What about the user?

This is probably close to swearing in the church since I work in an ad agency, but I've always been one of those people who wants functionality and customization before design. So understandably I've honestly never been an Apple fanboy. Not that I have anything against Apple, or atleast I'm trying to convince myself that's the case :)



There's no denying Apple has come up with some cool and new products lately and is certainly getting alot more attention than before. The first time someone at work brought his brand new iPod Touch I was astonished. Right there and then it was everything I wanted in a gadget! So I bought one myself. Then a year later I got a iPhone 3G which supposedly had everything missing on the iPod. Now my opinions about Apple has changed a lot the last year. They're pushing technology and boundaries, but there's still one very big issue with them. User control! - Or rather the lack of it..

As soon as I sat down with iTunes I felt like Apple took away my rights as a user to control my own bought gadgets and files. For starters, why am i forced to use iTunes in the first place? Ideally the phone should pop up as a disk drive which you could freely copy files to and from. My 4-5(?) year old Sony Ericsson does this without blinking. Connect it and a new disk drive pops up with easily recognised folders like "Games", "Music", "Documents" on it.
And why can I only copy files from one computer? If I one day want to transfer some music from my work computer it tells me I have to format the phone first. I can only guess it's a form of copy protection, but in my opinion it's certainly not Apple's job to tell me what I can copy and not. Besides what happened to the good ol' "innocent untill proven otherwise"?

Even just making a ring tone from a song I have requires a bunch of steps in and out of iTunes, including renaming file extentions to trick iTunes. I can't even share files with friends via bluetooth. I've never come across any other phone that won't let me do these basic things.

I'm just scratching the surface here and of course I can always jailbreak/hack the phone to get around many of these problems, but that's not the point. My whole point is that even though Apple is doing a lot of things right these days, they should really take their customers seriously and open up their products, not put in a whole bunch of restrictions on the end user. User-friendlyness and user-protection (from viruses and adware) does not have to go hand in hand with user restrictions!