This is a valid point:

Geeks and enthusiasts wearing Wordpress t-shirts, using laptops covered in Data Portability, Microformats and RSS stickers lined up enthusiastically on Friday to purchase a device that is completely proprietary, controlled and wrapped in DRM. The irony was lost on some as they ran home, docked their new devices into a proprietary media player and downloaded closed source applications wrapped in DRM.

Nik goes on to talk about the controls on the SDK (I was amused listening to "The Stack Trace", as Norm and Sam tried to work around the Apple NDAs, which are apparently fairly fanatical. So yeah, I have some sympathy for the POV that developers should be more wary of Apple, and that they would be yelling at the top of their lungs if MS were doing the same things.

Which takes me to the post's title - usability matters. Apple gets away with this for a very simple reason: their stuff works, and it works well. In general, you don't end up fighting with your Mac, or your iPod (unless your kid leaves the setting on "repeat one" and you don't know that :) ) to get them to do what you want. We are willing to forgive an awful lot of sins in exchange for devices that do a job, and do it well.

That's something an awful lot of outfits would do well to remember.

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