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 :-)

Interesting comment from Apple/Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs just posted a comment on the Apple website called "Thoughts on Music. He starts by mentioning that

To begin, it is useful to remember that all iPods play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in “open” licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC.

What he doesn't mention is that AAC and MP3 isn't exactly open formats - they are quite infected with software patents which means that everyone that wants to play those files have to pay royalties (if you bought an iPod, part of the price is royalties to be able to play MP3 files). Free, open formats do exist - just have a look at the Xiph.org formats like Ogg Vorbis and Flac. There is nobody that prevents Apple from adding support for those formats to their players and no one will demand royalties if they did! They would probably sell even more iPods if they added support for those formats.

He ends by stating the obvious and what everyone else have been saying for years:

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.

He also says that if the music companies would let them sell music without DRM,

Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.

That is positive news from Apple! It is now up to the music companies to do the right thing. The big question is whether they will go for it? I'll believe it when I see it. Why? Because they don't use DRM to stop piracy, they use it so they can sell us the same product again and again.

I got another question: If Apple starts selling DRM free music, will all those unfortunate people that already bought music with DRM be able to download DRM free versions of the music they already bought?