More Apple woes

Do you hear that sound? That's the sound of a corporation that bought into their own hype and got greedy. This is the year that Apple's stock might be soaring, but its also the year of many mis-steps. First, screwing early adopters out of 100 bucks only months after they released their iPhones. Which really isn't that big of a deal until you look at all the other factors that come into play.

1. OS X Leopard gets delayed. Everyone was expecting this beast to drop in June. I mean it has been touted as the next best thing for the last 2 years and now? We're not getting it til October.
   
   
2. iPods rushed to market. Sure the new iPod line-up is nice, but now there is all these bugs that are popping up because Apple got greedy. iPod Touch screens are having quality issues with dark screens. Coverflow and the UI for the iPod Classic and iPod Nano are buggy and not performing up to what most people expect from Apple.
   
   
3. More closed standards rather than open standards as time marches on. They tried to lock the iPod out of any other interface besides iTunes. Most people use iTunes which is fine, but what about the small set of people that want to use Linux? Before, no problem, but now the new iPods have a hash (that's already been cracked thankfully) to make sure who and what is connecting to it to upload music. I'm sure Apple is claiming that they're doing it for our own good. To "protect" us, but really, they're doing it for themselves. iTunes is now locking out any home-made ringtones. There was a way to circumvent this in the last few versions but Apple keeps patching them. What if I want to put ringtones on there of my dog barking? Does the RIAA have a say on that? What about a recording of anything that wasn't produced by some commercial entity? And of course why is the RIAA getting to say what Fair Use is on music that I own? Where is the little guy telling Steve Jobs that the RIAA is screwing us?
   

I take it that Steve Jobs is now thinking that the more closed of a system he can create, the better he can control who and what uses his products will offer rather than letting consumers do what they want with it. Its like telling a child that he should only use a spoon to eat with and not use it to dig up dirt in the backyard.

And today? To call a press conference to offer the same phone to the UK? I mean seriously, I don't know how many Europeans are really gonna buy into the iPhone. Sure, its a great iPod, but from my understanding, Europe is rocking 3G. That means most people that are data enabled and tech savvy are already hopping along at broadband speeds over their cellular network. Are they really going to want to downgrade to EDGE speeds just so they can lock themselves into the iTunes+iPod walled garden?

Sure, Apple makes things that usually "just work" that doesn't require you to be an elite hacker to get things done, but the larger they grow, they more greedy they get. If they move on this path much longer, I definitely will begin to lose faith in them, and they sure will be getting less and less of my money.