Goodbye, Apple
mdeslaur.blogspot.com
mdeslaur.blogspot.com
Monopolistic greed is understandable when it doesn't affect me seems to be the attitude (On that note I'm pretty sure Apple makes way more off iTunes than it does off the hardware at this point)
As a customer who is paying for this music I should be able to sync it with whatever I want. I don't expect Apple to support the Pre but I think it's reprehensible to actively try to cut it off.
(For the record I'm an iPhone 3GS owner who doesn't even like the Pre. I just don't want to be forced to use Apple products for the rest of my life just to keep my music)
If they wanted the Pre to sync to iTunes data, they should have written their own app that reads the user's XML file. It wouldn't have been that much work.
They way they re-enabled iTunes sync is by changing their
USB id to be the same as Apple's.
About ten years ago, Be wanted to have BeOS be an alternative OS you could run on Macs. Be did in fact get the first version running okay. But Apple was in the midst of one of its big hardware changes, so Be needed tech docs for the motherboard to do a really good job of it. Apple never supplied that information.
BeOS advocates at the time said: just go ahead and reverse engineer it. That's what the Linux people did. The powers that be at Be said: nope, we don't play that way. If Apple doesn't want us on their computers, then we're not going there. Be subsequently refocused on standard PC hardware.
I don't get your point.
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. --Alan Kay
While MicroSoft expends all of their resources testing their OS with every possible piece of hardware and its associated drivers, Apple gets to focus on making great products. They don't have to wait on the hardware manufacturers to innovate, and they don't have to support their shoddy hardware and drivers. They also don't have to take the blame when it doesn't work. MicroSoft does (earned or not).
Not wanting to test your OS with a myriad of different hardware is one thing. Stopping VMWare from supporting it as a guest OS is another. There's no technical reason that I shouldn't be able to run OSX on top of VMWare (I know there's hacks to get it to work, but it's slow as molasses).
Apple is more than happy to allow VMWare to develop and sell Fusion so I can run Windows on top of Apple hardware. How is it that they don't allow me to run OSX on top of my Windows box?
If they want to follow this tack they should at least be
forced to remove the USB-compatible logo from their product
and its marketing materials.
Unauthorized use of assigned or unassigned USB Vendor ID
Numbers and associated Product ID
Numbers are strictly prohibited.
Would you find some random guy using you SSN (or equivalent if you are not from US) obectionable?
But while I think it's useful to talk about defrauding other humans, it makes no sense to me to to talk about a computer defrauding another computer, at least, not yet :-D. This is where the analogy breaks down, in my opinion, and why I don't have any moral problems with what Palm is doing. A far closer analogy would be Compaq's emulation of the original PC BIOS.
I don't think anyone is asserting that Palm is intending to trick reasonable humans into thinking that their Pre is actually an iPod device. Everyone realizes that they are offering an iPod compatible device. To achieve this end, they are having their device "defraud" another computer. I'm okay with this. At worst, they have perhaps violated their licensing agreement with the USB Implementers forum. If so, this could be remedied by removing the USB logo from the Pre, and then even this argument dissolves.
Interoperability in practise brings you a mess. Look at the story of the serial GPS driver in Linux and how much effort goes into making it interoperable, look at the story of Netscape rewriting Navigator from scratch and having to track and work around bugs in 60+ FTP servers, look at the wx/tk/qt/kde/gnome mess in Linux - they all work together so you can have apps that look and feel completely different all running beside each other.
apple is obsessed with it's software and hardware
... because it's concerned about users. Users, not geeks. Apple kit works together. It generally works in fairly consistent ways, and third party Mac software does a pretty good job of looking "like Mac software". Apple's (Job's) fanatical and dictatorial approach is often credited with their comeback over the past few years.
Interoperability is good, and I'm a big fan of it, but not requiring it in the first place is even better.
I don't. Really, the more I think about this the more I'm convinced it's just a manipulative marketing tactic. Whether it will be a successful manipulative marketing tactic, I don't know yet.
Syncing music and data from a Mac doesn't seem to be that hard. Plenty of mobile device makers do it, and Apple even happily advertises and points people to the software used to do it (see, for example, Nokia's Mac transfer support). If you're concerned about supporting your users and ensuring they have a reliable good experience with your product, that's what you should be doing.
But Palm is knowingly doing something that's not only unsupported, but designed from the ground up to get Apple to take actions which hurt Palm's customers. This is literally the opposite of being concerned about your users.
The only reason I can think of for doing this is that Palm has seen how much press coverage you can get for your product if you can turn it into an anti-Apple story, because the tech press will eat out of your hand if you can give them a multi-million-page-view Apple controversy. And that's precisely what Palm is getting: the coverage of the Pre's syncing has effectively been a massive worldwide advertising campaign building up a sympathetic view of the Pre in the minds of potential customers. And best of all, it hasn't cost Palm so much as a single dime; it's all coming for free.
If Apple supports interoperability, they have a mess on their hands and they're dealing with interoperability issues instead of making a better product. If they don't support interoperability, people write angsty blog posts about them breaking whatever hackish unsupported software they were using to interface with their iPod. (As for the Pre, anything that allows arbitrary devices to pretend to be an iPhone and sync jeopardizes email account information--which can be synced to the iPhone--and is a security flaw. So I'm sure Apple did intentionally lock out the Pre. But I don't think they care about gtkpod enough to intentionally lock it out.)
"On that note I'm pretty sure Apple makes way more off iTunes than it does off the hardware at this point"
Why stop at "pretty sure"? They're a publicly traded company. It's not hard to get their financials.
Here's some numbers from their Q3 report a couple days ago:
"Apple sold 5.2 million iPhones during the quarter, producing $1.689 billion in revenue..."
"About 10.215 million iPods were sold this quarter, resulting in $1.492 billion in revenue..."
"Apple's "Other Music Related Products and Services" segment was responsible for $958 million in revenue..."
Cite: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/07/21/notes_of_inter...
So Apple gets to support iTunes and polish it for years and then Palm gets to leech off their hard work and use it for free without repercussion?
I think by disabling the Pre they're saying to Palm, "Hey, Palm, why don't you go spend your own millions of dollars and build your own damn app." When you look at it that way I can't really fault them.
What I suspect will happen is that Apple and Palm will battle back and forth for a few revisions over a few months and then Palm will cave and throw some money at Apple (or something else they want) and we'll hear about some sort of partnership and suddenly hey, look, the Pre will be supported officially. Either that or Palm will give up and make their own music uploader.
Apple's attitude is incredibly modern; just not open.
Do we HAVE to be 100% open all the time now, really? That makes no sense. Apple have killer products all the way from distribution to consumption; they've marketed them and sold them with effectiveness other companies only dream of!
I certainly cant fault them for wanting to keep that success to themselves :)
1. DRM free does not mean all my meta data comes with me. Much of that data is stuff I created and stuff I should have the right to take elsewhere
2. I specifically said "I don't expect Apple to support the Pre but they shouldn't actively block it"
3. Revenue is gross not net. Apple's margins are obviously WAY smaller on a hardware device than they are on digital media.
If it is a standard, they HAVE to support it. If not, they are justified in actively BLOCKing it. There is nothing in between that makes sense to me.
Once my car's warranty expires should Chevy be allowed to enforce a mandatory recall in which they change the car to prevent after market products from working in it?
By analogy, Apple can make it so that nothing syncs with iTunes, then open it up so that the iPod and iPhone do.
By doing that, they cut off anyone ranting that iTunes is rubbish because it crashed when syncing their music (unmentioned: to a third party device).
Microsoft picked up an incredibly bad rap for bluescreens, enormous numbers of them were caused by poor device drivers and shoddy third party software. Apple has little benefit in allowing El-Cheapo Music System to sync with iTunes, but lots of potential downside (support calls, lowered image of Apple, people migrating away from the Apple ecosystem towards less profitable accessories, buggy integration that requires development and testing of software update workarounds).
Apple's margins on iTunes are pretty low, when you consider how much they have to pay out to record labels and credit card companies even before paying for their own infrastructure. Digital media is high-margin in total, but only if you can realize all the profit. The record labels can do that, but Apple can't.
So any of the billions of iPod users are automatically trusted? I can't imagine the security of email on the iPod depends on trusting all iPhones? Surely they have some other mechanisms in place?
Well... yes. Right? I mean, not 100% trusted -- does anyone trust their own software 100%? But as trusted as software written or vetted by Apple can be.
iPods exclusively run software that is under Apple's control. On everything but the iPhone and iPod Touch, 100% of that software is written by Apple itself. And even on the iPhone, Apple has the power to immediately halt distribution of any app that is causing trouble until the app is fixed. (And, as we all know, they do this. For reasons far less important than security holes.)
You can, of course, run non-Apple-reviewed software on your hardware. But Apple will disclaim all responsibility for your fate -- and, as we can see, they will actively try to shake you off.
Since we are talking about USB ids here, pretending to be an iPhone would open a "security flaw" only when they have physical access to the computer iPhone's being synced with.
In which case a person already can do whatever they like with it. E.g., just copy your entire hard drive.
Interoperability is good, but it's not a mandate.
As far as the term. I mean, I understand people can have different definitions but the reality to me is when a company feels they can abuse their customers without fear of them going elsewhere that means they have reached the point of de-facto monopoly. Apple has no problem taking functionality from their own iTunes customers to kill the Pre and that to me is the line (though I fully understand others can differ)
The other problem is that no other companies who might stand a chance are really trying - if a huge techno-music company such as Sony-BMG made a proper attack, such as "our entire catalog, open, for $X/year" and that went nowhere, then I'd start to be convinced.
Apple's free to do this if they want, but then again Microsoft should be free to bundle IE also.
The key issue is whether the company in question had significant market power and used that power for non-competitive purposes. Price-fixing is a classic example, but it's only one of several.
If Palm fucks anything up and some fraction of Pre users manage to corrupt their data or their software (because Pre-iTunes interoperability is an ugly hack!), then those users are not—at least not all of them—going to shrug and say, 'Oh, well. I was using unsupported software and hardware, and I got burnt.' Enough of them are going to say, 'What the fuck!? iTunes/Apple/Mail/OS X sucks!' or they're going to call Applecare support and sit on the phone for half an hour while the poor schmuck tries to get their iTunes library back. That is what we call a bad experience, and Apple doesn't like that. If they control both sides of the equation, then they can make sure that doesn't happen.
Beyond that, if that scenario does happen Apple gets to tell it's customers "Look, Palm messed up your data which is why you should use geniune Apple hardware" and they win a monsterous victory. Palm corrupting iTunes data would be the greatest thing to ever happen to Apple. So the idea that Apple is blocking the Pre because of that doesn't hold much weight.
Vista requires signed drivers because Microsoft was finally sick of shoddy drivers destabilizing Windows, generating support calls and ruining the user experience.
So there's no need for the hypothetical. Microsoft has already done something analogous to Apple's move -- despite years of 'enjoying' what you view as a sales opportunity.
They don't win a Monstrous Victory. You know when Windows crashes, it now submits to a web service and comes back saying:
Your computer crashed because of software made by JONES SOFTWARE LTD.
I feel less annoyed at Microsoft when I see that, but never happy. It's still not OK. It's not a victory for MS, just a defensive block.
Apple is preventing people from essentially hacking their software for the benefit of another company.
Not true; fiduciary duty requires you to act in a manner "reasonably believed to be in the best interests of the corporation", which does not mean "reasonably believed to maximize profits".
Apple has every right to block the Pre. If they don't, then people will come to expect the Pre syncing to work (and I'm sure other devices would follow) and Apple would be forced into a situation where they would either have to support this or take a significant portion of the blame if an update to iTunes inadvertently broke 3rd party device syncing. Even so, if they only want you to sync with Apple brand products then they can do that too. Don't like it? Don't buy Apple products, that's always been an option.
"You'd think they would want to sell more iPods, not block a certain percentage of their market out," says mdeslaur in this post.
Maybe the Apple executives have made the wrong decision for their company's bottom line, and maybe mdeslaur, and many of the commenters here, would have made a better decision that would have increased Apple's profits. But given that (a) they have access to a lot of data that you don't have, and (b) they're executives at Apple and you're not, I wouldn't bet on it.
Well, that, plus a lot more drama and dramatic linebreaks.
Here's a better one:
In a misguided attempt to lock people in, apple is blocking linux users, (and anyone else) from accessing their data on an iPod.
Don't support 3rd party software? Fine.
Actively block them? Not so fine.
In either case, while breaking Pre interoperability was likely intentional (and we've discussed this to death in other threads), Apple doesn't give a shit about gtkpod.
I think people are afflicted with the misapprehension that product bundling is unlawful. It is not. It is unlawful to use bundling as a device to maintain or extend a monopoly. Saying Apple has a monopoly on the iPod is like saying Kimberly-Clark has a monopoly on Huggies.
It's a bad idea because it's hurts their own customers. It's a bad idea because it causes some people not to buy their product.
Huggies is a ridiculously bad example.
A better example is the Michelin PAX run flat wheels (rims) that require special (expensive) tires. Nothing illegal there, it's a great lock in. Except customers refuse to buy it, and not just refuse to buy the wheels, they won't even buy a car with those, and car manufacturers started having to add an option to not have run flat tires.
With the tires, it's just a bad idea, but with an iPhone apple is blocking access to a customers data. It's MY iPhone apple - not yours.
As for the "it's MY iPhone argument", I sympathize with it, but I see the other side of the argument too: I also want companies to be free to create any reasonable business model they'd like. Apple very specifically and deliberately didn't sell you an iPhone as a general-purpose computing platform you could do anything you want with, and you can't claim that you bought it expecting to use it as a Linux box.
In this day and age I have no idea why someone who primarily uses Linux would even bother using an iPod when there are good alternatives to Apple's "circle of one" products.
That's unfortunate for Linux users, because it's clearly not worth it to Apple to build a version of iTunes for GNU/Linux. But, you know, the iPod also doesn't play ogg files. So what are Linux users doing buying them in the first place?
Your argument about self contained would be good, except that it's not a case of apple not supporting other things, it's apple deliberately blocking them.
How many hacks that muck around in Apple's UX space do you think it would take for Apple to just sort of turn a blind eye to, before users starting accidentally wiping their iTunes libraries or bricking their iPhones? And how many proponents of said hacks do you think would argue that's an acceptable state of affairs?
Bad metaphor. Suppose I lived in a world where, if my TV malfunctioned, it could break my phone and my web browser, send random emails to my relatives, riffle through my address book, and delete all the music I've bought over the last five years.
Oh, and there are international criminal gangs who employ networks of botnets to attack my TV every fifteen seconds.
In that world, I'd see a real use case for the steel-cage-equipped TV.
Apple should simply ignore it: don't support it, and don't block it.
(I should note, by "you" I mean "Linux fan who bought an iPod", not "you, tdavis" :). I didn't even consider an Apple product when I was running Linux because I knew it would be too much of a pain.)
Their profitability demonstrates that this is false. People (lots of people) can and do afford their products.
which they force to not work with anything else [WHY?]
To be able to dictate a minimum standard of user experience and to keep you tied into their ~$250/second profit supply.
you'll want me to buy music just from you
Want you to, yes, but you don't have to - iTunes has offered to import your CDs for ages, and you can put other music files into its library with click-and-drag simplicity.
use only your software
No - if they did there would be no iPhone app-store. It doesn't make sense - they want you to buy a Mac, so they want a compelling ecosystem of high quality programs of all kinds - from Omnigroup and Circus Ponies to FireFox and the gnu Utils.
and pay you for software upgrades [iPod touch]
Which take employees time and effort to develop - why should they be free?
In other words, Apple's present behavior may be justifiable(like you say) and a change from how it used to work in the past (mrlebowski's point).
pay you for software upgrades [iPod touch] !
So your solution doesn't work.
My solution is to not upgrade the OS on my generation 1 iPod Touch and use gtkpod. Not very sustainable in the long run, but almost acceptable.