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Apple is renowned for their products’ ease of use. It’s a selling point for just about everything they put together, and in most cases they do amazing things — look no further than the response to the latest iteration of the iPhone.

But Apple hardware aside, I have to wonder where the usability goes with the software. iTunes on Windows is unbelievably more annoying to update than any other program. Here are the major offenses as far as I’m concerned:

1. I don’t want Safari. It’s great that they have an automatic updater — Apple Software Update. But an updater is only supposed to keep software you have installed up-to-date, it’s not supposed to install new software you probably don’t even want. It’s especially offensive because if you’re not paying attention and just click update, Safari is selected by default and will be installed for you. Thankfully you can hide it from the list by selecting it and going to Tools->Ignore Selected Updates. A nice feature, but someone like my mom isn’t going to know to do that.

2. Don’t break my shortcuts every time. I have a shortcut to iTunes in the Quick Launch bar. Every time I reinstall iTunes, the shortcut breaks. I don’t know why this happens, but it’s annoying as hell. The average user might think that their iTunes has been “deleted”, which would not make them very happy.

3. Don’t put Quicktime shortcuts everywhere without asking me. The opposite problem of #2. The iTunes shortcut breaks, but Quicktime puts new shortcuts EVERYWHERE… desktop, quick launch, start menu. This is especially annoying to me because Quicktime is a program that I NEVER start manually. If I use it, it’s always by clicking on a video in Explorer. I kinda think most people do the same.

4. User License Agreement. Thanks for making me accept the agreement every time I update. I excepted it seven times already, but I might have changed my mind this time, so I’m glad you asked. Also, why does the agreement window not show up in the task bar? If I launch iTunes while any other app is running, the agreement is obscured by those apps. I have to minimize everything to get to it. More than once I’ve been like “Man I thought I launched iTunes a half-hour ago, where is it?”

5. Why do I have to restart?!? This is an age-old Windows problem that has mostly been exterminated, but for some reason Apple wants you to restart your computer after updating a goddamn media player. This is not system critical software, you should be able to update it without restarting.

If you can get through all this, iTunes is actually a really great app. With all these annoyances, I wouldn’t still be using iTunes if it wasn’t the best at what it does.