Apple's really become a shitty company in the past few years. I was rooting for them when OS X was introduced, but now they're no better than Microsoft in the late 90s, and somehow more arrogant than MS ever was. How does something like this not run afoul of antitrust laws?
If Apple were like Microsoft in the 90s then they would have implemented their own Flash player for the iPad and made its frequent crashes look like Adobe's fault, they'd make it impossible to uninstall or remove Safari from the desktop or dock, and switch Chrome and Firefox for Safari as your default browser every time you upgraded Safari (which would be every time you patched). Every time a mew version of OSX shipp…
> they'd make it impossible to uninstall or remove Safari from the desktop or dock,
You can't remove the iTunes store from the iOS desktop, even if you only use Spotify. You can't remove Newsstand either. I'm kinda surprised that iBooks hasn't been baked-in yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
> and switch Chrome and Firefox for Safari as your default browser every time you upgraded Safari (which would be every time you patched).
Apple rejects alternative web browsers on iOS outright, and there's no way to replace any of the default Apple associations
> Every time a mew version of OSX shipped, competing third party apps would become unstable.
Every time a new version of iOS ships, apps get removed from the store for "bugs" and it takes a week to get them re-approved.
> Software compiled with non Apple tools would generate bogus error messages on pre-release copies of OSX.
Software compiled with non Apple tools WERE 100% BANNED FROM THE APP STORE for a while.
> Apple would develop its own version of Java that ran faster but encouraged developers to use features not available in Java.
See Apple embrace and extending HTML5/CSS with pre-standard stuff like canvas, 3D css transforms, etc, so that sites with cool designs only work on Apple browsers.
> They'd also bundle apps together so that anyone buying Apple's popular video editor, say, would have a free image editing and page layout programs.
iWork/iLife for OS X?
> They'd steal code from third party developers and turn them into free add ons for their OSes. Oh and they'd simply kill off competitors by releasing free clones of their products.
Apple banning Camera+ from the iOS store, and then turning around and adding the feature that got the App banned into their system Camera app, without even an apology.
Also, Classics -> iBooks.
The pre-Jobs-return Apple used to buy apps instead of just cloning them, like MenuClock, the hierarchical Apple menu, Stickies, etc. Then Jobs came back and they just said fuck it and ripped off Watson with Sherlock, then ripped off Konfabulator with Dashboard, etc, simply screwing over 3rd party developers because they could.
> They'd license their OS to hardware vendors on the condition that those vendors pay a license fee for every box shipped even if it didn't have the OS installed.
They take a 30% cut of content sales on iOS, and then completely forbid sellers from having lower prices on other platforms that don't have the 30% apple tax, in effect applying the 30% apple tax even on other platforms.
This conveniently causes major hassles to competitors to Apple's built in services such as iBooks or iTunes, which don't have to pay a third party a 30% overhead, in effect killing Kindle and music store alternatives.
> When successfully sued for misconduct, they'd pay some of the fines in the form of strategic donations of software to their competitors' best customers.
It'll be interesting to see the outcomes of the current Patent lawsuits