Apple breaks up Palm Pre, iTunes lovefest | Hacker News Reader

Apple breaks up Palm Pre, iTunes lovefest

news.cnet.com

16 pointsjballanc33 comments

I eagerly await the 1000-item-long comment thread about antitrust, unfair competition, and Apple's history of bare-knuckled business practices. Really.

But before we kick that off, can I just chime in with the observation that the overwhelming likelihood of just this event made it irresponsible for Palm to promote iTunes syncing for their device?

I agree with that. I'm sure that they would rather have their own syncing app that simply works with the iTunes library rather than masquerading as an iPod and leaving it up to iTunes to do all the work. That's just plain crazy if you think about it, but in their rush to market this was probably the easiest way. Surely there is a team at Palm working on a standalone app as we speak. Other handset manufacturers use their own applications for the sync and simply utilize the iTunes library data, in time Palm will too.

I completely concur.

I wonder now many consumers saw the small print stating, "Compatible with iTunes v8.2. Compatibility with future versions not guaranteed."

It seems irresponsible for Palm to put out a feature that relies on a hack, knowing full well that it would likely break when iTunes was updated.

I agree that it's irresponsible for Palm to promote iTunes compatibility - but someone had to be first. Without a clear, actual case of "Apple shuts down competitor by software patch" one cannot make a case against Apple as a monopolizer. Hypothetical "Apple can shut down competitor" cases do not convince mainstream lawmakers and media.

Let's be clear here: Apple doesn't prevent syncing with the iTunes library. What they prevent is third parties using iTunes to do so. It is less a case of shutting out a competitor as it is squashing a parasite. Nokia and RIM both provide software to sync with a user's iTunes library, why won't Palm?

Not even. Competitors are (as far as I know) welcome to use iTunes' xml database and files. But they are not allowed to label themselves as iPods, especially on user-facing interfaces. That's exactly what the Pre does, and it's a clear and blatant infringement on Apple's marks and trade dress.

A device identifying itself as an iPod in a protocol is no more "blatant infringement on Apple's marks" than it is when every modern browser puts Mozilla/4.0 in its user agent.

Please note "especially on user-facing interfaces" above. The Pre identifying itself as an iPod in a protocol is not an issue. The problem is that doing so ultimately advertises to the user that the Pre is an iPod via dialogs, icons, and other interface verbiage.

If for Internet Explorer to ape Mozilla/4.0 compatibility, it had to momentarily change its name, icon, and all user-facing interfaces to match Firefox so that one could not distinguish between an actual instance of Firefox and the "IE-in-fox's-clothing", you can bet that the Mozilla foundation would be peeved. Aside from legal considerations, what if IE-with-firefox-dress crashed all the time and people wrongfully blamed Firefox for this sorry state of affairs?

It was irresponsible of Palm to do so. That doesn't mean it isn't user-hostile and slightly evil for Apple to intentionally break syncing with a third-party device.

What's really interesting is who this hurts -- iTunes on OSX users who may have purchased music from the iTunes music store.

Windows users have a number of really useful and viable options to iTunes for managing their music. OSX users... don't. If I were still on Windows, I probably wouldn't have been using my Pre with iTunes to begin with. Unfortunately for me, I switched to a Mac not long ago, so I'm stuck with iTunes and a whole bunch of crap alternatives for managing my media library.

Great job, Apple, I'm so happy to be a Mac user.

There's SongBird for OSX which IIRC also supports iPod syncing. In the case of the Pre you can also use it as a USB Mass Storage device to add music. Or Palm could just stop being lazy and offer proper software for their device.

It's kind of amusing to see... I'm pretty sure people at Apple realise that just by breaking compatibility they won't force any special amount of Pre owners to suddenly buy an Apple product which does work with iTunes. They just bought Pre - why would they even look at iTouch / iPhone? Maybe iPod, but probably not before the next salary.

Also, I guess someone told them that this move has the same problem as DRM. Now Pre will improve compatibility. The only real way to block Pre would be to introduce a public key infrastructure support + certificate checking in iPods & iTunes, which I believe they don't support yet. (and it would require a mass firmware upgrade)

But they could just count on Pre users getting interested in iTunes and their store (which would give them profits). They could even detect a connected Pre and splash-screen advertise iPods to them. So... was it really something they had to do? Did they actually think before the default defensive move?

Maybe Apple wants to license iTunes Sync support in the future to third parties? In that case they would obviously want to restrict who can use it. Personally I think Apple just doesn't want the responsibility of support someone else's device and figured it was better to shut the door on it now instead of waiting. From Palm's perspective it's really puzzling they even did this in the first place. They have an agreement in place with Amazon to sell music through the Pre. Why support iTunes? I would love to see Amazon offer a desktop app for buying/syncing/ripping/playing music that could rival iTunes and create some real competition.

I wouldn't say that PKI & checking is far off, what do you think the entire app store dev platform is built on after all? I think the DRM is similar too.

There may be a support issue for Apple here. Imagine a customer purchases a Pre and syncs it to iTunes, but Palm's reverse-engineering of the iPod-iTunes protocol is incomplete and iTunes crashes as a result (and does so reproducibly). Many customers would follow this up with Apple, but Apple would likely be unable to help them (presuming they were even interested in doing so).

Apple deserves MUCH more rap and lawsuits than they currently get. They make amazing products, but that should be independent of their business practices

I would not call relying on a hack to use third party (which is not at all interested to support you) software a solid business practice either.

Patients don't sue doctors that they like.

Apple is just as bad as Microsoft.

I got downmodded when I said it before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661202 so now can I say I told you so?

It's amazing how pretty much every person in that thread refused to believe Apple would break it. This is not an accident, Apple did it deliberately - they warned about it, and then they did it.

Edit: And I get downmodded for this one too, which I expected. People clearly really like Apple and refuse to believe they would do this.

You misunderstand. People did not refuse to believe that Apple would break support. They refused to believe you had any compelling evidence to support your claim that they would.

That you happened to be right is no vindication when the odds were 50/50 and you put forth no model for predicting the outcome.

It was not 50/50 it was 100%. They clearly said they would break it.

Yes I know they used marketing speak to do it, but after a while you learn to decode it.

Um, as the person you replied to in that thread, I thought it was pretty obvious they were going to break it. From Apple's perspective, the ability to sync a Pre is a bug, and they fixed it as they would any other.

What isn't obvious is why you seem to find it so offensive and threatening.

I don't find it threatening, but I do find it offensive. Apple is harming consumers (it's own customers of music players), in order to protect it's market share in a related product. It's just not ethical behavior.

Some people tried to say "they just don't support it", but that's not so, they broke it deliberately. (And I know it was deliberate because they said in advance that they would do it.)

So that's what surprised me so much - that people, (you for example), just don't care that they would do that. It's something microsoft does, and everyone hates them for it. Why don't people care when apple does it?

I don't get it. Why should Apple support the Pre if they don't want to? Palm is perfectly capable of developing their own software that syncs with an iTunes library, and Apple has done nothing to prevent that. (RIM and Nokia both have such software, and DoubleTwist supports the Pre.) Why is it offensive it Apple chooses not to let their competitors parasitically hijack their software? Why is that any different from any other bug that produces undesirable behavior?

They should simply ignore Palm. Instead they chose to actively block them.

They didn't actively do anything to Palm. Apple fixed a bug in their software that causes what they think is undesirable behavior.

Suggesting that a company should avoid fixing bugs in it's software if it would potentially harm their competitors is a little bit on the silly side. I don't know of any business that operates on that principle.

This is why I use free software; software that works in my interests, instead of actively against it. I don't really understand why people would use software that intentionally limits their rights, but it makes me sad.

Amarok is vastly better than iTunes, if you are into that kind of thing. (I personally use xmms2 and a variety of perl scripts to control it, but I can see how that's not exactly suitable for everyone.)

The software itself doesn't work against you, but for people to have a good interface it has to go through a lot of use. (That's why bash, for instance, is so much better as a shell than GIMP is as a picture editor.)

I see the anti-free-software brigade is out in force tonight. Helpful hint, guys, I have lots of karma and nothing to spend it on.

For what it's worth, if you'd made the identical comment about Windows Media Player you'd probably be at +10 by now.

Yeah. I have learned what is and isn't popular here. On the popular list is being really cynical about everything; on the "not popular" list are free software, the GPL, and being liberal.

Fortunately, I have like 7000 karma points and only lose 8 for every unpopular post, so it doesn't really matter. Although, I am still trying to figure out why karma matters at all...

And a hint for you, in kind. When you post about Amarok, you don't get a bunch of people posting about how iTunes is "vastly better than" your chosen tech without anything other than dumb subjective anecdotes to back it up. Nor do people whine about how your viral licenses make them "sad".

For you to do so is not just rude, it insults our intelligence (do you honestly think anyone here doesn't know what free software is? If we're not using it, it's because we've been there and found it lacking. Deal.)

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