F.. apple

I’d say the iPhone is as locked down as an…

…Xbox.

You’d think if you paid you $600.00 you’d be able to with it as you please.

P.S.
n-blue-learn how to spell.

Here is the problem. Microsoft is a platform company, they make money by promoting their platform. Enticing developers is a good thing, and an open (open as in development) platform only ensures them continued market dominance.

Apple on the other hand is a content company, and they have to rely on their hardware to protect that revenue generating content. Take ring-tones for example. Apple charges $.99 for ring-tones on top of the price of a track. License-wise there is no reason I can’t use a track I already own as a ring-tone, and if Apple’s iPhone was more open I could do just that.

Now, I’m sorry to attack your bricking argument. When bricking is mentioned for the 1.1.1 upgrade it usually means that the phone functionality has been rendered useless, and without an AT&T account you cannot activate your phone to use the iPod/internet features. Now the reason that this happened is because of the nature of the firmware modification to unlock the phone from AT&T. When the firmware is modified, a large portion of the firmware is deleted and some patches are made to the binary dump before re-flashing it to the phone. With this missing data the phone is in bad shape to take a normal update as the firmware is in an unknown state. I doubt that we should lay blame on Apple for not testing their patch with the many variations of the firmware hack that were out there. More aptly, we should blame the anxious people that upgraded to 1.1.1 before learning if this was a safe thing to do. As the owner of an unlocked 1.0.2 iPhone I am not looking to Apple to provide me any firmware updates, but I look to my new firmware supplier that I accepted when I unlocked my iPhone.

Now for a bit of turn about. As a 13 year — and current — Microsoft platform developer veteran I have to admit that I feel a little betrayed with the release of Vista. I mean seriously, Flip3D, Lazy indexing and Aero? This is Microsoft’s next generation OS? Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE C# and .NET 3.0/3.5 and I love them daily on Windows XP. But as I sit here typing this on a MacBook Pro I wait with excitement for the release of Leopard (2.5 years after Tiger, not 5 years and 10000 employees). Core Animation alone is just amazing, but when you roll in Time Machine, Spaces, Spotlight, Expose you really get the feeling that the next step in computing happening.

I feel like Microsoft’s base platforms are stagnating all around, both their flagship vista, and windows mobile. I obviously do not include .NET in this sweeping statement as it merely resides on top of this tepid wasteland, and as long as they have people like Scott Guthrie we shouldn’t have to worry.

So in the end I would not put either company on a pedestal, I love Apple’s innovation in hardware and software, but I could not do my job every day without Microsoft’s platform. I will probably always be a .NET developer and it really perturbs me every time I use my iPhone that Apple will not support a native application 3rd party development community that have made all of these wonderful apps.

Thanks for putting this thought out there!

Bob Porter