3. Installation, Continued

Bad documentation is what upsets me most about some PC component vendors and what makes it difficult to argue about stability with the Apple supporting peers many of us have. If my sister or mother had tried to install this thing with their PC, they would have figured it was defective and taken it back to the store, when all that was needed was a message saying "This device may not work with certain USB hubs," better yet, Dell could figured out the problem and fixed it so that it did work with most hubs. Also, if the instructions say, "When prompted, connect the small end of the USB cable to your device's USB connector...Connect the larger end of the USB cable to your computer" there really ought to be a prompt that tells you to do that. Some folks might stare at their computer for days waiting for it.

The one bit of bragging rights that Apple aficionados feel they have at their disposal is that when they buy products, they just turn them on and use them. No patch downloads, no workarounds, no lousy documentation. (It's also frequently true that, when they do encounter a problem, it requires taking the machine to the shop and doing without it until an "expert" figures out what's wrong with it.) If Dell wants to compete with the iPod, the installation instructions are a good place to start, but crappy documentation, bad drivers and the general feeling of being a beta tester are something that every single PC tinkerer has to deal with - and Dell is not the only culprit. Why is Apple still here? Because there are devoted legions of people who are willing to spend more money to avoid messing with their equipment - they just want it to work. I haven't had an Apple product around in years, but that's the word on the street with the Apple acolytes and whenever I need to write a story about a product and run into something like this where better docs could easily have saved me an hour or two (as well as much wrath associated with my deadline issues), I have no question in my mind that the PC component vendors are simply not up to par with this segment of their competition.

Front view of the Dell Digital Jukebox. The screen actually has a blue background, which is hard to discern in this photo. The front controls include a scroll wheel with "back" and "home" buttons on either side of it. Beneath those buttons are the usual play/pause (center) and forward and back buttons.