Remind anyone of IE vs other browsers?

Having a dominant (in the market) media store and management software that then syncs automatically to any media player - fine.

Have a dominant position in media playing devices and management software that syncs automatically to any download service - fine.

Have a dominant download service that uses the management software to automatically sync to only one (dominant) device - not fine.

I'd take a wild guess that Palm have been given a cast iron legal opinion that Apple are acting in an anti-competitive way.

Any requirement to install extra software to be able to access media you've bought from a store would be seen as anti-competitive as it mitigates against the device with extra software. I suspect that other manufacturers haven't done it before because they were busy promoting either their own stores (eg sony/ Nokia ovi) or microsoft backed service compatibility. I guess no-one before has had the bottle/desire/money to take Apple on legally but Palm have decided that if their phone's going to be an ipod killer then they really need to get at the installed base of itunes users.

Will Apple block "foreign" computer mice from working with Mac OS X?

I mean, they wrote the program, built the computer, they have every right to decide what device can work with it, right? How come they accept to work with a Dell computer mouse, but not with a Palm Pre phone?

Still pissed off when anybody takes pain to stop something that works from working.

RE: Do none of you guys have any friends?

"You know, the sort of people who buy a new computer when the power lead falls out?"

No - nobody I know is that stupid, even my 70 year old father in law isn't that stupid... he's asked me to fix his computer when it didn't switch on (power lead fell out, ironically) - but he's never gone out and bought a new computer.

"Palm are writing software... "

Correction - Palm are making tiny modifications and falsifying device id's.. there is no real writing of software on their part. Actually, they are misusing a standard so they can plug into somebody elses software to do something that the software writer (Apple, not Palm) didn't want the software to do. If it was somebody doing that to my application, I'd be pretty annoyed too - especially when that other person was using this hack as a sales feature over my own product.

"... to help their non-technical customers who don't want to have to use one application to buy music, and another application to copy it onto their iPhone. That's a perfectly reasonable (and laudable) thing for them to do."

If the user wants the experience you speak of, then they can modify their purchasing to fit with that. Buy a Nokia (it Comes With Music apparently), it also has WMP, Winamp, and iTunes plugins. Same with any other major manufacturer really.... incidently, they all work with double twist! ;)

"Apple are writing patches to punish customers who dare to buy someone else's hardware."

Actually, it's not punishing customers - if you buy from itunes then the mp3 (if aac then you right click on the track and select "make mp3 version") is movable to your Pre, or any other device, providing you didn't buy a DRM track, which the customer wouldn't do if they expected it to play on a Palm Pre anyway (DRM sucks, but that's not the issue here). You seem to think that because Palm have said "sync's with iTunes" in the news, and then told their phone to lie to iTunes and say it's an iPod, that Apple are somehow wrong for not wanting that.

"They've always done that (just look at the buggy crap that is the Windows versions of QT or iTunes)."

Buggy versions?? lol - iTunes is buggy in both Windows and OSX... I actually wish Winamp or Amarok would get their arses into gear and do a decent port to OSX. Recently I've had tracks dissapear in my itunes library, entire artists being renamed as somebody completely different, and once or twice iPhoto and iTunes have crashed out whenever I plugged my iPhone in. Incidentally, Quicktime has sucked on any operating system. This is not them punishing people, it's just poor programming - but at least they are attemping to make something, unlike Palm in this case.

"Apple are morally in the wrong, but they don't care, because their shite doesn't smell."

But they arn't morally wrong IN THIS CASE... ok, in other cases they would be, but in this particular issue they aren't the wrong party.

FYI - I'm assuming their shite smells really bad - especially if Jobs is a fruititarian... eek!