As much as this blog is just an exercise in futility and just plain stubbornness, I feel an obligation to you Georgie. Although you are my audience of one, you keep coming back to show your support with melodious chirping. It is bittersweet since the only reason I can hear the chirping is because I have no audience, but I appreciate you sticking around.
So for a personal note, after my long vacation and a bout of the flu there after, I had stumbled a bit on my path to healthy living. That all ended last week. I worked out 6 days last weeks and strating my 2nd week with the same intent yesterday. I am mixing up cardio and a core workout and hopefully an Aikido class or two. Even though I feel like one giant sore muscle, I feel good.
Now back to the subject at hand. Let me just start by stating my stance/philosophy on the computing market. This includes but not restricted to personal computers (notebooks or desktops), PDAs, MP3 players (aka PMPs and MP4 Players and DAPs), tablet computers, netbooks, smartphones, eReaders, operating systems, software, and video games. I personally go for functionality over sexy, open source over big corporation, practicality over hype and expandability over convenience.
That is why I am fervently against Apple and its direction it has been taking over the last 10 years. Apple make good products. The Macbook has always been solid. iMacs and eMacs and Mac desktops very nice designs and good hardware integration. Also Apple was a very community based product. They listened to their audience and made the necessary changes, sometimes for free. I also think that they had one of the first real open source communities where people would just make applications for the Mac and provide it to the community for free. Not for profit but for the well being of the community. Apple supported this and encouraged it. However now they are trying to find every way possible to making money from it. Which is not a sin, but it is going against everything they built in the 80s and 90s.
Now do not get me wrong, I am definitely not a geek with hippy undertones. I do believe in making money for your efforts and I believe in true capitalism. But I also believe in ownership. That if you buy a device you own it and you should be able to modify, fix and destroy it if that is your desire. Apple makes this as difficult as possible and tries to profit from it at every angle. Let me explain.
MP3 players were a way of playing music that you owned by converting it to bits and bytes and eliminating the need to carry the physical media with you. It also made it easier to share your music with friends. It did not make it possible it made it easier. Before MP3s we shared music with each other on tape, before tape we shared music with friends on the radio or going to their houses and listening to their records, before that Beethoven and Mozart gave free concerts to the public. Music was always meant to be free. They (that is the corporate they) would like you to believe that sharing is pirating and is a new phenomenon but it is not. I digress, when Apple started making the iPod they also made a platform for the iPod called iTunes. In its inception it was supposed to be an easy way of managing your music and putting it on the iPod. That was ingenious. It meant that anyone with an Apple computer could rip music easily and port it around on their iPod.
Soon after the iPods creation Apple started taking over the digital audio player market. Not because they were providing the best quality device and not because it could be expanded or made to be used over many years (battery was built in and meant you had to either replace the device or pay to get the battery replaced from Apple) but because it was cool, sexy and convenient. This also led to Apple locking the device down by using a proprietary music compression format. This meant that once you bought the iPod and ripped your extensive music collection into iTunes you were trapped. You had to use the iPod or you could not use your electronic music. This led to Apple selling music on the iTunes with not only the proprietary format but with a DRM encryption. This led to movies and now applications. The same sort of applications that used to be free to download and use on your Mac computer now has charges on your iPod or iPhone or iPad. Not only that, if you want to use open source software on any of those device you have to "jailbreak" the software (remove security measures that were put in place). This could void your warranty and is some cases render your device inoperable.
And it is for the reasons above that I will own and use device that are not made by Apple.
