I’d been in a charity shop and bought a CD for a quid. I decided to load it to my i tunes. I clicked on the i tunes icon, but it wouldn’t open and I got this message: “TS1609 Re: Service ‘Apple Mobile Device’ (Apple Mobile Device) failed to start. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system services”. I hadn’t changed anything and I had no idea why it suddenly wasn’t working after doing so for years. When you get these type of messages, they arrive with a sort of jolting noise that sounds like someone hitting a couple of keys of a keyboard simultaneously. It’s a noise I dread because I know it heralds a problem that I usually won’t have a clue about fixing. For a start, I never understand what the actual words mean, so the instructions are almost pointless. I say “almost” because I’ve now learned to cut and paste the message, google it and see if other people have had the problem, and they usually have. However, people who purport to want to help you also seem to delight in impressing you with their software knowledge by explaining things via the kind of gobbledegook expressed in the above picture, which I cut and pasted from the Apple user group advice page. As if I would have the slightest hope of following those instructions! Other suggestions blamed the fact that I was on Windows 7 or that my browser was blocking things, which were both useless suggestions because I didn’t know how I could change those things without causing more problems like opening myself up to viruses. Fortunately, somebody else had offered a simplified set of instructions which involved uninstalling all the Apple software, then re-installing it. I tried this and it took a long time, about half an hour. When I then tried to open i tunes again, I still got the dreaded noise, followed by the same message and my heart just sank. I genuinely felt depressed. I was actually contemplating the idea of dumping my PC in favour of an Apple Mac, purely so that they would all be compatible, but I thought “The barstards, they force you to get all your hardware and software from them and that is pure 1984! – NO! they are NOT going to get me!” Anyway, I noticed that the fixing instructions were very emphatic about uninstalling ALL the Apple software first, so I went back to the lists and somehow, I worked out that the Apple software sometimes included programs that didn’t have Apple in the name, like “bonjour” and so I had another go. Again, this took quite a while, but eventually I uninstalled everything remotely to do with Apple, then re-installed from the Apple website and, praise the Lord, it worked! The whole process, with coffee breaks, had taken 3.5 hours. Admittedly, i phones and i pods are amazing devices, but are we gradually creating an intricate monster that will one day implode and bury us in failed technology?