Apple Lock-In Spells Trouble

Apple.  Love the company or hate it, it is growing in popularity fast. While I love the style of apples devices (aside from the extremely ugly mac book pro), I would never choose to use a mac as my primary computer for many reasons that I will not go into here.  That isn't the topic here.  The personal computing market is still dominated by Windows, and probably will be forever.  The music, or more appropriately, the music player, market is controlled by Apple and its iPod's, iPhone, and iTunes.

Not only does Apple have a monopoly over this market, but it practices lock-in techniques that some would consider to be borderline illegal.  Sure, Apples practices as far as its media players are concerned came about well before it developed the kind of dominance that it enjoys today.  That doesn't mean that Apple is free from the same kind of Anti-trust laws that got Microsoft into trouble years ago.  The truth of the matter is that now that Apple has asserted itself as the leader in the digital music realm, it has to start acting like the monopoly that it is. 

Lets look at the facts.  You got to your local Best Buy and pick up the new iPod Nano.  You take it home and you have tons of music files, and movies and such that you are ready to put on your new beautiful device.  What do you have to do?  You cant even get the thing to hardly turn on without plugging it into a computer running iTunes (Apples digital media jukebox).  You cant just drag you files to the device, and it is very likely that the files you do have are not compatible.  Apple has made sure that in order to have the best iPod experience without having to bend over backwards, you should be using their program, with their file formats sold at their store.  iTunes itself is buggy on Windows, so there could even be some attempt to make the iPod work better on a mac than a PC.  As with any Apple product you need to buy 10 other things to make it work the way we would like it to work in the first place, unless you are a dedicated Mac fan-boy, you don't want to own every overpriced Apple accessory on the market to make things just work.  Want to get your media content to your living room, as is the trend these days?  If you are using iTunes you have but one choice, Apple TV.  Now Microsoft has learned from its mistakes in the past.  Media Center, Microsoft's Apple TV/iTunes equivalent has the new extenders such as the Xbox 360, and guess what, they are open to developers.  That means more competitive prices and therefore more consumer friendly devices.

Apple on the other hand doesn't have to worry about consumer friendly prices, because it is the sole developer for most of the devices its consumers need.  Take for example the new iPhone.  I wanted to go and get a nicer set of headphone for mine only to discover that the headphone jack is only shaped to fit Apple headphones.  It is this kind of scary trend that Apple has gotten itself caught up in out of ability and greed.  In the end, we will see Apple in court, just as any monopolistic company before it.  Just as Microsoft has had to tread softly given its monopolistic qualities over the PC market, Apple will soon learn that its stylish, closed system world is going to be rocked because in the end, the consumer is protected by law, and no one cared how pretty the new iMac looks.