Apple has done it to us again. By "us" I mean iPod touch owners, or the sensible younger brothers of the life-of-the party iPhone fans. With the 3.0 software upgrade, Apple has decided to shaft those of us without a $60/mo carrier subscription with a $10 upgrade fee. Granted, it's not as bad as the $20 charged for the 2.0 upgrade, but that's probably attributed more to the fact that they decided to charge $30 for the Snow Leopard service pack than out of the goodness of their hearts.
Last time around, apologists attempted to explain away the fee as an accounting requirement, which never made much sense, especially considering that they have been freely updating the iPod classic since its inception. Even if this is the case, this article freely admits that the pricing of the upgrade is not included in the requirement and has been left completely to Apple's discretion. In other words, if they wanted to charge $.01, they could.
Admittedly, I love the features included in the update and didn't feel too bad about paying for them. That is, until I learned that the upgrade included forty six bug fixes, including a particularly nasty one uncovered by this year's PWN2OWN hacker competition. Anybody in the tech profession is conditioned through experience that these types of security updates are not optional. Leaving your systems open to these types of vulnerabilities is an invitation for disaster. iPod touch owners have been forced to pay for 46 critical bug fixes in Apple's OS. Typically, software companies will issue bug fixes - especially for security vulnerabilities - without cost both as a concession that the OS should have been free from such issues to begin with as well as in an effort to keep the Internet as safe as possible.
Apple would be much more responsible if they broke their updates into bug fixes and feature enhancements, and charged only for the latter. Why don't they? I think there are a couple of reasons. Apple is very concerned about the perception of their products. They charge top dollar for the Apple brand because they have sold the "it just works" mantra. Apple prefers to razzle-dazzle consumers and media at trade shows with slick new features to distract from the ugly side of the software business - bugs. After all, what about 46 security vulnerabilities "just works"? In this way, they can continue to sell their differentiation from Windows, which is generally perceived as more buggy and susceptible. Image is everything.
Secondly, and also probably secondarily, Apple is a company that makes money hand over fist. They are just darn good at it, and their shareholders expect it. Thus, any chance they have to bring in an additional revenue stream they jump at. This motive would seem to be supported by the fact that they charged $10 instead of $.10 for the most recent upgrade.
So, until Apple decides to act more responsibly toward the computing community at large, iPod owners are stuck paying for fixes for bugs that never should have existed in the first place.
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