Apple has always wanted to make the whole widget. It’s about making a unique, quality user experience that no other computer manufacture bundling with Windows can provide. You, however, equate Apple’s obsession with quality and control over the user’s experience as a company that is greedy and creates lock-in. Unbelievable. I thank every day that Steve Jobs came back to save a dying Apple and renewed its mission to provide a total quality experience with hardware and software, thinking entirely different about the way to do things as opposed to the rest of the industry.

Today, I enjoy my aluminum iMac, my MacBook Air, my iPod Touch, along with best consumer operating system experience of Leopard and the many excellent Mac-only software titles available. I shudder when I think how close Apple came to becoming irrelevant and that we might be doomed to be stuck in the dark ages of computing forced to buy commodity beige boxes running the spaghetti-coded, insecure, virus-burdened, poorly designed and implemented, copy-cat software that is Windows.

Apple are not the bad guys here, folks. Apple strives to make the best product and user experience and sell computers and software that way. Their hope is that you will buy their products, not because you are forced to, but because you get as excited about their products as they do. Microsoft has historically been about copying others’ innovation to make something “good enough” and then using its monopoly position to destroy competitors and to create user lock-in — not by providing a better quality offering but by creating artificial compatibility issues and through devious business practices.

Apple doesn’t force electronics sales companies to only sell audio players with the iPod operating system on it. Apple makes the entire widget and sells a complete hardware/software/electronic music delivery solution for the best user experience and the public has chosen its offerings over a sea of competition.

I don’t see arrogance here. I see a company obsessed with quality and user experience and being willing to reinvent the computer, the mp3 player, the phone, and certainly more devices in the future that will change the world, change our lives, or less ambitiously, to at least give us a more pleasurable experience with these devices than ever possible with the competition’s. Does Apple want to make money at this? Of course, it’s a business! As Steve Jobs said that Ross Perot advised him when Next was struggling: at the end of the day, always be sure you make a profit and you will survive another day. And I applaud Apple for taking cautious steps to make sure their inventions/innovations are never sabotaged again by opportunistic copycats; to make sure their new iphone platform is not riddled with the unmanageable problems that plaque the albatross of Windows; and to make sure Apple is never at the brink of death again.

And to Snusket, some of us can do more than one thing with our minds and our money. It’s pretty stupid to think that just because someone purchases and thinks about technology, they are ignoring the greater problems of humanity. Also, you’re reading and commenting on a tech blog on the internet, so you clearly have some “unnecessary gadgets” of your own, and aren’t living in a hovel in a third world country helping the oppressed indigenous peoples, so screw you and the high horse you rode in on.

You are talking about a product that no one really needs, while 1 billion individuals go without clean drinking water today, our oil resources are seizing and religious fanaticism has a grip on our daily life’s.

Buy Apple products or don’t. Who cares? Be glad you can still worry about which unnecessary gadget to buy in the first place. The real arrogance here is to believe that it is of any importance to anyone what your little consumer ass thinks. Jeeezzzeees fuckin christ!

However, where you say “greed and arrogance,” I say “standard-issue capitalism and free market price controls.” If people will pay $X for Y product, $X is by definition deserved. Apple is not being arrogant; its customer base is being naive.

Apple is not and never was an experiment in technological socialism. For most of the eighties, the profit margin on a Mac was about 50%.

But we can still critique a company for its good or bad strategy, in the sense that what it does today will translate into future business returns. In the category of bad strategy, I think Apple’s failure to focus on the Mac and OS X is bad strategy which in the long run will reduce both revenues and share price.

Also, there is now hardware as good or better than an iPod. Consider the new Creative Zen 16 GB player — supports a wider range of movie formats including .wmv, so I don’t have to spend literally hundreds of hours converting, and it also has a removable media card slot like a digicam, something no iPod has ever had. This means its library is theoretically infinite, which makes it look *much* more appealing than a 16 GB iPod Touch with *no* slot, despite the Touch’s sexy interface.

Combine such players with Amazon’s service and you get serious competition for Apple, whose stock price has risen with the iPod’s market share. If I held AAPL right now, I’d be cashing out.

If you hack a piece of hardware and you run into trouble later, get over it.

Apple is — wait for it — in business to make money. Who decides how much money they get to make, you?

Maybe people ought to design their own fancy gadget; and then after designing it, let other people decide how to deprive them of the money they had intended to earn.