When I say something sucks, I'm am not reading it off of a bumper sticker, man. as far as their economic strength, I won't deny that,.. but that is not the criteria by which I judge if something sucks. I will brush that incompetent statement off my shoulder this time, but if you disagree, that's fine. When you want to know why I made a statement that sounds wrong, a simple request for my reasoning will suffice.
Apple sucks for many reasons, all of which are extensions of ONE major reason:
Their continuance of a legacy exclusive proprietary nature. Everything else could be fixed.
Their corporate philosophy is "friendly facism" in in all its beauty, and so is their gear.
The reason they are even still on the map is because they allowed people to FINALLY go with an OS they were comfortable with, and no one has heard of Cowon's iAudio series of MP3 players.
iAudio plays most every kind of media file (EVEN PROTECTED MP3's), and requires NO additional software, it is simply read as an external drive, that happens to have an amazingly powerful onbard media player. The iAudio 30 gig cost EXACTLY the same as the 30 GIG iPod my girl demanded.
http://www.cowonamerica.com/products/iaudio/x5/
if my girl had not SPECIFICALLY asked for a iPod, I would have got her this instead. As it is, she learned the hard way what she wanted was a "digital music player" not a "iPod". She has learned iPods suck, because Apple sucks. she got it to share in her family iPod experience, and basically, she learned there are better options.
When a company has a 13+% contigengy in its earnings for selling people the same music they already own in a format that is exclusive to their media, it sucks. When it further relies on a percentage of people buying their "apple mp3" file format of music IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN, they SUCK. When they don't have the ifunctionality of a automatic update feature on their EXCLUSIVE MANDATORY software package that just updates the songs, you add, it sucks. It's not an update, it's an "overwrite."
A person with a 30* gig iPod has to put all 30* gigs of music on their computer and keep it there, cause if they hook it up to iTunes to download ONE new song and have auto-updates, it will erase the entire thing, and only add the songs that are CURRENTLY in iTunes. even if you are just trying to download a podcast. That means your 30* gigs of data is infact taking up 60* gigs of total space, including the instances on your computer... that REALLY means that their file format, due to their proprietary nature is 200% larger than advertised. Oh, and you can only inherently upload files to your iPod, and must have your computer connected to erase a file. So, they sell you a 1-way data stream, with no internal control, even though it has a user access portal (the wheel that it hacked from an old Creative system, and mercilessly attacks those who seek to use it) ? THAT SUCKS. APPLE SUCKS.
This is not a place to store your music and you can not download it onto a new computer from yor iPod. It is just an expensive place to hear the music you buy and have in iTunes, and if you lose the originally purchased files, though they have ON-HAND what songs you have bought from them, you WILL have to pay for it all over again if there is not a THIRD back-up. This means you need a total of 90* (smaller with compression, which they warn may cause loss of data, and is not guaranteed) gigs of storage space, to store and preserve 30* gigs of media data.
Oh and the whole thing about their employees giving false information in open disclosures that are mandatory for anti-monoply regulations. At least Microsoft just hid their data, Apple lied to sabatogue the competition, and created a substandard in the market which allows for inflated prices. The kicker is they even lied to companies that were trying to develop software compatible with Apple computers... and thus they have a decided lack of third party software, an most games refuse to support them for exactly that reason. Then they boast, "HEY, were leading the online music market, and no one can use our files, our borrowed design features, and we have no guarantee for any of the media purchases you make to fufill the operative function of our leading media player which has an overinflated price structure that is concrete cause we lied to everyone who we were supposed to share with, including the people we illegally borrowed from!"
The marketing team they have is amazing, except they have already gotten artists, who they sought to exploit; for not paying for the music rights, including MULTI-PLATINUM artsts still in circulation and making new music. They then claim their use of an exclusive file format prevents piracy. What file format will keep them from forgetting to get eminem's permission to use his music in their commercials? I also like the whole "paying the same price for music in the free domain as you pay for new stuff", that's a GREAT element of their price structure.