Palm Pre-clued

July 16, 2009 at 9:23 am | No Comments »

Must be slow news day because so many sites are clucking over the completely unsurprising news that the most recent iTunes update breaks the hack Palm used to glom music sync onto the Pre. Even mainstream outlets have picked up on the non-news.

If you’re a Pre owner and you’re surprised by this development, well, let’s just say you probably should deal with the bigger concerns in your life. Like the earth-shaking news that the a big yellow orb will rise above the horizon in the neighborhood of 6 A.M. or that the Republicans are showing their asshole side to Sonia Sotomayor.

What I find totally puzzling are the semi-normal people postulating that iTunes/iPods represent a monopoly that needs to be broken up. I just don’t get that thinking. iTunes is software that you use, among other things, to manage a hardware peripheral. Apple is under no obligation to support other company’s devices. Folks who have tried the approach of supporting all comers get killed with incompatibilities and upgrade difficulties (Hello, Windows Vista).

Or here’s another analogy. Buy an HP printer and you get a bunch of software to edit photos, assemble picture albums and drive the printer. Imagine if Canon woke up tomorrow and decided it’d be easier just to glom onto HP’s software rather than write their own. Think HP would stand still for that? Of course not. The big difference is that HP’s photo editing software sucks. Anyone with common sense or good taste buys (more likely steals) Photoshop.

I suppose the real difference is that Apple had the gall to make iTunes so good that everyone wants to use it. Then to add insult, they give it away absolutely free. You don’t have to buy any Apple hardware or pay any sort of fee to download iTunes and import/manage/play media on your PC.

How very monopolistic of them.

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