A maliciously crafted Microsoft Word document that attacks a Mac?
Very sneaky.
Now that is despicable!
Apple has issued updates to squash vulnerabilities in the OS X and Windows versions of iTunes and the word-processor app Pages. The iTunes 11.1.4 update will also patch security bugs in the Safari application and in underlying software such as the WebKit browser engine and a pair of library components. Users running iTunes on …
"It would be nice if they make iTunes fast, but I guess that will never happen. Even my friend who like Apple iTunes won't use it on Windows, even though he uses Windows quite a bit."
A friend of mine lamented the fact it took over 3 hours to update the music on his iDevice. Funny how Sharepod software did it in 20 minutes. Apple software... it's just not my cup of tea.
This site http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-49/product_id-156/cvssscoremin-2/cvssscoremax-2.99/Apple-Mac-Os-X.html
Indicates 76 vunerabilities.
Would you care to share where you got your figures from? I am sure we'd all like to know so that we can make our own mind up.
See here: http://secunia.com/advisories/product/96/
Affected By 2066 Vulnerabilities
Although I'm not sure why you are asking as you are clearly clueless - The page that you link to that says 76 clearly states that it is the total of vulnerabilities just with a CVE rating of 2.00 - 2.99.
Can you name one feature that iTunes gives a mobile device that the device doesn't inherently have in and of itself? You're obviously not thinking of iOS devices since they don't require iTunes for anything. I think the second part of your gripe may not be entirely up to date.
So it's a shame the first part remains so valid. iTunes on Windows was immediately came into my mind when Jobs wrote about the perils of cross-platform development in his Thoughts on Flash.
Try getting music (or any files) on and off an ipad without iTunes in bulk, it's a complete pain in the arse. If the IOS ecosystem had anything like ES filemanager (without jailbreak) I may not kick it so hard but I would still give it a kicking for crap native codec support.. Android has it's faults but shifting data around is so much easier and codec support is light years ahead.
What you're referring to is a slightly more specific than that: it's music the user has ripped themselves, and which they don't want to use a music locker service for. You can even use Google's if you want — it's free and it works across Android, iOS and the web.
So if you bought the music through iTunes you can download it again from Apple directly onto the device. If you ripped your own library to iTunes then you picked iTunes in the first place but you can just grab the MP3/AACs and take them elsewhere if you want. If you ripped it elsewhere you can use iTunes or you can use a music locker. Google's is free.
"Can you name one feature that iTunes gives a mobile device that the device doesn't inherently have in and of itself?" - loads. Try getting an iPad Mini to talk to a Windows machine (no, I don't have a Mac) without iTunes.
"You're obviously not thinking of iOS devices since they don't require iTunes for anything." - huh? iPad Mini iOS7. Please explain how to plug it into my PC to copy across my music (not ripped with iTunes, but need to be put into iTunes to put 'em on the iPad). Then please explain how to plug the same into the PC and give video files to VLC without going through iTunes.
And no, sending them via the network is no good. It'll run at around 300K/sec, a fraction of the speed USB can run at. Been there, tried that (VLC has a built in server).
About the only thing the iPad can talk to is WIA. I can get photos off the device without going through iTunes.
Now, all I need is a light, tight, nippy sync utility that can discard with all the iTunes bloat and just let me drop files into the expected places... [sort of like you can do with practically any Android device with no special software required]
...fails to install here (Win 7). On further investigation, it gets just about all the way through then fails to call 'a C runtime library properly'. Upgrade tool, individual MSI, repair install or uninstall and reinstall from fresh download - now Upgrade tells me it's the latest version, if I ignore the error, but trying to run the app tells me the installation failed. Happens on both the iTunes.msi and MobileDevice support MSI, but not the other sections.
Not been the first time upgrading iTunes has borked either, but instead of just letting me drop them the error nunbers Apple try to get one of their support genies involved.
Yup... that's what I found. But then got stuck in the uninstall loop for the MobileDevice service - kept rewinding at about 99% complete. Answer to that was to select 'Change' and then 'Repair' (Repair on its own didn't work), which still failed due to incorrectly calling that C Runtime, but repaired it enough to let me uninstall it straight after.