How do I hide old podcasts in iTunes 11.1 and What's Up with the New Podcast Pane?

Apple hasn't updated iTunes Help

... it's the best money saving scheme any company has ever come up with - let the users figure it out, saves us manpower galore - all we have to check is consumers' findings and voilà we have the new help at what? 10 % of the cost??? and no I am not trying to be funny I am very serious.

To prove it here is my latest "revelation" as to what the search function in iTunes does:

I search for Misha Glenny - an author who once had a very extended booktour - first result is

"Carnegie Council Audio Podcast"

neither my stored nor the list of available for download podcasts includes Misha Glenny, thus I try for "show me in iTunes store" - the result is a very weird package of very short VIDEOS promising to show me Misha Glenny. So no success there - but besides the provider the search result tells me the name of the talk "Dark Matter: Cyberthieves, Cyber ..." - and that promises to get me a result in Google which voilà it does

http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/studio/multimedia/20120215/index.html

Even though it is a bit round-about it helps much better and faster than Google alone would have - does iTunes help know of iTunes ingenuousness??? not that I can see it.

I think I deserve a fee from Apple for figuring this out, but am pretty sure they will not even acknowledge in one single word that their users are helpful to them.

(I know that my solving that little riddle is a niche problem that may excite only a very tiny number of people but what you guys come up with is so much more mainstream, will you be thanked? I bet the answer is no.)

There are more issues with the Podcast player after the latest update. For users like me who sync the iPhone to iTunes to get the podcasts updated it isn't working correctly. All downloaded shows are there (usually) but it also shows other available episodes again.

This is annoying and didn't happen after the first fix. Any suggestions?

My podcast app flipped to automatically deleting podcasts after they finished - took me ages to find out what was going on and change the option.

Now, previous podcasts appear with the Cloud/download symbol on my iPhone, even though I've already listened to them and deleted them. I want to manually sync/delete the podcasts but Apple seem to want to do it for me.

Apple keep messing about with the podcast app, making it worse each time. If they don't want to maintain it, stop doing it and we'll find another way to listen to the podcasts. Otherwise it just gets more and more frustrating.

Why mess about with something that worked so well in the first place?

Hi Andy,

yes Podcasts on iTunes which were once heaven on earth - I use Podcasts on iTunes now for 7 years - the latest "improvements" have convinced me that without regular self tutoring lessons with Apple help I won't be able to keep up with the programming geniuses at Apple. 7 years ago I didn't need to study Apple help pages, read them slowly and loudly, to get it. Now I read and read and still don't get it. Must be my getting dumb, can't be their mistake ;-(

The most impressive of their latest improvements is that when I have listened to a podcast file on the iPod Shuffle and delete it under podcasts it will remain undeleted but marked in the playlist.

Somehow I seem to remember that flawless and self-explanatory synching made all the world marvel at Apple's ingenuity once upon a time - but who cares these days - Steve Jobs is gone and thus his ideas MUST by definition be from yesterday.

May complaints about the podcast-feature are so many, I could write a book about it - the only improvement is that I can listen to a podcast before first downloading it but that is such a tiny minor comfort to all the rest that's gone.

To me it seems Apple is in its microsoft-ising itself phase ...

Yeah, Microsoft is a good comparison.

They want to decide how we should do things, make changes for the sake of it and introduce new "options" (ie the Cloud) which is a way of screwing more money out of people. I don't feel they are putting the consumer first anymore.

It is a shame as Apple is still the market leader in terms of product in my opinion, they just mess about with things too much.

my impression is that they are by now interested only in buyers of mobile devices and customers of iTunes and App store - old fashioned people using Macs to ride their own personal hobby horses may spend a bit on hardware here and now but that isn't reason enough to bother about them.

The iPod Shuffle is for my personal needs the best thing there is on the market. I don't care about phones, I don't need to be online when on the beach and since I prefer deserted beaches there wouldn't be a connection anyway.

All in all I think they have overplayed their hand in trying to achieve what in German is called the eierlegende Wollmilchsau (egg laying woolmilkpig) - they had angered me with their last major iTunes update so much that I got myself for Xmas an assortment of Kindles (old one, Paperwhite and Fire HD) instead of an iPad and though they are limited they are very undemanding and completely adequate. Especially the original Kindle is a delight, buttons are so much less skill-demanding than that swiping business and as for imitating book reading experience it beats even the much applauded Paperwhite (which proves its worth only at night in bed with all lights out)

Yes but all in all after using Apple for 7 years all of a sudden I can't get along without reference to the help pages? If that is so, then I might as well buy my next Laptop for a third of the price from the discounter and download iTunes to it.

7 years ago when I got my Mac I kept sighing with delight at how simple life can be and now ....