All I wanted to do was sync my new iPod….
On October 23, 2001, Apple released iTunes 2.0 to the world. Shortly afterward, the pulled the release. Why?
Apple had introduced an update to iTunes that added the “the three most requested features from iTunes users: MP3 CD burning, an equalizer and cross fading”. Among some other enhancements, it also added support for the then-new iPod — and along with it this nasty bug?
But how?
It turns out that it all came down to a quotation mark. The code that wrapped up the installer process was missing a quotation mark. That over-looked character resulted in some users having their data erased from their Macs. How could this be? The developers (and QA) at Apple had likely not considered testing on a Mac OS X instance with a partitioned drive, let alone one starting with a space in the name.
I actually encountered this bug at the time using on my Power Mac G4, and thankfully the data loss wasn’t too painful.