[Nicole060]

I am a mac user too, but I just own a laptop, rather than a whole ecosystem of iMac+macbook+*. My desktop computer is a home built tower.

And yes, the android tablets were absolute shit when the iPad came out, that's why I didn't buy an android tablet even though I was already kinda getting fed up with Apple at the time. I just think I should've waited for a while, wait for something like the newer, Android 4.0 Transformer and now the Nexus 7, rather than immediately buy an iPad 2. I'm torn between the two, the Transformer sounds closer to my ideal, with stuff like a built-in card reader, but the portability of a 7" sounds good to me too.

You're admitting that iTunes isn't really that great even on a Mac. And think about it. It's the only way to put mp3s on an iPhone or iPad (unless you bought everything on the store). I'd rather they just give me a Mass Storage interface to the file system than force me to use some crap proprietary software. iTunes sucks partly because they have to keep it cross platform, meaning it's never going to be a full modern cocoa app on the mac and it's never going to feel right on Windows either and mac libraries are not known for being great for cross platforms apps compared to Qt or Java SWT.

Even if I were to be a full mac user I would oppose this idea of my-way-or-the-highway simply because I find it crucial to be able to QUICKLY move from a platform to the other without any fuss whatsoever if you change your mind or anything like that, and it's something only standard metadata and filesystems hierarchies can give you. I was a long time linux user until I made the mistake of building a desktop that was kinda incompatible, particularly the ATI Radeon that crashes a lot with Gnome 3. It wasn't a pain to come back to windows, and it's never been a pain to switch from Mac OS X on my laptop to windows on my desktop. And I use Rsync to make mirrors on an external usb drive of my data, a tool that works on the three platforms rather well. I have nothing against an heterogeneous environment and I'm not married to a particular OS or software. I'm not a fanboy of any one of them, I use what works best for me at a particular time and particular hardware I bought. Mac laptops are really nice, their trackpad rocks, the suspend works good, they offer good battery use, the unibody case feels solid and not creaky even if you hold it a bit wrong..

I like a lot of things from Apple, I just wish they were actually more open and not just in the open source sense of working on projects like LLVM, but open in the way their devices interact, open in the protocols, open in the way metadata is stocked and shared.. the Mail.app for example used to implement mbox, and one of the things that pushed Mark Pilgrim over the edge was the conversion to a proprietary format. MS loses too on that particular example (mail), but they're getting more open these days with file formats, and while the Open XML process hasn't been without mistakes it's still miles better than the state of iWork. iWork can't even open ODF files, while Microsoft created a plugin for Office that lets it import and export to ODF. I recall Office 2010 supports it natively.

Apple just doesn't give a shit. I don't care as much for "free as in freedom" software as I care for "open protocols", "open file formats", "open metadata". Make closed source software if you want, and sell it for as much as you want, but as long as you support openness, I'll give you the thumbs up. Microsoft made great strides toward this. The way they worked with mono developers was also exemplary and C# truly became crossplatform apart from the GUI libraries themselves (and it's still possible to do so with the old WinForms) and Mono never really lagged that far away when it came to language features and major APIs, and they actually submitted the language to a standard body, and the specifications are free to download, unlike ISO specs. It's hard to think of Microsoft as the great evil the way lots of nerds did, because compared to Apple, they're novices, amateurs, a gentle brand of evil. If Apple had the same stranglehold on PCs the way Microsoft has presently it would literally be a NIGHTMARE.

I refuse the thought of marrying myself to a platform, so I'll never buy into something that locks me in. Hell, even free software could theoretically lock me in if it didn't support stuff like IPTC tags, file system hierarchies and built its own proprietary database for everything to take the photo management example again. Thank god the open source community tends to value a certain form of pragmatism and just follow the path of least resistance rather than "innovate" by building their own crap.

[pooriaazimi]

I completely agree with you. Apple should really be more "open" in protocols and interfaces they use. But, sadly, I don't think they care (as you say). They lose you and thousands like you (and in a few years might lose me too, but I'm not really fed up with it and have invested too much in Apps to be able to switch easily, and even if I could I wouldn't just now - I really enjoy my iDevices, despite all their vices), but this strategy "might" lure more naïve users into their platform. Which is what they want.

But, personally, I'd really love for them to use more "open" protocols. But, maybe it's not entirely their fault? ePub wasn't great for their dream of ibooks. It would literally take years to "standardize" the new file format through W3C or whoever is controlling ePub. So, they did the only thing they could: creating a new file format. Just like iMessage, FaceTime, iWork, iTunes, ... - I don't mind them doing it, just wish they would "open" their contrived file formats afterwards, so Linux guys could create decent iPhoto clones that we could "rsync" stuff between devices, etc.