No one makes for a horrible user experience the way Sony does. Frankly, for a company that large, it’s as if no one in it actually uses the products they sell. A friend of mine has a Sony BDP-S300 Blu Ray player. Of course it won’t play some newer movies, and since he doesn’t have an ethernet jack on his, that means he has to burn a disc with the firmware update, drop it in the player, and let it roll.
He had some issues with burning the disc, and he tweeted that he needed a Windows PC to do it. No problem, I have Parallels, so I decided I would see if I could help out. I went to Sony’s page for the firmware update and was surprised to see the downloads were only for Windows-based PC’s.
Check this out:
Notice the “compatible operating systems.” All Windows-based. So I downloaded it in Parallels, opened up the .EXE and it offered to extract the files to my desktop. After extraction, what was left sitting on my desktop?
A .ISO file! For some reason unknown to both man and beast, Sony wrapped the ISO file in a Windows 32 self-extracting executable. Good God, Sony, Why? Burning .ISO files on a Mac is actually built into the operating system (as it is with Linux) but you’ve made it impossible for Mac or Linux people to get that ISO out unless they have a Windows machine! Why not just make the .ISO downloadable so everyone can partake in the greatness that is firmware updating!
This is the kind of stupidity that Sony commits on a regular basis and it’s utterly infuriating. It’s just another in a long series of reasons why there will never be any Sony products in my house. Ever.