Palm responds to Apple's threats regarding the death of unsupported iTunes syncing

Blah I used to buy songs on itunes, but they make you buy the same song to make a ringtone?

Apple, kiss my apple bottom ass!

… couldnt people just NOT UPDATE iTunes and it work fine

Apple makes some great products, and they design wonderful, intuitive, fast UIs — like they were born to do it.

On the flip side, they’re a bunch of fascist assholes and they are one of the most (secretly) anti-consumer companies in the world.

If the mock turtlneck overlord and his syndicate had their ways, they’d make every connector proprietary, create form-fitting docking stations for said connectors, then change their device footprint every year or two so you’d need to buy another proprietary form-fitting docking station or peripheral. Oh, wait, they already do that. And then, there’s iTunes. And other iNonsense, proprietary garbage, that they charge you knuckleheads for when Google and others gives away similar products for free.

So to summarize:

Apple = great products, cutting edge brilliant design

Apple = the most (secretly) anti-consumer company in the known universe, who would take your last dime and tell you to enjoy your iPod while you walk home.

This is why people hate Apple fanboys. Because who the F*#^& roots for fascism?

YOU PEOPLE ARE SO FUCKING DUMB.

i mean really none of you read the actual terms because if you did you would realize that apple NEVER said they were going to intentionally cut off pre or any other non-apple device support. i understand hating apple is the ~kewl rebellious~ thing to do, but you suck at it. just shut up and stop talking out of your asses.

Here’s the deal – if you buy music with itunes, there’s NO DRM – you *can* do with it what you please.

Palm is having the Pre fake out itunes by pretending it’s an ipod…and they’re likely doing it for free publicity for the Pre.

Apple has methods for syncing with itunes music that don’t involve itunes – use isync or copy the files directly to your device.

I’m sure Apple would license access to itunes to interested parties – HOWEVER what Palm has done is reverse engineer itunes and exploiting a hole in itunes in order to interoperate with it.

Apple can close up itunes tighter than a drum – but anyone with non drm’ed files in itunes has full access to those files and can easily copy them over to the Pre.

Obviously both Apple and Palm see the ability to sync with itunes as a competitive edge – unfortunately for Palm – Apple owns the rights to itunes and can do what they want.

Elevation Partners should shell out another 20 million and hire some people to write proper syncing software for the Pre.

Apple has no responsibility to always make sure the competitor’s product works with their software, why should they? If Palm wanted to make sure their own itunes-using customers were happy, they would have a licensing deal with Apple before they made claims that it worked. Especially since this same thing went down with other companies claiming to have itunes sync in the past.

Apple can’t actually actively block other media players from working with itunes. That is antitrust behavior and it’s illegal. They are however, not responsible for making sure other media players work with itunes, so that’s exactly what they are saying. Still, if they were to use more aggressive tactic to dissuade itunes users from using non-Apple products (such as conclusively stating that certain manufacturer’s product won’t work with itunes), that could also make the Justice Department interested in what they are doing.

I don’t think anti-trust means what you think it means. iTunes is the iPhone syncing conduit. Palm doesn’t get to add features to iTunes like they’re trying to do right now. Also, no one expects Palm Desktop to be able to sync anything besides Palm devices. Why should anyone expect iTunes to sync anything besides Apple devices?

(More importantly, the Pre being unable to sync with iTunes does not lead to Apple having a dominant position in the cellphone market.)

In any case, Apple didn’t say they would block other media players from syncing with iTunes. They said they wouldn’t support it. That means as they write new versions of iTunes, they’re not going to make any changes in the code to make sure that Pre syncing continues to work. They’re not going to do the regression testing to catch Pre syncing failures before release. If the Pre ever fails to sync with iTunes, it may be a side effect of Apple improving iTunes for iPods and iPhones rather than any explicit blocking effort by Apple’s part. i.e., if you never test to see if iTunes works with the Pre before release, you will actually be the last to know if it doesn’t.

When Palm throws around language like “chooses to disable”, they’re arguing that if the Pre ever fails to sync via iTunes, it must be an explicit act on Apple’s part. That’s not necessarily true. In software, the behavior of anything you don’t put effort into working correctly to might as well be random. All Apple has said is that they will put no effort into third-party syncing working correctly.

Personally, I hope Palm is just using this as a stop-gap until they come up with their own syncing solution. If they can come up with WebOS, surely they can come up with their own conduit.

teachonly apple can’t kill the pre becuz it is then monopoly and then it will be ie and netscapeall over again