero way to remove it, until there was such an uproar that Apple had to make a special tool.
Apple spent money on this and they really, really wanted to force feed it to every Apple user (not unlike their F1 movie venture). It was incredibly obnoxious.
1 - And it isn't homophobic to note that the Songs of Innocence cover art looked a bit like you were browsing Grindr or something. People have the right to have the opinion that having that image suddenly being featured on their phone might be misinterpreted by others.
... It's a shirtless man hugging the waist of another shirtless man. The cover art doesn't even have any text on it, but instead is just a picture of a couple of shirtless dudes in an incredibly weird pose. Yeah, I'm sure lots of fathers find themselves in scenes just like this. Totes normal.
"Not every picture of two men is sexual."
Yes, no shit. Of course on HN someone would try this morally righteous horseshit, especially hilarious when it's served with a side of "Duh, of course!"
But you know what the picture represents because you were quite literally told how to interpret it. I don't want some picture I didn't ask for suddenly appearing on my lock screen (because most of us actually had empty libraries, so when this "gift" was added and the device did its fun "autoplay" nonsense, it would suddenly be active media), walking around saying to anyone who might catch site "Oh don't worry, it's an artistic image of a father protecting his son or something"
I wasn't told how to interpret it, I saw an unusual picture and, where you apparently jumped the conclusion that it was two men that were obviously about to have sex and that it would be a scandalous statement on your own sexuality if anyone were to see you with that picture, I chose to look up what the explanation was. I can only imagine how much you must clutch your pearls when naval aviators play volleyball together in the movies.
Then you detail how you had to look up how to interpret this. Amazing stuff. Like, do you realize you just destroyed your own nonsense? Doing the "Duh, obviously" bit and then saying "this picture was so weird I had to be told what it meant" is quite the self-own.
"where you apparently jumped the conclusion that it was two men that were obviously about to have sex "
Save this boorish troll Reddit righteous-brigading garbage from HN. How isn't your garbage post far in the negatives?
Yes, you're so enlightened and better than thou. Howler.
It's an extremely odd picture to be on one's homescreen. Some people have their dog, some their wife, and then Bob here, he has two strange shirtless men in an extremely odd pose. Not even any normal album cover text to make it clear it's an album cover. Just a picture of two shirtless men.
No, I'm not saying "it's obviously a father and a son", I'm saying "it's not obviously sexual or gay and it's weird that you were so concerned about that interpretation that you were embarrassed about it". I didn't immediately know it was his son and represented innocence. I did immediately know that it was probably not something sexual, and I went looking for an answer instead of panicking about anyone seeing me looking at it.
For a guy who complains about reddit so much, you sure seem intent on having a deliberately obtuse reddit-style "gotcha" argument. I'm not really here for that. I hope you remain safe from phone images that scandalize you and those around you.
In this vastly unlikely passive aggressive hypothetical scenario, you're imagining that a random person who might see your screen would be as triggered by the image as you were. Most people had figured out by then that two men together are no more offensive or evil than a man and a woman.
> holy smokes, let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal!
Or 11 years, when the scandal was that the president wore a tan suit [1]:
> U.S. representative Peter King, a member of the Republican Party, deemed the suit's color combined with the subject matter of terrorism to be "unpresidential". He went on: "There's no way, I don't think, any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday. I mean, you have the world watching"
The lesson of tan suit learned by modern politicians: if you don't feed the media plenty of juicy things to be made into outrage pornography they will invent some. Much better to do the inventing yourself and keep people afraid and angry in the direction of the other guy.
Nobody cared because nobody knew what an mp3 was in 1995. Most people - everyone but a minority of tech-minded audio producers - considered digital audio on a computer just a novelty. It took another four years until the public started to associate a music collection with the computer (ie: 1999, when Napster came out).
everyone [...] considered digital audio on a computer just a novelty
Personal computers, in 1995, did not have the juice to play high quality audio and video. Media formats used less efficient compression and harddisks were smaller (most couldn't fit a whole CD of PCM audio).
And, in 1995, there were no portable device options - as far as I know - to play audio files, on-the-go. For high-quality digital audio, it was pretty much either DAT cassettes, or CDs (recordable CDs were too new for normal people to own).
On the internet, a few sites, such as radio stations, streamed audio using 'realaudio'. The sound quality was abysmal.
At the same time, the tech industry was in the midst of a 'multimedia' bubble. 'Multimedia' essentially referred to programs on CD-ROMs that could play postage-stamp sized videos and short snippets, or low-quality snippets, of audio.
The music environment became closer to today's in 1999 - with Napster - when the public discovered mp3s, and closer still in 2001 - with Apple's introduction of the iPod - when the public discovered portable music players.
I don’t remember U2 being a gift being ready to download. It was automatically put on all my devices in iTunes. I think it’s still there but I use Spotify instead of iPods and iTunes.
I think there were two problems with the U2 thing...
First, U2's general public perception as far as grandstanding[0]...
I think the bigger subconscious part was, at the time, Apple stuff was still premium price compared to most other brands, and the consumer perceived price of a U2 album, i.e. "It would cost me 10-15$ to buy this at Media Play^W^W FYE^W Best buy or wherever, couldn't they have made the contract price 10-15$ (which back then may have been as much as 5-10% of cost) cheaper"?
Cause I know an ex-partner bitched about that.
And, to other's comments, they bitched about the bono stuff popping up randomly playing music...[1]
[0] - I mean there was a whole south park episode about Bono's grandstanding...
[1] - Interestingly, the South Park episode was good therapy for her.
That’s a very confident recount given that it’s completely false. Good for you that you’ve memory-holed it. But don’t turn around and act like everyone else was insane.
Maybe you don’t remember iTunes mechanics at the time, but this “gift” as you call it would get in the way all the time. I’d always end up accidentally playing it. It’d always be present in library views when I did not care for it. It couldn’t be truly removed until Apple built a custom web page where you could request it to be removed from your account.
Honestly it was the cover art and title, not the album itself. Without context, it’s easy for all of our internet-jaded minds to get a very wrong idea about what the album relates to.
And your music library is a very personal thing. For some people, it represents part of their identity. It can feel wrong to have something you may not like or agree with stuck in there.
'Consensual' sex between a 50 year old President - the most powerful man in the world - and a 21 year old intern. Yeah right.
Clinton had a decades-long history of being a sexual predator. He was repeatedly accused of rape. He was also active with his friendship with Epstein during those years, which I think everybody understands what that means at this point.
> let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal
You're right: now we learned that same ex-president was frequenting Epstein's island. Did that ex- president have sex with trafficked women (Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail for sex-trafficking and she was a known friend of the Clintons btw) on Epstein's island? Was it consensual?
This video was also on the CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc .. holy smokes, let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal!