Anton Notkin Yes, because all Apple fans are gullible while everyone else is infallible. Round us up and put us in confinement now.

Absolutely. Though I could imagine someone at 1 Infinite Loop wanting to give poor old bungling Microsoft a break by copying one of their unsuccessful strategies.

new on itunes, been there for a while on zune, but obviously Apple came up with it first, just like everything else

Really? Am sure I can prove that wrong. Apple is a closed ecosystem after all.

Cristian Reyes I’m sorry, I just can’t let this go. Your REALLY trying to make an argument that Microsoft is MORE open than Apple? You have no idea, they are at least equal in their openness or should I say they are equally closed systems. How open is is to force people to buy server licenses for every member of a company that connects to a server, if you consider that open, your internet would disappear very quickly, no thank you Microsoft. If you think its because Apple restrict apps in their app store…so do Microsoft. I don’t remember having to enter a product key and then verify it online or over the phone to get my operating system to install the last time I installed an Apple OS. What about Windows PlaysForSure…that no longer plays for sure? Apple went to ridiculous lengths to stop people making Apple clones that ran on purchased Apple software….The list is almost endless. Neither party are particularly open, but both parties are very successful because they have been allowed to protect their market. IF other markets were this closed, they would be forced to be more open by government, the tech industry has been surprisingly lucky at escaping such regulation to allow open competition. One wonders how long that will last?

Cristian Reyes: Apple is not a closed ecosystem. All of their devices run open standard, vendor-neutral W3C standard HTML5 Web apps from any source or server in the world, and all of their devices run open standard, vendor-neutral ISO MPEG4 audio video from any source or server in the world, and all of their devices run standard ePub books, again from any source or server in the world. Apple provides a free app for Mac or Windows PC’s that enables you to side-load anything from anywhere onto any Apple mobile device, and in fact, the ease with which the regular consumer can accomplish this task has been a primary selling feature of Apple mobiles for just over 10 years since the first iPod. The typical Apple device has MORE apps on it, more media, more books, and from more diverse sources than the typical device from any other manufacturer.

Further, Apple doesn’t just include HTML5, they provide the single-best, #1 HTML5 app environment anywhere on any device, and they provide their own open source HTML5 reference browser engine for free to all other manufacturers of PC’s and mobiles. Apple ported the Web to mobiles and then made that available to all of their competitors through the WebKit project which is one of a top handful of the most successful open source projects ever. Right up there with Linux.

And what’s more, native app development for Apple devices — which by nature is proprietary on all platforms, not just Apple’s — is done with ISO standard C. Many of the native C apps you see running on iPhone or iPad were written on other platforms like Windows or PlayStation. There are apps like DOOM that were written on early OS X systems but deployed only on DOS, but now run on iPhone. Most of the code was essentially Copy/Pasted from the DOS version to the iPhone version. Because the iPhone is closed? No. Duh.

And iOS has the most mobile apps because it is closed? It’s just too hard to get stuff on there?

So you’re just factually incorrect. Wrong on the facts. Not clued in. Don’t know what you are talking about.

hamranhansenhansen I can load any application made for MS Windows on Windows I want without Microsoft even knowing. Developers have to get permission from Apple to offer apps to owners of iOS devices and then we can only buy the application through Apple. I think that is one small example of the closed system Christian was referring to. The examples of Apple having a ‘closed’ system in this sense are many. Apple may use open standards, but their devices are closed to direct to iOS access so the ‘open’ standards are somewhat empty chest pounding, aren’t they. Except maybe the browser – but even then they choose to not support competitive technologies in their browser – or even other independent browsers that could take advantage of unsupported iOS technologies, for that matter. Just rendering of Safari in other browsers. No Chrome on iOS or IE on iOS allowed. Safari is on Windows, however.

Rhonda Petrosky can you use icloud on android or windows phones? what about facetime? I thought I already proved my with my previous comments. You can only do it “Everywhere” if you have apple products like an apple tv. The same can be said about Zune. You can use it on PC,Windows Phones and to tv’s via Xbox . “Everywhere” to both companies just means their own hardware.

So if I get a new iphone I can add files without itunes??

Apple is the first in everything? There weren’t mp3 players before the iPod, or smartphones before the iPhone or tablets before the iPad? There were, but they were to complicated for “normal” (i.e. non-tech users) people to understand. You guys need big shiny icons, not functionality (remember the cool wallpapers that the original iPhone had? yeah, none. my 2003 cellphone had wallpapers though :D)

Josh Gullickson Sure! The iPhone is a stand alone product. Self contained and not reliant on iTunes. Apps can be loaded via it’s app store, transferred via iDisk, Drop Box, iCloud, email etc……

i didn’t know xbox+kinect+wp7

running out of ideas eh?