Why I'm not an Apple customer

Mark has written a nice blog post that resembles my feelings about Apple pretty well:

I don’t understand this continuing obsession with buying things that you need to break before they do what you want. It’s not just the iPhone; people did the exact same thing with the AppleTV too. Primarily to add support for other video codecs, like DivX and XviD. Why? (No seriously, why? I bought a Philips DVP 5960 for $60. It’s a DivX-certified DVD player with a USB port. Out of the box, it’ll play a DVD-R full — or a thumb drive full — of AVI files.) I thought the big draw for Apple hardware was that “It Just Works.” By breaking it, you must know you’re giving up the “Just Works” factor, so what’s left? Rounded corners?

I do understand why many people like Apple! They do make some great products, OS X is very nice (based on the quite limited time I've used it) and much of their hardware is very nice and their design team is doing a great job! It's just such a shame that they are so obsessed with locking their customers to their hardware and software. Considering how great their products in general are, I'm pretty sure they would sell even more if they opened up. At least I'd be a potential customer :-)