app OD

Apple’s monopoly on personal devices shows no sign of relenting, with the iPad released earlier this year. What does this device do exactly? Is it a phone, a laptop, neither or both? Well I personally have little idea, having yet to actually see one in the flesh. I’m not going to review the device (what do you mean, no USB inputs?), but I would like to talk about Apple for a bit.

Fifteen years ago, it would have been laughable to suggest that Apple would have the market share it enjoys in 2010. Twenty-five years ago it might have been more believable. While its desktop and laptop sales have risen dramatically, it is the market domination of iTunes, iPods, the iPhone and possibly now the iPad, that have launched this once small, specialised, education focused computer company into a juggernaut, saturating the western market with its products.

This web log is being created on a MacBook Pro, whilst music is listened to from iTunes via an iPod. And while I have resisted the urge to purchase the iPhone yet, there is little doubt that when my current phone expires it will be replaced with one. While I love their products, what bugs me is the total, all over acceptance of this brand into our lives. Should we all just give in and get ourselves tattooed? Is this the beginning of a new world order, a single system or language that our daily lives are so plugged into that if we disconnect from our Apple we are unable to function?

The only dissonance seems to be coming from the technically minded, the folks who like to build and drive their machines in their own direction to interesting destinations, rather than the majority of the consumer market who are happy buying a Toyota Prius that can only go as fast as 60km/h and will only drive on streets covered in Apple’s iMap.
“The iPad, much like the iPhone, is completely locked down. The user has no control over what she installs on the hardware, short of accepting exactly what Apple has approved for it.” Lifehacker

“Apple has taken operating system control to a new extreme: Not only does the company insist on approving each and every iPhone and iPad app, it now wants to control exactly how those apps are written.” Gawker

Should we fear this kind of market control? In other industries the resounding yes to this question is deafening. Imagine the only restaurant was McDonalds and the only things you could buy at supermarkets were McDonalds products that could only be used in strictly defined McDonalds ways. Think a step further and it begins to sound like, “What if we only had one bank for everyone, that didn’t require cash or cards because everyone had a microchip under their skin that holds all of their account information?” Even better would be, “What if we had one government for the whole world that controlled the one bank that had all of our money?” Pretty soon things would start to feel like an extremist socialist dictatorship.

The market most inclined to recognize the danger in the kind of control Apple seems to seek have been seduced by the beauty of the Apple. This group were the sceptics of the 1990s who saw Apple as a specialised but unaffordable design tool that they would love to have if it could do all the things their PC could do at the same price. The ones who despised Bill Gates and bought the doomed first generation of bubblegum iMacs when they hit the shelves (exclusively in Apple stores). This generation, now with kids and mortgages, are happy to blindly accept the brilliance of Apple. After all, they are so intuitive!

The generation they call Generation Y seem less inclined to care about these sorts of issues. They haven’t quite been seduced by the beauty of the Apple, for them it has always been the most obvious, the most dominant, and (in some cases) the only brand. “What’s an MP3 player? I just have an iPod.”

Tim Marshall seems to recognize the irony:
Apple seem to be moving more into this way of thinking which is odd when Microsoft after years of doing this have now realised it’s stupid to do so and have relented! Could be an interesting few years to see how things play out with Apple….

Agreed Tim. Lets hope some healthy competition surfaces to keep Apple on their toes. And lets also hope that Apple is not too big for the consumer watchdogs to shut down what might be called an unfair market share.