Five Lessons Apple Can Learn From Amazon

http://www.geardiary.com/2009/06/19/kindles-drm-rears-its-ug...

Amazon's Kindle service provides you with a limited number of downloads for each of your purchases, and there is no obvious way to back up your data. Burn through too many devices and you are out of luck; there isn't even a way to tell how many that magic number is.

Meanwhile, Apple always provides powerful backup and migration mechanisms: you can get a new Mac, plug it into the old one via Firewire, and have it transfer all of your apps and data seamlessly to the new system.

(And yes, I'm "that saurik", and I obviously have no reason to be defending Apple, my sworn enemy ;P. This article is simply jacked up.)

I’d paid for that program, but I no longer had access to it — and Apple refused to refund the measly two bucks I paid because it was a purchase over 30 days old.[...]

The store works like that ? Poof, gone, no refund, if you dare to update firmware ?

To be fair, Amazon pulled this stunt with a copy of 1984 (of all things). But unlike Apple, as soon as Amazon became aware of how grossly stupid it was to yank a book off Kindles (and the delicious irony of it being 1984), Jeff Bezos came out with an apology and made an explicit promise not to do it again.

I'd rather they could not do it, period. And that one didn't even involve firmware updates - just a plain yank on the leash (their 3G link) ...

[I suppose it's a lost cause pointing out that the title is Nineteen Eighty-Four, not 1984 ? Ah, the time when writers were paid five cents per word ...]