Ah, you mean that Apple should release a system based on completely open standards, so that it can be easily cloned by former employees of Apple's own Chinese m

Ah, you mean that Apple should release a system based on completely open standards, so that it can be easily cloned by former employees of Apple's own Chinese manufacturing partners and brought to market at a lower price? A process which, when iterated, will eventually shave margins down to razor-thin levels, lead to an erosion of good design and the proliferation of generic, bad design, and threaten to drive Apple out of its own industry? That sure worked out well for IBM in the PC industry. Whereas the folks who specialized in selling closed, proprietary PC operating systems didn't do well at all. Not that I wouldn't love a completely open music player that provided the same user experience as iTunes and the iPod. But, oddly, despite the existence of lots of cheap MP3 players, the majority of them have a kind of generic, bad design -- and those that don't sell at low enough volumes that they have trouble competing in price with iPods. And their market is fragmented enough that they don't achieve the kind of dominance that -- for example -- leads to podcast pages having a special button just for them, the way many pages have a special "listen with iTunes" button.