Earlier this year, it became known that the Palm Pre, engineered by a number of ex-Apple engineers, could interface with Apple’s iTunes as if it was an iPod. Everybody more or less expected Apple to block the Pre from syncing with iTunes, but I don’t think any of us had anticipated just how forthright Apple would be about it.
Apple today released iTunes 8.2.1, and after you install this new release, the Palm Pre will no longer sync with iTunes. When you connect your Pre, iTunes will still respond by bringin itself to front, but that’s all it’ll do. While this shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who knows Apple even a little, it is surprising just how forthright Apple is about this move.
El Reg contacted Apple about the move, and they got a very open and honest statement about this situation. “iTunes 8.2.1 is a free software update that provides a number of important bug fixes. It also disables devices falsely pretending to be iPods, including the Palm Pre,” an Apple spokesperson told El Reg.
For a company whose usual release notes amount to little more than “This update comes with new stuff”, and who usually doesn’t even acknowledge the actual existence of competitors, this is pretty open and honest. Very refreshing and welcome.
What is interesting is whether or not this is going to raise any antitrust issues. The iTunes music store has a serious monopoly in the online music business, and blocking third party devices from interacting with this store could raise some little red flags over at Neelie Kroes’ office. Imagine what would happen if Microsoft blocked other browsers from installing on Windows.
For Palm Pre users, there is little to worry about. The Palm Pre is quite open when it comes to its storage (contrary to closed and restrictive devices like the iPod and iPhone), so there are lots of solutions out there for getting stuff on your Pre, including something like DoubleTwist which even enables iTunes integration.
This doesn’t block users from using the iTunes Store: you can still use iTunes, buy music on the iTS and then drag and drop the files in your Pre. This prevents the Pre from masquerading as an iPod, which is smart but dirty hack.
So Apple is not preventing Pre users from buying music or using iTunes, it just reserves the awesomeness of seamless sync to iPod/iPhone owners.
Palm could pay some devs to build an app that uses the iTunes Library’s XML file, which is something Apple officially supports.
They better beware. I patented the use of Awesomeness during seemless bi-directional synchronization of data. The are however allowed to use Mundane, Sizzly and/or Sublime.
I remember trying to use a program that synced that way once — if I recall correctly, it was very poorly integrated into iTunes, changes were frequently either misinterpreted or outright ignored.
Palm directly violated USB specifications by cloning another companies vendorid. I sure hope they didn’t let an USB Label near the pre as this would be enough for an lawsuit.
As objectionable as i find it of Apple to abuse their music quasi-monopol, i find the stunt palm did even more objectionable.
Very wrong; the Palm Pre doesn’t clone any VendorID; it still shows up as made by Palm’s vendor ID. Which is probably what iTunes 8.2.1 blocks
I have read different things on that, but even if they “only” cloned an device id, it still nowhere near acceptable and still a strong violation of the USB standard.
Apple does not have a monopoly in the market. There are plenty of other ways of getting content for the Pre that doesn’t involve iTunes. Some would call that a plus not everyone likes iTunes. Apple has been actively removing the drm on the music available in their database, and the format they use for iTunes is plain old xml that can be parsed by anyone with brain.
What Apple does have is a huge share of the digital content pie, but the same content you find on itunes you can find elsewhere, sometimes cheaper and in better quality. They don’t have monopoly in the market and they are not actively trying to stop others from accessing the content elsewhere. They just don’t want 3rd parties to mooch off of their biggest differentiator in the market which is the seamless syncing functionality of the ipod/itunes ecosystem.
Just like OSX, Apple doesn’t want everyone benefitting from their work at the cost of the Apple ecosystem. No matter how much people argue about how douchey Apple is or that they are a monopoly, you are never going to convince them (or me) that they should be giving their work away for free just because they should play nice with others. They are a company that needs to make a profit, they sell hardware the biggest differentiator between Apple and others in the market always comes back to the software, they aren’t going to give that way at the cost of customers, especially when they are obviously seeing a return in their investment.
Palm deserves this and more for using hack and calling it a feature. I call it false advertising/incompetence.
Microsoft doesn’t have an Monopoly either.
Microsoft however fits into the legal definition of a quasi monopole in the OS Market in most countries, including the USA.
Apple reaches the quasi monopole market share in the online music market.
Anti-trust isn’t always solely about abusing monopolies.
Apple are leveraging their hardware market (a near monopoly) to get customers to use the iTunes Store, and vice versa.
By blocking other entities from using certain aspects of their system, it may be seen that Apple is being anti-competitive.
There is absolutely nothing stopping me from going to amazon, tescodigital, 7digital and other online sites that sell drm free music and then using iTunes to load it onto my iPod. In fact, I rather prefer using 7digital because they let me redownload at will. iTunes is top because Apple worked on the whole package and largely got it right before anyone else bothered. Rivals should step up to the plate, and not get a free pass. They should outdo Apple and force Apple to improve.
Competition is promoted not for other entrepreneurs to be able to make money. It’s for the customer’s benefit. Palm has no right to expect a free pass from Apple.
Ok call me crazy, and I know most of you will, but is it just me or is Apple starting to have the same authoratative nature that most of us complained about Microsoft back in the day? I mean seriously…Microsoft comes with Windows Media Player which can sync to so many devices, but iTunes on a Mac, only to an iPod. Apple doesn’t like Java so they wait almost 2 years (or was it more) to release Java 6 for Mac developers. This in addition to limited hardware upgrades etc is not the ‘Apple’ I thought it was…not the one that ‘thinks different’.
I’m not a fanboy or anything. I own and regularly use both a Mac and a PC. And while I think OS X is a beautiful OS and a pleasure to use, I (and I can’t believe I am about to say this…) am appreciating Microsoft’s openness lately on a lot of things..Windows 7 RC, Office 2010 online for free, etc.
Yes both companies have their drawbacks. There is no angel in the midst, but I have to say Apple is not as open as I thought it was. This just adds to the list.
Then again, part of me wonders how much of this is Apple really not wanting the Pre to sync with iTunes, or a rub against the Ex-Apple employees that helped develop the Pre. Regardless, I don’t get it.
When did Microsoft release Java, and whose implementation did they release (ie. was it Sun-approved)?
Apple is not the one to complain to when it comes to releasing Java for OSX: they are not the creators of Java. If Linux distros want to include it, that’s entirely up to those distro makers:they aren’t responsible for including and developing Java for the platform, either, unless it is a Sun-provided distro.
Apple isn’t legally or morally required to support non-Apple music devices via iTunes, as part of iTunes was by design meant to support Apple’s hardware, like it or not: regardless of the hardware support for other types of devices, it still functions for the music collection and playback functionality on computers running OSX and Windows mutations, and Apple is not preventing Palm from creating and distributing their own OSX-based Palm Pre´ music app that works with another music file provider and their devices to manage them: I wouldn’t be surprised if perhaps some of Apple’s music partners want to ensure that their music is strictly controlled as to what types of devices it is stored/played on, and how many times: if something downloaded from iTunes is protected/signed somehow, they likely have contract requirements that Apple must fulfill for at least attempting to control how things are managed via iTunes, and if you couple all that with Apple reasonably wanting to reserve the right to not be blamed for anything that doesn’t work on other devices that they didn’t make, while perhaps adding/changing how iTunes works, well… this whole whining about iTunes not working with Palm’s devices is all sour grapes.
I this we slightly enter the apple distortion field here
At least the others that replied created full sentences and did some research to attack my statements, instead of just accusing me of being a fan boy with a sentence that would cause a grammar parser to gasp, along with no punctuation!
Have you actually got something intelligible to comment, or are you just an anti-Apple troll?
Uhm. Yes Apple is repsonsible for Java on their platform
http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp
Notice how sun provides updates for every other platform. Apple creates its own version, which dealt with the intel/ppc 32/64 stuff and made java more a part of the OS.
Yes, Microsoft did the same thing, only worse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B
I think the biggest difference though is that with Windows you had/have a choice: you could choose IBM’s java, Microsoft’s java, or Sun’s java, etc. With Apple, you had to wait for them to release Java for macs and even then they never made any announcements or updates on the matter. They’re response to their users was pretty much a “it comes when it comes” type answer. Anyhow
But isn’t not supporting different from deliberate blocking? Maybe we ought to ask Intel.
No. If I don’t “support” * you, would I let you live in my house, eat my food and sleep in my bed? No, I would lock my door and tell you to go somewhere else if you tried to gain access. If you broke in to my house, you would be fair game.
* Support – yes I have slightly twisted your meaning, but essentially the analogy stands.
I believe a better analogy is this:
Someone has just lost his house and is living in park near your home. If you don’t support this arrangement you just pass by the park and ignore this person. Whereas if you wanted to block this arrangement you call the police and have this person arrested and taken away.
Apple is no more or less open than any other company; compared to Microsoft, they’re light years ahead:
* OpenGL
* OpenAL
* MPEG4/AAC/H264
* Opened up the Quicktime container format
That doesn’t include the numerous bits of code they give back to the numerous projects they pull code from – so compared to Microsoft, it is like night and day.
Btw, who cares that you can’t use iTunes for other devices or you can’t use iPod with other players; if it is so horrible, vote with your wallet and purchase something else; purchase a iAudio, Sandisk or some other vendor that supports MTP or drag and drop synchronising of music.
Sure, I could go for the iPod Touch, but I choose not to because of its limited size and Apple telling me what I can and can’t load onto the device; so I stick with my iPod Classic and will remain there until Apple gets its act together.
Apple contributed to the development of those in a significant way how, exactly?
You mean while kicking and screaming, when they were legally obligated to? Apple’s most meaningful contribution to opensource is using it. Code contributions, not so much. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; for the BSD world, that’s good enough.
Apple cannot be compared to major contributors like Sun who actually voluntarily opened up entire projects/products which brought significant value to the open source community at large. If you’re going to paint companies as night and day, it’s pretty clear which side Apple would be on.
http://www.apple.com/opensource/
Taking a look at this page, it’s clear to see that Apple’s contributions are more marketing than substance. Furthermore, their suggestion that they created many of these projects is just downright misleading.
“You mean while kicking and screaming, when they were legally obligated to?”
I know of at least one counter-example to this: Apple have a fairly heavy investment in LLVM &Clang (employing plenty of developers), both of which are BSD licensed. There’s no “legal obligation” for Apple to release their changes, but they do.
I used them as examples of them embracing open standards but hate seems to blind you of that fact.
What the bloody hell are you going on about; Apple single handily turned KHTML from virtually an unknown into something that is now used by not only Apple but Google, Adobe, Nokia and numerous other small opensource projects. That alone is worth its weight in gold.
That doesn’t include the massive contributions made back to GNU GCC project including the work done with Objective-C++, PowerPC improvements, Objective-C 2.0 improvements, the embracing and investment in LLVM/Clang, SQLite, Xorg, Freetype, libxml, libxsl, opencl, samba, python, ruby, expat, then there are improvements provided by compatibility between Mac and Windows under the BSD licence.
I’m sure there are a lot more things they have contributed back to which I can’t remember – what ever the case maybe, you’re on a damn unstable turf when you start complaining about things with little to back up your accusations.
By embracing, you mean (with the exception of quicktime) using technologies that were developed by other companies to their own benefit? Sure. You honestly think they deserve kudos from the open source community for that? What, realistically (as in financially feasible), would they have done as an alternative?
KHTML was a working, usable part of the KDE project before Apple had any involvement with it. It’s not as if it wouldn’t exist today if Apple had never decided to base Safari on it. If Apple were really interested in contributing back, they wouldn’t have forked it. Also, in case you don’t recall, Apple’s contributions back were virtually unusable, and KDE had to call them out for them to start playing ball.
http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1049
KHTML has seen improvements due to Apple’s involvement, but there’s no question that it would still exist today in a similar form without Apple.
The bulk of the GCC work was for PowerPC support. Since they distributed GCC, they were legally compelled to give the changes back. Teeny bit of kudos there.
As for LLVM/Clang, they hired one of the project’s main developers. There are also several other developers working on the project that aren’t in Apple’s employ.
http://llvm.org/developers.cgi
As with KHTML, the project existed long beforehand. They are the main sponsor, and contribute a significant amount of code, so they do get kudos. I don’t believe their contributions sum up to anywhere near the majority of the code however.
As for the other projects, a handful of minor patches doesn’t make them a major contributor.
So, out of all the projects mentioned, only for three can they really be considered major contributors, and for two of those three they are under legal obligation (*GPL). Frankly, given the amount of open source Apple uses, this is marginally above bare minimum.
The fact remains that Apple has opened up maybe 1 project (Quicktime), and started 0 of the others. Compare this to Sun, who have contributed OpenSolaris, OpenOffice, VirtualBox, MySQL, and finally Java. These are whole projects, which are still almost entirely developed by Sun.
In terms of open source contributions, can you honestly say Apple is more like Sun than Microsoft?
Wow! You are complaining that a company is embracing and using and implementing open standards? Would you prefer it is they pulled a Microsoft and developed their own, non-compliant, incompatible “versions” of standards?
Seriously?
Regardless of the reasons behind it, any company that embraces and uses open standards should be *applauded*. That’s the whole point of having open standards. The more people that use them, the better.
No, I did not complain that they were using open standards. I simply stated that they don’t deserve any credit for adopting those technologies, especially as they did very little to contribute to those standards, with Quicktime being the exception.
I don’t disagree. What I did disagree with in kawai’s original post is his implication that they contribute code back to the projects they borrow from in a significant way. In this regard, I would not describe Microsoft and Apple as night and day; more like midnight and late evening.
So what you’re saying is that, unless a company has contributed significantly to the formation of an open standard, they should be given no credit for their willingness to adopt it? Wow, I’m glad the standards committees don’t think the way you do or we’d never have open standards at all.
I’ve long said Apple is more consumer hostile and closed than Microsoft. They tend to do implementation better and put more effort into quality control though.
That’s absolutely fine with me. I own a iPhone, and I dislike only two things about it:
1. I have to use iTunes. Probably the slowest, most intrusive MP3 player since some early versions of Windows Media Player.
2. It totally locks out it’s internal storage. Why? It’s my phone … or is it?
you dont have to use itunes to use your ipod. I *guess* this softwares also works with iphone:
http://www.simplehelp.net/2007/07/08/10-alternatives-to-itunes-for-…
Anyway, apple sucks 🙂
iphone/ipod touch are different from older ipods for the specific reason that apple wanted to block these programs from controlling them.
try an iphone with any of those and see how far you get. i jailbreaked my GF’s iphone and so far the only thing of value it did was let her use a locked AT&T phone with optus in Australia.
http://code.google.com/p/iphonebrowser/
this may work but i haven’t got a windows pc to try it on at the mo. as to whether it puts music in there in a playable (to the ipod database) form i can’t say.
There is a point where you upset potential customers enough that they go somewhere else. Apple do it a lot.
We knew this would happen but it’s upsetting that they didn’t take time to fix their software and instead, took time to bar the competition.
I don’t have an iPhone because AT&T doesn’t provide good service, but why shouldn’t other devices work smoothly with iTunes? “Because I said so” isn’t good enough and never has been. If I want a Pré or Blackberry or some other device (my LG phone isn’t even recognised by Mac OS X), why shouldn’t I be able to use it seamlessly?
They can’t fix security problems quickly or provide 100 % solutions in the operating system, but they can spend time to show monopolistic policies within the company. They’re in business to make money, not to show how many customers they can upset.
Is Thom running out of ideas for bashing Apple?
Well, you obviously have not been around long, as Thom has stated he regularly uses Macs. He bashes Microsoft, Apple, Linux, and the BSD’s regularly. he does not treat a favorite OS as a religion, and is subjective about it. Hell he hates me just because I am American, but I don’t hold that against him. Get a life.
Seriously,why this fuss. What happened actually? You can still listen to your iTunes songs on your Pre. Can’t you listen mp3 downloads taken from Amazon on your iPod ? But of course you can. You can’t synchronize Pre with the iTunes like you do with an iPod. That’s because (maybe,maybe!) Pre is not an iPod? What about the other phones/mp3 players? Why are they not in the spotlight? They have (and had for a long time) same “problem” Pre is having right now. Seriously people, move along. These are old news already but Palm is looking for some more attention here. How good is an iPod in using Palm software? No good at all? Well …
I personally think the whole ipod/itunes thing is as overrated as Obama’s speaking abilities.
itunes is unintuitive, intrusive, and way too proprietary while ipods are overpriced.
I do get a big laugh out of the way Apple’s marketing sucker’s people in though.
They portray themselves as the “hip” or “alternative”..alternative to everything else while being just as ruthlessly market-hording and profit-oriented as Microsoft – except they’re even more aggressive in the hardware arena.
I’m just suprised they haven’t made a game console yet.