When I went to check my tech headlines today, two bits of bad news for Apple were near the top: "Apple Disables iTunes Sync Feature on Palm Pre" and "Apple Wanted PC Hunter Ads Pulled, Says Microsoft".
The second item is sort of a joke. Apparently an Apple lawyer called Microsoft and demanded that they pull the "PC Hunter" series of ads, saying it made inaccurate claims about Apple's pricing. This is based on an anecdotal story told by Microsoft COO Kevin Turner during a speech at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. In response, Turner claimed Microsoft will be opening retail stores "right nextdoor to Apple Stores."
How true that is can be a matter of conjecture. Lawyers usually make demands like that in writing because they can bill more hours to add paragraphs about the exact laws you're violating and make things sound more official. Also, a letter is something they can show in court if they decide to proceed with an actual suit. A letter bolsters your case much more than a lawyer taking the stand to testify he/she called the defendant and told them to "stop it."
More importantly, I have to wonder why Apple would even bother with such a reaction. They make no bones about being more expensive than commodity hardware. Let me put it this way, the starting price for the top of Hyundai's line, the V6 Genesis, is $650 cheaper than the starting price for the bottom of Mercedes-Benz's line, the C300 sport. Does Mercedes worry that you can get a high-end Hyundai for less than a low-end Mercedes? If Apple did this, it just makes them look scared of competition.
But it's the first item that really makes them look scared of competition. They deliberately updated iTunes in such a way as to make it incompatible with your Palm Pre, making a competing smartphone just that much less competitive with their iPhone.
I can understand that they might want to preserve a seamless experience. If they let iTunes talk with any random player, then they have to field support requests from people who blame iTunes when something goes wrong in the communication process. Still, deliberately trying to prevent users from using other devices just smacks of monopolistic lock-in. What's the point of selling us all these "upgrades" to remove DRM from our purchased music if we can't use it with non iPod devices? Oh, we can, but we're just going to have to jump through a bunch of hoops, because it might cut into their iPod sales if it was easy to use iTunes with non-iPod players.
Combine all this with the fact that it seems Apple will punish me for the heresy of not upgrading to OS X 10.5 by charging $10 more for the 10.4 to 10.6 upgrade than the cost of buying 10.5 and the 10.5 to 10.6 upgrade. That will also be more than wiping OS X and installing clean with a new copy of Windows 7.
I'm just sort of getting really tired of Apple. When I get a job and get our finances back to where I can justify a new laptop, it's becoming less and less likely that I'll stay with them. It's not just the price, but the way it feels like they see their customers as there to serve them instead of the other way around.
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