[LINK] Jobs not all bad

[Ivan Trundle]

> (Apple has never explained why, for 
> example, Australians who buy songs via iTunes can pay more than twice as 
> much as Americans for the same content.)

Is this the fault of Apple, or the record companies? If Apple could have licensed 99-cent songs universally around the world, I am sure that they would have done.

> In dealing with business partners, Apple extracts a hefty share of 
> income and only allows applications for its iPhone and iPad to be 
> written on a few approved programming languages.

Gosh. Is this such a big deal? In optimising the experience for the consumer, this is seen as a negative. Amazing stuff. 

> It also must approve 
> every application written for the iPhone or iPad and they are only 
> available via iTunes.

Again, why is either of these 'issues' such a problem, especially from a consumer perspective? The implication between the lines is that because it's not open-source or not freely available, that it has become a constraint. Oddly, it hasn't hampered Apple's market share.

> Apple is also very litigious, especially on patents,

And what company isn't these days?

> There's another subplot to the Jobs saga. He is the son of a Syrian 
> Muslim immigrant to the US, Abdulfattah Jandali, but was adopted out at 
> infancy. He never sought nor encouraged contact with his natural father. 
> What if Jobs had been raised in Syria? None of his mercantile genius 
> would have been revealed to the larger world because the Muslim Arab 
> world, despite all its latent intellectual talent and oil wealth, is a 
> desert for the creation of patents, advanced technology and innovation.

All of a sudden I see an entirely different agenda here.

> Thankfully, Jobs was not raised under the deadening hand of a closed 
> social and religious system but near the most intellectually fertile 
> valley in the world, Silicon Valley.

Nothing like breathtaking propaganda to keep the mind fertile.

iT