I have absolutely nothing against Macs, Mac users or their choices (while they are still free to make them)!

The main theme of my original post was, that by choosing Apple products that enforce the use of Apple Store, customers are left with no choice as to what they do with their devices. If you control the software, you can control the content. Take this video, which you wouldn’t be able to watch on an iPad unless you’d signed up to the HTML 5 Beta programme (despite H.264 not being an official HTML5 format…)

I would argue that this is the reason why Flash has been dropped; it’s an independent run-time much like Java, that allows applications to be installed (using Air, for example) which rely on the run-time rather than on the host’s operating system itself.

Therefore, without it, the only way to get software on the device is presumably to get a developer account (even if you’re not a developer) or buy it through the Apple store. So the point still stands: you have more freedom using a Windows (or Google or Nokia) mobile device than you do an Apple one.

A side note re search engine payments/handouts, this is how life really started for Firefox: the Mozilla Foundation receive about $50m/year because Google is the default search provider. But at least they are open (in FF’s URL, type “about:rights”) with the technology, much like Google opening up Android completely. I don’t think Apple have given much back to a community that gave them BSD/Darwin and WebKit, but I’ll save that for another blog.. 😉