But having wireless downloads available and not having to pay for a T-Mobile hotspot account seems pretty cool.

Starbucks may be evil, but if you can’t beat em… drink em?

And if being the defendant in an antitrust case doesn’t constitute “being in trouble”, then let’s all get sued. Yay!

NBC’s **free** download service doesn’t cost $5 per download, though there are plenty of restrictions on them, not the least of which is that they’re Mac-only. It is true that they are planning a pay-to-download service, but pricing hasn’t been set — unless you’ve heard something… .

Check out some of the links I included in the piece for more info, as I have limited space in my column.

Thanks for commenting!

Apple is not in trouble with the EU. They’re on the EU’s side with iTunes pricing in Europe! Are you paying attention at all? Apple fought for single-tier pricing in Euope. The music lables wouldn’t allow it.

As for NBC, well, if you want to pay $5 for a TV episode, then go ahead. You want to download their movies that last for a week (from the date of airing, not from when you downloaded it) go ahead. I don’t buy many TV shows from Apple. I would if they were HD and 99 cents an episode. I would buy whole seasons of several shows at that price. Which is more than what I pay for, say a week of Star Trek Deep Space 9 or West Wing when I buy them on DVDs – not counting the cost of the materials that wouldn’t exist with downloaded videos.

Apple is the one sane organization in this whole mess. They are at the mercy of the content owners. And such actions to people not paying close attention (not to mention those willing to pass on disinformation because they want to take Apple down a notch or two) make it seem like Apple is wrong, but they are simply the victim because they aren’t powerful enough to dictate all the terms. Luckily for consumers they’re powerful enough to make a dent in the process. Or you’d all still be using $15 a month subscription services where the music disppaers off your MP3 player the minute you cancel your subscription.

Geeze, Apple is far from perfect, and they don’t do everything right. But all those people out there slamming them in a “mee too” frenzy to be “hip” by knocking the leader off his pedastal is ridiculous.

Next time, do some research. Your ludicrous assumptions and claims detract from the good points made.

The 180-degree attitude with the iPhone is very curious indeed. I wonder if ATT doesn’t have something to do with that. ATT might be concerned about rouge applications running on iPhones wreaking havoc on their wireless network. That’s probably a legit concern, but it’s also probably something that Apple could address directly on the iPhone platform itself (in some other way than “not supporting third party application development”). I imagine that Apple is doing a “wait and see” with the 3rd party stuff to prove to ATT (and probably themselves) that there won’t be any disasters.

With the rest of the stuff, they’ve really gotten themselves into a spider’s web of special interests. They have to worry about keeping record companies and content producers happy. I think this is what is driving a lot of the anti-consumer moves that they have been making lately. Apple may be a big-player in the music download business, but they are still a niche-player overall. And I think, deep down, they know this.