Is this guy serious. What doofus deletes his iPod contents TWICE? The first time I can understand, the second time, you're an idiot. I guess boxo the clown here is incapable of reading dialog boxes.

And exactly what is he talking about with the double storage. ANYBODY who keeps there entire collection on the MP3 player and suffers a HD crash deserves to pay for all their music again.

What an idiot.

Doofus is right. And this guy is a columnist for an electronic engineering magazine? I guess that his friends are idiots, too, since they've erased their iPods as well. You'd think that the first one to do it would've warned the others to be careful. The guy also doesn't seem to understand about DRM - which is why bi-directional copying of music is not a native feature.

Wow, I am now convinced this site is run by the same people that run slashdot - misleading healines, bad spelling, the works!

"In no time at all, I'd erased all the content I'd laboriously downloaded onto my iPod. Twice.

Several friends have done the same thing, so this is apparently not an isolated case of "cockpit error." "

- Birds of an idiotic feather definitely are flocking together.

"The software's operation is utterly counterintuitive, but with no other user interface it's the only way to get your $300 hard drive to do anything at all."

- Someone should tell him that iTunes operates in ENGLISH, not by toggling in binary on the front panel.

Turley is a notorious Apple basher and has been for a long time. He is to be ignored. Notice how he sets himself as the only rational person on the planet and all the millions of iPod users are idiots. He is what Spiro Agnew used to call an effete snob.

Quite simply...the gentleman who blasted the iPod and iTunes is an over-the-top Apple-hater. No other reasonable person would have such harsh words. I understand that not everyone likes iTunes and iPod, but, c'mon! Claiming that iTunes is "counterintuitive" and that the iPod is nothing more than a hard drive with a play button? Even some of the biggest Windows/Microsoft fans (if there are any) who dislike both iTunes and the iPod wouldn't write such outlandish material.

He erased it twice? He's an editor in chief of a technology magazine and he erased it twice?

I really don't think further comment is necessary.

I don't know about this guy, but my brother got an iPod and wanted to just store the music on it, rather than also on his computer (he's got the CDs, and didn't want to waste the disk space). So, i told him "Plug it in. When asked, tell itunes not to manage the iPod. Then you can copy whatever you want to it, set up playlists on it, etc. If you told it to manage your music, then just go into preferences and uncheck the option."

It ain't hard. Many people do it. Although the guy's an engineer, so he probably needs some 10-year-old to explain it to him.

BTW, they probably erased all their music because they were trying to dump all their music on their iPods, take it to another computer, and copy them off, it came up with the message "Do you want itunes to manage this ipod" and they said yes. Twice.