Meanwhile, I am amazed that people are giving Palm a pass for the tactics they're using. They way they re-enabled iTunes sync is by changing their USB id to be the same as Apple's.
If they wanted the Pre to sync to iTunes data, they should have written their own app that reads the user's XML file. It wouldn't have been that much work.
How about this for a reason to find this tactic objectionable: USB is a standard with a licensing body which mandates the acceptable USB protocol behavior of vendors that slap the approved USB logo on their product/box, part of the licensing agreement which Palm signed mandates that they supply their proper vendor id (in this case 0 × 0830 (Palm Inc.)) during negotiation. What Palm did was change the vendor id they were supplying to Apple's vendor id. Palm is in violation of a licensing agreement they willingly entered into. If they want to follow this tack they should at least be forced to remove the USB-compatible logo from their product and its marketing materials.
I think I understand your point, but I respectfully submit that it's a bit of a stretch to turn identity theft into something like "computer identity theft". The arguments being presented by you and others boil down to an assertion that Palm behaved fraudulently by emulating Apple's USB device IDs.
But while I think it's useful to talk about defrauding other humans, it makes no sense to me to to talk about a computer defrauding another computer, at least, not yet :-D. This is where the analogy breaks down, in my opinion, and why I don't have any moral problems with what Palm is doing. A far closer analogy would be Compaq's emulation of the original PC BIOS.
I don't think anyone is asserting that Palm is intending to trick reasonable humans into thinking that their Pre is actually an iPod device. Everyone realizes that they are offering an iPod compatible device. To achieve this end, they are having their device "defraud" another computer. I'm okay with this. At worst, they have perhaps violated their licensing agreement with the USB Implementers forum. If so, this could be remedied by removing the USB logo from the Pre, and then even this argument dissolves.
It's treading where they are obviously unwanted. That's not a good way to do business or instill faith.
About ten years ago, Be wanted to have BeOS be an alternative OS you could run on Macs. Be did in fact get the first version running okay. But Apple was in the midst of one of its big hardware changes, so Be needed tech docs for the motherboard to do a really good job of it. Apple never supplied that information.
BeOS advocates at the time said: just go ahead and reverse engineer it. That's what the Linux people did. The powers that be at Be said: nope, we don't play that way. If Apple doesn't want us on their computers, then we're not going there. Be subsequently refocused on standard PC hardware.
And where's Be now? Dead. Where's Apple? Still acting like twits and preventing OS X from running on standard PC hardware, you still have to go to Apple to buy their hardware.
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. --Alan Kay
While MicroSoft expends all of their resources testing their OS with every possible piece of hardware and its associated drivers, Apple gets to focus on making great products. They don't have to wait on the hardware manufacturers to innovate, and they don't have to support their shoddy hardware and drivers. They also don't have to take the blame when it doesn't work. MicroSoft does (earned or not).
Apple gets to focus on making great products. They don't have to wait on the hardware manufacturers to innovate, and they don't have to support their shoddy hardware and drivers.
Not wanting to test your OS with a myriad of different hardware is one thing. Stopping VMWare from supporting it as a guest OS is another. There's no technical reason that I shouldn't be able to run OSX on top of VMWare (I know there's hacks to get it to work, but it's slow as molasses).
Apple is more than happy to allow VMWare to develop and sell Fusion so I can run Windows on top of Apple hardware. How is it that they don't allow me to run OSX on top of my Windows box?
This is an interesting example. I'd argue that if Be had not abandoned the Mac market they might have had a better fate than to be merely bought by, ironically, Palm!
I think Palm Pre is concerned more about its users, whereas apple is obsessed with it's software and hardware. Everyone knows that interoperability is a great thing to have, but nobody wants their competitor(Palm Pre et al) to benefit from the technology that they(Apple) has pioneered and improved for years.
Think of it this way. Imagine a world where Palm Pre is invented before iPhone, and there is PreTunes software which is the most popular music/app store in the world. Then Apple launches iPhone, do you think Apple would try to make iPhone compatible with the hypothetical 'PreTunes'? or more importantly: Would Palm stop iPhone from being used via PreTunes? The answer is probably 'Yes'.
"I think Palm Pre is concerned more about its users"
I don't. Really, the more I think about this the more I'm convinced it's just a manipulative marketing tactic. Whether it will be a successful manipulative marketing tactic, I don't know yet.
Syncing music and data from a Mac doesn't seem to be that hard. Plenty of mobile device makers do it, and Apple even happily advertises and points people to the software used to do it (see, for example, Nokia's Mac transfer support). If you're concerned about supporting your users and ensuring they have a reliable good experience with your product, that's what you should be doing.
But Palm is knowingly doing something that's not only unsupported, but designed from the ground up to get Apple to take actions which hurt Palm's customers. This is literally the opposite of being concerned about your users.
The only reason I can think of for doing this is that Palm has seen how much press coverage you can get for your product if you can turn it into an anti-Apple story, because the tech press will eat out of your hand if you can give them a multi-million-page-view Apple controversy. And that's precisely what Palm is getting: the coverage of the Pre's syncing has effectively been a massive worldwide advertising campaign building up a sympathetic view of the Pre in the minds of potential customers. And best of all, it hasn't cost Palm so much as a single dime; it's all coming for free.
Everyone knows that interoperability is a great thing to have
Interoperability in practise brings you a mess. Look at the story of the serial GPS driver in Linux and how much effort goes into making it interoperable, look at the story of Netscape rewriting Navigator from scratch and having to track and work around bugs in 60+ FTP servers, look at the wx/tk/qt/kde/gnome mess in Linux - they all work together so you can have apps that look and feel completely different all running beside each other.
apple is obsessed with it's software and hardware
... because it's concerned about users. Users, not geeks. Apple kit works together. It generally works in fairly consistent ways, and third party Mac software does a pretty good job of looking "like Mac software". Apple's (Job's) fanatical and dictatorial approach is often credited with their comeback over the past few years.
Interoperability is good, and I'm a big fan of it, but not requiring it in the first place is even better.
If they wanted the Pre to sync to iTunes data, they should have written their own app that reads the user's XML file. It wouldn't have been that much work.