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"The only two (somewhat related) things Apple does that I would classify as vendor lock-in are 1: XCode, and therefore OS X, is required for iPhone development,
by Niten 17y ago
"The only two (somewhat related) things Apple does that I would classify as vendor lock-in are 1: XCode, and therefore OS X, is required for iPhone development, and 2: You need a Mac to run OS X."
What about the fact that they actively sabotage efforts to make the iPod work with music library managers other than iTunes, or to make iTunes work with MP3 players other than the iPod?
- philwelch 17y agoA lot of this is overplayed. You use a security flaw in iTunes/iPod/iPhone to connect to it, Apple closes the security flaw. Apple decides to change how any of these components interface to each other, third party stuff stops working. Frankly, I would be very surprised if Apple cared at all about things like gtkpod working or not. There is some simplification of effort involved when Apple assumes that iTunes and iPod are an integrated system that doesn't need to talk to anything else, and if you don't want to buy into that ecosystem there are tons of viable competitors. Deliberately positioning your products as a closed system is fine. Apple has better things to do than worry about backwards compatibility with iTunes/iPod external API's.