Wednesday, September 26, 2007

The walled garden is pretty, but annoying.

Apple peeve me sometimes.

I'm a relatively new 'convert' to the mac. It started at work when I was given a mac, an ancient (at the time) g3 (3 years ago), progressed to a g4, then a g5 in relatively little time.

But slowly I found that I liked the "Apple way" of doing things a lot better than the MS way, which in my experience; most of the time means (I'm being very general here):

* Follow the wizard, wizard doesn't work, figure out how to do it manually.

* use MS tool, find it isn't up to scratch upon further inspection, find third party product.

* learn lots of shortcut keys for everyday tasks otherwise you'll be clicking a way through a lot of obscure menus, dialogs and tabs, oh, and the really fiddly stuff? you might find it.

* Never use a 'lite' product.

* If in doubt, google, help files other than office are often useless.

Last year, 2 years after working at my mac-oriented office, I decided to get a macbook pro. I think what clenched the deal is that, if I wanted, I could run windows on it. I could "run back to familiar ground".

I haven't installed windows on boot camp (although i did get parallels after about 6 months because I wanted to play with the whole virtualization thing :) )

Most of the time when apple have disabled something, I've seen it's been for good reason (apart from the powerbook screen spanning thing, but there's a hack, and it works :) ).

but reading about this iPhone voiding your warranty pish posh has arced me up.

For goodness sake, you have entered the phone market. Phones need to be available to ALL NETWORKS, not just ones you enter special deals with, in markets you choose.

This is like region-coding, stupid DRM-y, management/marketing dictating technology requirements that the IT industry should not go down... any further.

The ACCC... I remember reading that the ACCC were going to do something about Region coding, but it appears that they have done nothing but other than point out that it's nasty and intervene in a sony case (good, but not quite good enough).

Steve jobs talking about it being a "Cat and mouse game" and that they experienced the same thing with fairplay.

... No you didn't. You entered a deal with the record companies to make sure "fairplay" (what is it about doublespeak that is so appealing for DRM names? PlaysForSure anyone?) wasn't broken for a significant amount of time otherwise they'd be fined (Can't find the article for the life of me, I assure you it's on arstechnica).

Stopping people elsewhere in the world, let alone people in the same country using your phone on other networks is just monopolistic.

Don't get me started on the "no devkit for iphone". people aren't buying the web 2.0 apps bit, and clearly evident by the amount of hacks available.

coupled with the blocking ipod synching with linux, the need to purchase ipod games again for the new ipod and the one which really takes the cake is...

disabling video out for non "blessed" accessories.

What's going on apple?

Seriously.

I looked at the process of getting ubuntu on my macbook pro the other day... it wasn't pretty... but I will keep tabs on it.