Here is Cory Doctorow's opinion of Apple (specifically the iPad/iPad2);
Quote:
The important thing about the iPad isn’t how well it works (beautifully); it’s how badly it fails (miserably). There’s not really any such thing as an “iPad”—the gadget in your bag will be landfill in 18 months. The enduring, immortal spirit of the iPad is its ecosystem: the App Store and the deals it entails with carriers and software authors. Apple has decided that it should be the only entity in the world that can approve software to run on your iPad. If you want to buy an app from me, and I want to sell an app to you, it’s literally illegal for us to do that unless Apple blesses the transaction (and takes 30 percent as part of the bargain, as well as 30 percent of all the money you spend through the app after you buy it). No entity is well situated to be the arbiter of all the content and experiences and communications you’re allowed to undertake on your all-purpose communications device.
Apple routinely makes mistakes in which apps it lets in and which ones it keeps out. For example, they told Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist Mark Fiore that he couldn’t put his cartoons in the App Store because they “disparaged public figures.” They blocked an app that accessed Project Gutenberg’s repository of public-domain books because the Kama Sutra was included. In both cases, they changed their minds because of the public outcry, but we don’t (and can’t) know all the times they haven’t reversed themselves, and, besides, as a model of governance, “We’ll censor whatever we feel like, and if you don’t like it, you have to embarrass us sufficiently, otherwise tough noogies” is a crummy substitute for a free market.
What’s worse is that this lock-in means that every dollar you spend in the iPad ecosystem is a sunk cost you can’t recover if you switch to another ecosystem. None of your iPad content will make the jump with you to a competing platform like Android, because it’s illegal to provide you with tools to unlock and convert that stuff. This is bad news for customers—the only reason to pursue a dirty lock-in strategy is to charge higher prices. And it’s bad news for developers—the narrower the distribution bottleneck, the worse the deal is that artists get. Growing up with open PC hardware—Apple II Plus—taught me that the information society was hackable and configurable, that I could learn to make computers serve me and do my bidding. Growing up with an iPad, the lesson is, “You can make your computer do anything, provided one of the largest corporations in the world likes you, and if they do, you may be able to give or sell your creations to your friends.” I know which lesson I want my kid to learn.
I have to admit that Apple has morphed from an underdog to a monster not unlike Micosoft was in the 90s and frankly I'm astounded that Jobs and Co. can sleep at night with what they've done to Apple.
Although as Simspons character McBain once said in response to that question (how do you sleep at night), "On top of a giant pile of money surrounded by many beautiful women."
CKA Uber 
CKA Uber 
