Return of the Apple we know and love?

This article was originally posted Oct 20th 2007 3:00PM by Mike Schramm, from TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog)

I'm reposting this here to bring this to more people, as I'm afraid, as others are, that Apple is now turning into Microsoft, and Microsoft now listens to its user base more.

"For the past few months, we've seen some turbulent waters here at TUAW. I don't think I need to mention the furor that's popped up in the comments multiple times over a number of Apple's past actions. All the iPhone unlocking has stirred emotions we didn't even know you guys had. The ringtones issue made a lot of us question just what kind of company Apple was. And Apple's own developers were pretty shocked when they found out that to develop for the iPhone, they'd need to brush up on HTML and AJAX, not Cocoa. The Apple we've seen the past few months has been making plenty money, but not so much winning our hearts.

But as Macworld points out, change may finally be back in the air, and all in the past week. Apple brought DRM free music back down to normal prices, which is exactly what Jobs wanted to do when he wrote that open letter we all cheered so long ago. Apple has unlocked the iPhone-- albeit in France, and only because they had to, and they'll probably charge a lot more for it, but still, it's progress. High sales of the unlocks there will be more ammunition for getting an unlock everywhere else. And of course, we got the announcement, finally, of a coming SDK for the iPhone.

Apple isn't even close to back in the clear yet-- we may have cheaper DRM-free music, but no one but France has an unlocked iPhone, and all we have is the promise of an SDK with zero details on what that means. It's been a rough road these past few months, however, and we can only hope that Apple is listening to what their fans want, and willing to get back on track."


And here's one comment I wanted to post here, posted at 3:40PM on Oct 20th 2007 by Angelus2007:

I am not sure they are back yet. I think the lower DRM free price is more of the market than Steve Jobs being nice. If he wanted them a 99 cents to begin with why didn't he? With Amazon selling DRM free music for 89 cents how can you sell yours for 40 cents more?

Also the article said it itself, they only unlocked the iPhone because they had too. What about the $100 store credit, or raising the price for students?

It seems we are in a world where Microsoft is doing right by their customers and Apple isn't. What happened Steve? Why can't you still sell 30GB iPods for $200? Or how about firmware updates for my 5.5G iPod? If Redmond can do it why can't you? For all the bad things Microsoft has done in the past, early Zune adopters get the features in their old player, and those not wanting 80GB can get 30GB for $200. Sell me a 2GB 2G Nano for $99, I don't need video. For once Cupertino should watch what Redmond is doing instead of the other way around.

I was Apple would go back to the way it was, thinking different.