This week I have learnt a few new things. All of them were a bit of an eye opener or even worse, a right royal pain in the neck causing lots and lots of painful listening to horrendous music on hold.

Fact 1 - Apples iTunes server doesn't connect to any of their products. You don't use it to server content for iPhones, iPads or Apple TV. In fact as far as I can see it has no use at all.

Fact 2 - If you need / want to sign up to iTunes, and you have an icloud email address, you cant sign up unless you get a third party email address. That's correct. Apple will not let you use an Apple email account (like iCloud) as your primary email address when you register with iTunes. They want you to leave their cloud system and use another provider like Google, Microsoft or your local ISP.

Fact 3 - Hmm - sounds like I'm Apple bashing but they really did raise my eyebrows a few times this week. If you have an iPhone 5 / 6, and it has that 'find my phone using icloud' feature turned on, and the icloud account you used has been deleted - then your phone is effectively bricked as you cannot reset it, format it or make it respond to anyone else but your (non-existent) iCloud account. How do I know this? A client has a new phone, set it up with an icloud account, realised it should be on the same iCloud account as previous phone, deleted iCloud account and now has a bricked iPhone 5S. Two weeks on, after providing evidence of ownership and proof of purchase to Apple the phone is still bricked.

Fact 4 - A non Apple fact to show I'm not too partisan. Microsoft and Facebook are in tight collusion with each other. Why? MSN (Microsoft, the anti-Apples home page for new PCs) forces you to log into Facebook or with a Facebook account to place comments on stories. There are no other choices. Go straight to Facebook, do not pass go, do not collect $200 dollars. 

Fact 5 - The Education Dept in its rush to implement the New Learning Environment, is being ably assisted by Apple to get  iPads into the hands of the children for them to do their homework. Unfortunately it seems that many schools are using Sum dog and a range of similar sites which require Flash. Pity the iPads don't do flash.

Fact 6 - If you rebuild a PC with Windows XP, (yes there are good reasons to do so sometimes), you cannot get it onto the internet to download updates, the latest version of internet explorer or to download firefox, chrome, flash and a raft of other items needed to get it updated and working on the internet. All those sites now use https, of a type not supported by WinXP, SP1 or possibly SP2.  Thank goodness for MajorGeeks.com, you can still download using non-flash, http based, straight forward links from there.


Like I said, an interesting week of learning. Well interesting for me but along the way maybe some snippets of info that might help someone else stuck with one of the scenarios shown above.