Apple is doing the minimum that the market will let it get away with. Fortunately for the company, that bar is pretty low by the alternative: Microsoft.
This is a pretty good example of the power of branding. Customers (on the whole, not necessarily individually) are willing to overlook poorly functioning applications, lost data, expensive hardware, DRM, near-instant depreciation, lack of APIs, and so on because the positive feeling that brand imparts balances out the negatives.
As martythemaniak points out in his comment, if Microsoft were to try some of these things, the press and blogs would be all over it.
At the least, this sort of behavior from the big players in a market has one upside: It creates an opportunity for an upstart to come in and compete on service.
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Apple is doing the minimum that the market will let it get away with. Fortunately for the company, that bar is pretty low by the alternative: Microsoft.
This is a pretty good example of the power of branding. Customers (on the whole, not necessarily individually) are willing to overlook poorly functioning applications, lost data, expensive hardware, DRM, near-instant depreciation, lack of APIs, and so on because the positive feeling that brand imparts balances out the negatives.
As martythemaniak points out in his comment, if Microsoft were to try some of these things, the press and blogs would be all over it.
At the least, this sort of behavior from the big players in a market has one upside: It creates an opportunity for an upstart to come in and compete on service.