[scottjl]

Originally Posted by Charbax

First, I think that monopoly should be banned by regulators. Supporting of a monopolistic hardware/content scheme is just plain wrong. Why would you support any company tying proprietary software, with own hardware and lock-in the whole thing with their proprietary and closed overpriced content store.

i think you need to look up your anti-trust laws. itunes is not a monopoly. popular, yes, monopoly, no. $1 for a song is overpriced? take it up with the music industry, who'd love even higher prices. apparently you haven't read the news articles for years.

Second, itunes is only for people who can't bother pirate stuff. Even among ipod owners, about 80% do NEVER buy anything on itunes. People just pirate stuff or rip their own CDs/DVDs. Yet, the remaining 20% of ipod owners that did buy at least 1 song in itunes are still a large amount of people because apple literally sold hundreds of millions of ipods.

source of facts? or are you just making this one up.

Do you pride yourself for buying overpriced locked-in contents on the itunes? For someone who understands how to register and use online forums, I wouldn't consider it to be very hip for someone like you to actually support the itunes scheme.

i'll have you know that i myself have purchased a few thousand cd's over the past decade and personally rip all of my music with LAME (because i like a higher quality than apple provides). i wouldn't consider myself "locked in" by any stretch of the imagination. same goes with DVD's. as soon as i purchase one i convert it over with Handbrake. again. no lock in as far as I can tell, and it's also not piracy (as much as the RIAA would like to prohibit it entirely).

Give me a break. Apple products are the absolute worst media players in the history of consumer electronics.

thanks for your opinion.

No DivX, no XviD, no Flac, no Ogg Vorbis, no Mpeg2 (DVD format), no Windows Media video/audio (format of all other DRMed content stores than itunes), no Flash support (format of 95% of online video streaming), no Mass Storage support (forces you to install bloatware itunes to even use!!!), no extendable memory slots (every other product on the market supports SD cards), locked access to apps and it actually bricks jailbroken devices.. I could go on.

no. please don't. i'm tired of listening to the same factless arguments over and over. you're right, apple's products don't support those formats. guess what, hasn't stopped them from selling millions has it? doesn't seem to be much of a hindrance does it?

That is just wrong. Most ipod owners pirate all of their music (either BitTorrent or knowing someone who can transfer pirated music). The apple products sell because they become fashion symbols for some reason. It's all about trend, it's all about design and external aestetics and about a thirst for gadgets that somehow apple has managed to capture through viral marketing.

so. anyone who owns an ipod is a pirate, and anyone who owns a sansa or zune isn't? good logic there.

when you come back with some facts instead of just ranting let me know.