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It's funny that the only thing San Francisco city has a problem with is the fact that you cannot dispose of the battery by yourself. That's clearly another way Apple removes power from the user (and forces them to go back to the Apple store for maintenance, recycling and all - as a company which LOVES centralization of power) but that's probably not the worst. The fact that devices such as iPad are locked to the death in terms of software do not seem to get any reaction, however.

Microsoft was judged on antitrust grounds for far LESS than what Apple is doing nowadays.



Something not being user serviceable doesn't mean that it warrants an antitrust process. The two things couldn't be further apart.

As to your first point, would you agree that, say, 95% of all devices are "locked to the death in terms of software"? Because if you think about it, you'll see it is quite true. Note that by this I don't disagree with openness, I'm just contradicting the assumption that Apple is not the norm here.


If you are talking about computing devices, I don't know if your number of 95% is really true.

I don't really care if my oven is hackable or not, but I do care about my computer/tablet/smartphone/other computing device. I am not really a fan of Windows, but it's certainly NOT a deeply locked system: you can develop your own programs and install whatever you like, and even modify the registry. Android is "relatively" open. You can still develop software for it on your own, without any expenses as long as you have the SDK on your computer. True, you can't tweak the system as much as you'd like, and the manufacturers do put some additional locks on the device (preventing root access, for example).

All of this is impossible on any Apple device, out of the box. You just can't produce software. It's just as disposable as your oven/washing machine.

That's definitely not the kind of computing device that I want, no matter how shiny the interface looks like.




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