Often when I attend open source conventions or meet with people who consider themselves open source enthusiasts I am confronted with the most startling hypocrisy that I’m often at a loss as to how to respond. When attempting to list the "enemies of open source" the first company to roll of the tongue is of course, Microsoft - it shouldn’t be. The standard bearer, the very paragon of proprietary control and vicious lawyering of innovative hackers is none other than the little fruit-named company at Infinity Loop, Cupertino.
Invariably I’ll see a talk or a lecture on the lack of cooperation from hardware vendors with open source organizations and in the crowd I’ll see all those little backlit apples floating around. Does nobody find this ironic?
How about the iPhone? Apple fully intends on retaining vice-like controls over the destiny of the device - even after the consumer has purchased it outright and owns the bloody thing. Apple has become so cowed by the major carriers that it’s disallowing independent purchasing - forcing customers to do everything in store on the new 3G iPhones. This is nothing to say of the application architecture and distribution mechanism.
The iPod is the cracker for the iTunes cheese as far as Apple is concerned. The quantity of crippling DRM mechanisms and various other hoops to manage music I own is ludicrous. NEVER EVER should a digital version of a music file be less convenient than a physical media version - but this is exactly what occurs with the limited synch, proprietary media management software the iPod forces upon users.
Mac OS X - built on an open source operating system (FreeBSD for those of you not in the know) is hardly welcoming to open source development - XCode is a tool for developing apps for Apple to sell.
The strategy for MacOS reminds me of the market angling of Windows 98 - produce some headline titles everyone wants and backfill with shovel ware.
As someone who became very disillusioned with the company (around the coming of Mac OS X) it’s difficult for me to intuitively understand why everyone turned toward Apple for precisely the reasons I began to loathe their product line. They stopped caring about their MacAddicts and instead strut themselves for the general public and by "they" I mean Steve Jobs. So, if this is the case, how can they maintain such a loyal fan-base, not necessarily the fomenting Berkenstock with socks wearing evanglists of yore, but a group of people who well overspend for an under-delivering set of products?
What I believe to be the secret to Apple’s success in recent years has nothing to do with its usability or reliability - both of which are drastically inferior to both Windows and Linux (respectively) in the long term. It has to do with two things - industrial design / fashion and the ascendancy of the Web as platform.
As the web has become the primary conduit for practically everything we do the individual details of the operating system you’re using locally becomes further commoditized. So for most users who send email, browse Amazon/eBay, hit-up Facebook, watch YouTube it just doesn’t matter what OS you’re using. There exists, I believe, a codependent relationship between Apple users and the web productivity applications coming out.
I’m hypothesizing that applications like Google Office, Twitter, or any app that replaces a typically desktop app with a web version - are going to have a disproportionate quantity of Apple users relative to the actual market.
I believe this to be because most people just don’t care about the long-term viability of their computer so things like "lifestyle association" - which Apple has spent many millions of dollars generating - make the balance. In some ways, Apple has become the computer for people who don’t really need/want one and feel obligated to buy SOMETHING.