Over the past week I've received wink wink, nudge nudge, emails from my friends asking in a knowing sort of way if I had pre-ordered an iPad.
I think they were surprised and somewhat angered when I told them that because of Apple's store policies toward developers. My primary issue with the iPad is that I don't want hardware manufacturers making decisions over what tasteless applications pricing experiment I want to run on MY hardware.
I can play, read, watch, and listen to almost anything I want on my PC. This is because it is a (fairly) open system. I can't say the same for my XBox, iPhone, or DS...
I'm afraid that our future is filled with companies that want to control what we can watch and when we can watch it. It saddens me that the company we think of as "most cool" is behind much of the technological lock down of devices we own.
Apple, in particular, has sold this sort of control as a means of protecting the consumer. We know one developer whose product was banned from the Apple store just because the blurb mentioned he won an award for the Android version of the product. How did that protect the end-user? who was told that he had to remove the references to Android to avoid an interruption in the availability of the program. How did that protect the end user or meaningfully advance Apple for that matter. (Ed. note: I'm not sure there is much of a distinction between being threatened and being banned, but I've made the correction in the interests of accuracy. When Apple is the only store in town, there isn't much of a choice for a developer, but to comply. The threat, whether acted upon or merely coercive, is still the same sort of heavy handed behavior to which I object.)
I mentioned I am an iPhone user. With all of Apple's corporate policy of "protecting the consumer" why not have a central registry where consumers could report the serial number of their stolen or lost iPhones? That would immediately end the market for these devices. That would be true consumer protection.
When I think of the software that has given me the most trouble on my PCs over the past few years it has been preciesely the software that has been forced on me at time of purchase by the manufacturers. Thank you very much, but I want to be the one deciding what does or does not go on my system; keep your bloatware to yourself.
Fortunately, there are alternative devices to the iPad. Dozens of pads will be on the market w/in the year. The problem we face collectively, however, is that Microsoft has now jumped into the "closed market" model with two feet. First the xBox (which helped kill PC gaming), then the Zune (which helped kill the more open "plays for sure" devices). Now, the Windows 7 phone, is reputed to use a closed storefront.
With Microsoft and Apple both moving in the same direction the mass market is being pushed to a closed model. If these companies had their way I doubt there would be a single "internet". There would have been Microsoft's internet, and Apple's, and Sony's. Each would have had their own terms of service and none would talk to each other. (Try playing a PC game online against a PS3 or even and Xbox). The open nature of the the internet is not a marketing tool; the suits never would have gone for it. Yet it is what gave the internet its power.
Perhaps the "final frontier" is the freedom we have to think, to play, to read, to say what we want.
It is resistance to corporate control, however futile, that will push off my great desire to purchase an iPad. So, c'mon Acer and HP and Dell, gimmee freedom and I'll give you Mastercard.
