A rant against Apple

I decided to never again buy an Apple product after my Windows laptop died. I guess I ought to explain.

I have an iPod Touch and the only thing it works with is iTunes. Unlike every other MP3 player on the planet, Apple products work only with their own music management software.  You can't just take a mp3 file and copy it to the device.  In turn, iTunes works with no other MP3 player, only with Apple products. This made it painful when I wanted to copy playlists to my Nook, for example, but I found a Java program that would parse the file structures and pull out the necessary files.

So, anyway, my Windows laptop died and I lost my music library. But no problem ... the library was on my iPod. How hard could it be to simply copy the files back?  Aaah ... not so easy.  Apple insisted on wiping my iPod clean before it could be tied to a new (really just the rebuilt) PC.  Now, the only music I have left are the playlists I happened to have on my Nook.

The reason I bring this up is that Apple is now apparently trying to restrict what e-books you can read on their devices. If you bought an iPad thinking that you could use it read e-books, this is bad news. Pretty soon, Apple is going to force you to go through their app store, thus paying them a 30% tax (guess who pays that 30% increase in the cost of e-books?)

Meanwhile, like Linux, Android sort of grows on you.  It's not the cleanest, most user-friendly thing out there. But it's open, it's flexible and the culture around Android devices is one I'm more comfortable with.  If you're trying to decide between an iPad and an Android tablet, get the Android one.  It may not be as slick, but it will be more flexible in the long run.

p.s. This sort of thing is why I believe that companies like Amazon who make iPhone apps are making strategically stupid decisions. It would have been far better for Amazon to make a web browser application with the desired functionality.  Of course, pre-HTML 5, such web applications would have to use Flash and Apple won't let you run Flash (now you know why Apple won't let you run Flash).