Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of amusing to see... I'm pretty sure people at Apple realise that just by breaking compatibility they won't force any special amount of Pre owners to suddenly buy an Apple product which does work with iTunes. They just bought Pre - why would they even look at iTouch / iPhone? Maybe iPod, but probably not before the next salary.

Also, I guess someone told them that this move has the same problem as DRM. Now Pre will improve compatibility. The only real way to block Pre would be to introduce a public key infrastructure support + certificate checking in iPods & iTunes, which I believe they don't support yet. (and it would require a mass firmware upgrade)

But they could just count on Pre users getting interested in iTunes and their store (which would give them profits). They could even detect a connected Pre and splash-screen advertise iPods to them. So... was it really something they had to do? Did they actually think before the default defensive move?

There may be a support issue for Apple here. Imagine a customer purchases a Pre and syncs it to iTunes, but Palm's reverse-engineering of the iPod-iTunes protocol is incomplete and iTunes crashes as a result (and does so reproducibly). Many customers would follow this up with Apple, but Apple would likely be unable to help them (presuming they were even interested in doing so).

Maybe Apple wants to license iTunes Sync support in the future to third parties? In that case they would obviously want to restrict who can use it. Personally I think Apple just doesn't want the responsibility of support someone else's device and figured it was better to shut the door on it now instead of waiting. From Palm's perspective it's really puzzling they even did this in the first place. They have an agreement in place with Amazon to sell music through the Pre. Why support iTunes? I would love to see Amazon offer a desktop app for buying/syncing/ripping/playing music that could rival iTunes and create some real competition.

I wouldn't say that PKI & checking is far off, what do you think the entire app store dev platform is built on after all? I think the DRM is similar too.

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