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Has Apple become like Mirosoft? Or may be even worse?

I love Apple!

I cannot live without my iPod, much less without my iPhone! The “I am a Mac, I am a PC” commercials on TV are so adorable… Sometimes I rewind my DVR just to see one of those commercials again. In these moments I tell myself “Show that evil empire Microsoft how things are done!”.

But then… I must have been brain dead for a while! You see, what got me is that I have always been for a free market and fair competition. And what Microsoft was doing was not right. No two ways about it. Apple was the company that materialized those feelings and stood up to Microsoft. Naturally, I (like many others) fell for it and blindly screamed “Go Apple!”.

It turns out that I have supported a company that became worse than the one it had set out to defy.

Apple said that if you want to have an iPod, you can only use it with iTunes and if you want to buy music for it… guess what?… you need iTunes for that as well. Same applies to the iPhone with the only difference that you have to be an AT&T customer. Oh yeah… and all these songs you might have bought from Apple, you can’t put on any other mp3 player but on an iPod, unless you remove the DRM protection.

On the computer front things do not look much more different. Mac OS X can legally run only on officially approved Apple hardware and vise versa. If you like the OS, well your only chance is to drop some major cash for the hardware as well. This goes over and beyond what Microsoft has ever attempted to do. After all you can run Windows on anything you feel like.

I am a huge believer in FOSS and Apple has shaped to be the absolute opposite of this philosophy. Even though their OS is built on top of FreeBSD and NetBSD, and they have ported a number of Linux applications to Mac OS X, they have not contrubuted back to the community at all. They even officially announced that iTunes will not be released for Linux. I would like to think that the only reason for this is because they know that Linux users are not going to tollerate DRM content anyway.

2 Comments to Has Apple become like Mirosoft? Or may be even worse?

1. 

   I wish all companies would play fair and support open standards and not force people to use their proprietary formats. Leaving M$ was easy for me, but Apple simply makes too good of a computer (both hardware and OS) to abandon. Hopefully things will change, especially with iTunes/iPod…
Timmy on January 20th, 2009
2. 

   I absolutely agree that Apple makes good products. I hope they continue to do so.
   My only concern is that they have become an entity that is only concerned with the bottom line. That can turn around and bite them in the long run.
dimitar on January 20th, 2009

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