Applenomics
By: Reach for the Sky
I stopped using a Macintosh as my primary computer for several reasons. It was a good computer to be sure, but as a gamer I simply had no business using a computer with a severe lack of compatible games. I still used iPods for awhile, and eventually saved up enough for the iPhone 3G. It was a fine product at first, although after awhile it showed itself to be nothing more than a well-polished smart-phone. In fact, my decision to forgo the purchasing of Apple products has very little to do with the quality of said products, but a series of business practices I can't in good conscience put money forward to support. Let's sit down and go over them.
The first is their operating system. One can not legally run mac OS X on a Windows-based PC, but one can run Windows on a mac. This is celebrated as another wonderful feature of Apple. This is akin to an orange-farming village claiming broader fruit diversity over a pear-farming village because the pear village is willing to share its fruit while the orange village hoards its oranges. The fault lies in Apple's failure to allow its software to be used with any hardware, as opposed to the current proprietary system they currently have going on. I'm not saying its wrong that they do this, and technically it is an advantage macs have over other PCs, but to pretend as though Windows compatibility is due to the capabilities of the Macintosh is dishonest.
Then I started getting interested in the DRM debate. Perhaps too interested in my own good. A devastating blow was dealt when I found that Audiosurf, a game that creates level based on any song, which would become one of my favorite games, was not compatible with my iTunes songs. This fact has thankfully changed since that day, although now Beat Hazard, another song-based game, currently faces the same problem. The DRM of iTunes' song format has gotten thankfully more lenient, although users like myself are far from owning the song we have purchased. It's all fine now though, because I use Amazon mp3, a DRM-free music provider, for my music needs now.
It was at this point I became enraptured in the iPhone. It was all fine and good until I found out how Apple treats its app developers. Here is a detailed account of the process third-party developers have to go through. Note that developers have to pay $99 just to be able to use their software on an actual iPhone, and that there is no guarantee that anything a developer makes will ever make it onto the app store. If a developer does get his app approved, Apple then takes 30% of all profits. The only service Apple is providing the developer at that point is hosting, and considering Apple gives them no alternative and that no hosting fee should ever be that high, this is borderline thievery.
Then I looked a little bit closer at the iPhone jailbreaking situation. Let's look at some of iPhones most recently touted features.
Copy-Paste capability
Video/audio recording
Multi-tasking
Customizable interface
What do all of those features have in common (aside from being features every phone should have at this point?) All of them were features that were available to those who jailbroke their first generation iPhone. Just kidding about that last one though. That one is still only available to those who jailbreak their iPhones. You see, there is no reason the first generation iPhone couldn't do most of the things the latest iPhone can. Apple simply wanted to sell their bamboozled customers three phones instead of one. Apple is, of course, working hard to compete with third party developers who write code for jailbroken iphones.
Ha. Just kidding, obviously. They are trying to make jailbreaking an iPhone illegal.
