Yes, it’s true. After many years of claiming that their products are impervious to viruses, Apple has egg all over its face.
Or rather, is the egg all over its face.
I’ve resisted commenting on the iPhone price drop debacle. Let’s get this out of the way: my opinion is that even in a market where prices free-fall (and I argue that the iPhone is not a typical mobile phone, so this doesn’t apply, anyway), Apple has screwed its early-adopter customers to a wall dropping the price of the iPhone by $200 just two months after its initial, much-hyped release. No news there; everybody thinks so.
Have you noticed, though, that the very same week Apple chopped the iPhone’s price news broke that NBC had decided to stop distributing its television programs in the iTunes store? And that Apple wants to cut the price of video downloads from $1.99 to $.99? AND that the rumor mill is churning that Apple is about to start doing movie rentals in the iTunes store?
I saw a commentary this week that Apple has become the new Microsoft, with the implication being that they have gained such strong powers in a particular market that they are now hated by almost everyone…even their own users. The other day, a friend who loves her Macintosh actually commented that OS X is getting to be as bad as Windows since they are both “just Unix, anyway”.
The Mac OS is far more resistant to attack than Windows, and likely always will be. But Apple itself has begun to look like a virus. Let’s see if this little bug does good, or bad.
