Is it just me, or does the Me in Mobile Me look a lot like the Me in Windows ME? I hope it doesn’t predict the quality of the service.

This post was originally posted to FourStarters.com on the 12th of March 2008

I was talking and thinking about the recently released Apple iPhone SDK today, and realized that while I like the major idea of a controlled application platform I did have my doubts about some of the more intricate details. Selling an application for your price through the Apple controlled store sounds like solid business model for both Apple and developers, but quickly shows an contrast with how developers really build a community around their products.

Uniform Price Model

As far as I can understand, Apple let’s you set your own price, which at first sounds very cool, but is eventually very limiting in real life. Inherently this model will force anyone into a uniform price plan, which isn’t the same uniform price plan that is set in the iTunes music store where every song is either £0.79 or £0.99, but it does force every developer to stick to the same price for every customer. This poses an intricate problem for developers that might want to perform some kind of price discrimination.
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I used to have this crystal clear case for my iPhone, which protected all but the screen and looked incredibly bulky. Still, I thought it necessary as I didn’t want scratches on my precious iPhone. The problem with almost all enclosures though, is that they result to the iPhone not fitting into any accessories (e.g. the dock). As I got tired of removing the case every time I wanted to put my iPhone in any dock, I decided to get something a bit less visible. In comes the Invisible Shield.

The Invisible Shield is pretty cheap ($24.95 and free shipping worldwide), covers the entire phone, takes a moment to apply, and seriously rocks. I can now use my iPhone as if it was a bare naked iPhone, without being afraid of damaging it with my keys or other sharp objects. Below are the photos.

I know that people think that I am a major Apple fanboy, but honestly I personally believe I’m not. I am sincerely concerned about the increase of Apple market share while they still promote their closed hardware model. I am glad to see a move from the Windows monopoly, but eventually any monopoly is a bad thing, even an Apple monopoly.

Still, I get pissed when people claim that Apple has a monopoly on online music sales. A new class action suit is right around the corner which to me is bullshit. Here are some facts against an Apple monopoly:

1. Wikipedia describes a monopoly to be “a persistent situation where there is only one provider of a product or service in a particular market. Monopolies are characterized by a lack of economic competition for the good or service that they provide and a lack of viable substitute goods”. First off this is not true for the entire music market, as iTunes does not sell in the offline market, which (yeah this is true) is still bigger. Considering the online market numbers are different with Apple having a share of over 80% of all online digital downloads., which brings us to point #2.
2. More than 80% might sound like a lot. 3 billion songs sold might sound like a lot. But research proved that only 21 songs were sold on average per sold iPod. In other words, the market is still huge and people are still filling up their music either with CD-ripped copies or illegally downloaded songs. Apple is just the first company that has been able to break the monopoly of illegal downloads and make it easy enough for people to even consider buying their music online.
3. Obviously fact #2 also proves that people have no problem finding content for their iPods. The fact is that any iPod will play any music available without DRM. As more and more record labels are making their content available without DRM, interoperability between music bought in different stores will become a non-issue.
4. The iTunes Music Store (iTMS) only sells DRM because the record labels demanded them too. In the pioneering times that Apple started iTMS this was necessary. As the record labels demanded Apple to be able to quickly patch any problems in the DRM might they occur, Apple decided to keep things manageable and not license their DRM method to others. Although this is still an issue, it is becoming less and less important because of fact #3.

All and all I don’t see what the monopoly of Apple’s music store is all about. The more and more DRM is being dropped, the easier it is to buy music in the iTMS and use it on whatever device you want. The same goes for music bought in another store and using it on your iPod. Furthermore people prove that the size of the market still leaves a big enough market share to be conquered, making this monopoly by Apple nothing more than a virtual monopoly.

Personally I would be more worried about Apple creating a monopoly in their operating system, fanatically bundling hardware with their OS and even shipping a lot of software with it (iLife). Obviously i don’t think this is an issue either, but this is a totally different story.

So I stumbled across this handy tip on MacOSXHints.com describing how you can use the Stocks Widget to give you the current exchange rates between for example the Euro and the Dollar. The cool thing is that this widget comes with Leopard, Tiger and best of all the iPhone, which means that this hack works even when you are on the road!

Just add codes like these below to your widget and they will be recognized:

GBPUSD=X (for £UK to $USD rate)
GBPEUR=X (for £UK to €EUR rate)
EURUSD=X (for €EURto $USD rate)

This works because the Stock Quote widget uses the Yahoo! Finance site in the backend. Go there for more currency codes.

[More hacks for the Stocks Widget]