I'll Ping you in the Turtleneck.

Once upon a time, I was a fan of Apple. I've only owned iPods, and I liked iTunes well enough. At least, it seemed to work better than any of my alternatives.

Recently, Google has announced that they plan on opening their own music store. Depending on its efficacy, I fully intend on switching to it. I am a huge fan of Google, and I hope they'll stay as cool as they are right now.

I've owned an iPod of some kind for as long as I've been listening to music that didn't belong to my parents. And I've decided that my current one, an iPod Touch, is the last one. I am done with iPods, and I am done with Apple. I've gone from being annoyed to being flat-out enraged, and there's no reason I should stay with a company I don't like.

The beginning of this was the release of the iPad. As I've mentioned before, I hate the iPad. It has a dumb name, it looks dumb, and most annoyingly, Steve Jobs acted like it was the first tablet ever invented. Never mind the fact that my laptop doubles as a touchscreen tablet. I was severely annoyed by the people who waxed poetic about Jobs and his maxiPad. It got old, and, eventually, the world divided into three groups- those who loved the TamPod, those who saw it as a running joke, and those who had never heard of Jobs and thought Apples grew on trees.

Now, however, the turtlenecked vampire has given us Ping. It is a social Network, or at least, it's supposed to be one. I'm not quite sure you can just "create" a social network- Facebook didn't just come into existence with millions of members, it had to work at it and grow. Same thing with Myspace. Even if Jobs is "magic," I sort of doubt his ability to just bring a social network into being.

And this Ping shit is annoying as hell. Even though you don't have to create an account, there are countless icons crowding iTunes that want you to use Ping to tell people what you're listening to, what you're thinking about listening to, what you like, what you want to like, what you don't like, what you recommend to others, et cetera. It's making me crazy.

I want iTunes to store my music, keep it organized, and let me load it onto my iPod. I don't want anything else. I'm not interested in knowing what other people think of some song or album. I don't care. I don't want to know what everyone else is likes. That is not how I choose my music.

So, yes, I am quite annoyed with iTunes and Apple. Steve Jobs will be losing a customer soon enough, I can tell you that. And something tells me I'm not the only one who'll be leaving.