A few months ago I had a blog post where I said it would be great to live in a world without advertising. Products would have to stand up on their own, spread through word of mouth and reviews, and overall it would lead to better products and higher quality content.

Note that I never once mentioned Apple in that post. Now Apple is becoming more of a media company through the iTunes music store. Version 4.5 has many cool new features like party shuffle, iMixes (publish your playlists online), print cool cd covers.

But the best features are those that bring better content to the users without annoying websites and ads. You can watch music videos without navigating through mtv.com and its maze of links and banners and flash.

My favorite feature is radio lists. You can see what radio stations are playing all over the country. I use to go to sites like kroq.com and live105.com to see their top played songs, and then download them. Now I can see this list in iTunes and buy the songs right there. I don't see any ads, and all the information is neatly laid out. And of course there are 30 second free samples on everything.


My dad has been trading some stock using etrade. It costs about $22 per trade so we decided to investigate some of the cheaper alternatives. We went with Ameritrade because they are a reputable site, and we used them a few years ago.

I created an account for my dad. The site was a little shittier than etrade, but not horrible. I called customer service. The people weren't as nice, but not horrible. Then they put me on hold, and they starting playing ads! Fuck that! Play some music or something. Don't make me sit there listening to ads for home mortgages.

Bottom line: you get what you pay for. If you're doing a lot of trading, Ameritrade might be worth it. But for just a little trading, I would always go with etrade. The quality of their service is way above the competition.