One Infinite Loop
Cupertino, California, 2006 - It was a rocky ride in on the plane to San Jose, which included a freefall joyride in the biggest air pocket I’ve ever encountered. The folks at Apple treated us very well, and the rest of the trip was a total blast.
I am a Mac user but not a fanatic. I really like the Apple reps I know, and they have always been gracious and knowledgeable. That said, there’s something wrong with a digital world in which there seem to be two serpents eating each others’ tails, like a yin/yang dichotomy or the two sides of The Force. But which is the Dark Side?
Steve Jobs’ office is on the fourth floor just under the left side of the curved roof structure. We didn’t meet him of course, but a day at One Infinite Loop is like a day drinking sunshine. Or Koolade, you pick.
Apple protects Palm Pre users from iTunes
As everyone who follows the detailed news about every single portable device in the world well knows, the makers of the Palm Pre had recently inflicted on its users the ability to sync with Apple’s iTunes software. What this means is that this so-called Palm company, which I have to admit has a beautiful-looking website, was literally preventing people from buying more devices.
Me, I have an iPhone, an iPod Classic, an iPod Touch, and of course my vintage 2005 iPod Shuffle with its cute little 512MBs. Do I need all this? Not really, so chock me up as super-loyal, please! Credit where due, I’m willing to go all the way and sync the right devices. If I had a Palm Pre, I’d sync that too but not with iTunes!
Especially not now, because to its credit and stock price protection Apple pulled the Palm Pre plug with a new version of iTunes. That’s one small step for Mac, and one giant leap for maintaining proprietary silos based on highly-engineered software incompatibilities. Palm tried to break down one too many garden walls, so Apple had no choice but to rebuild them with razor wire, or those broken bottles you see at the top of walls like in Mexico or something. Try and sync your Palm Pre now boys, and say Ouch!
This is just good news for us, and right when we need it. By maintaining a system requiring good consumers to buy more stuff than they would have, Apple is stimulating the economy. They’re putting more programmers to work designing software that breaks things, which we then download to our computers. We then buy more stuff, which hackers then use to figure out ways to sync things cleverly (but wrongly!), then the programmers are paid to get busy again.
So let Palm come up with something as good as iTunes anyway. As a loyal consumer, I won’t use it to sync my iPod!