Tell them, my song.

I’ve installed the update a minute ago and already love it: The avatar’s are cute and the new dashboard looks great and is fun to use, but finally being able to copy games to the Xbox 360 hard disk is the killer feature per se!

With this cost-free update, Microsoft is making an already awesome product even better. Kudos to Redmond!

“Apple asks its customers to purchase Mac OS knowing that it is to be used only with Apple computers,” he wrote. “It is certainly entitled to do so.”

This is what the honorable Californian judge whose name I don’t know said today in the ongoing lawsuit between Psystar and Apple. In my absolutely not humble opinion on this topic, this is typical American legal bullshit and a great example of how laws obviously are always bought by big money.

A Mac is nothing but a regular PC, built with standard industry components. It is NOT an embedded device where legally the software counts as an integrated part of the machine, as for example in a Blackberry or an iPhone or an iPod. OS X is sold separately and can easily be run on other machines that were not built by Apple. And Macs can easily run other operating system software that was not produced by Apple.

Imagine Apple would sell their Macs with an EULA that says “you are not allowed to run Microsoft Windows on this computer (or GNU/Linux or FreeBSD)”, and that same judge would have said today “Apple is certainly entitled to do so”.

Wouldn’t that be the very same thing? It’s a rhetorical question: Yes, it is the same thing for the customer, because in both cases Apple restricts your rights to use the products they sold to you. But strangely enough, a ruling like this would seem unfathomable even to the greatest Apple zealot.

A court decision like the one above is a wonderful thing for a corporation like Apple, and at the same time it is the worst thing for us consumers. The judge’s statement entitles Apple to continue using anti-competitive techniques to control their market. Giving such a card blanche to a company is never a good thing for the customers of such a company. Once you are caught in the vendor lock-in, they can milk you any way they want to - unless you decide to spend even more money and buy your way out.

I cannot say that I have many positive feelings left for Apple. They have the prettier products, but they bully their customers even more around than Microsoft. Unfortunately for me, I have invested a lot of money only to swap one vendor lock-in with another. But in retrospective, I think that in the Microsoft-dominated PC world there was more space to breathe than there is in the shiny but much smaller Apple-dominated world.

Now don’t tell me about Linux or the family of BSD Unixes. The open source systems still don’t have any software for me to be a valid option, and their tiny market sucks enough on its own merit. The freedom there also comes at a price, and that is mainly my time which I just don’t want to spend on non-working or insufficient computer and software crap anymore. Apple the company completely sucks, but at at least their products work most of the time for me.

Why can’t a consumer-friendly court in a consumer-friendly country decide that Apple has to remove that stinking paragraph from their end user license agreement so that everybody can use that software on any computer they like? Is that really asked too much?

In the meantime, I have posted my feedback to Apple and asked them to remove that paragraph from their OS X EULA. I know that with their current management this is highly unlikely to ever happen and probably my feedback is only good for a laugh at Apple, but maybe they stop laughing when they receive a significant number of feedbacks. This is the URL where you can post a similar request if you feel like me about the subject: http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html