So I was watching some of the clever new ads that Apple has out here: Apple – Get a Mac – Watch The TV Ads, and I am struck once again how similar Apple is to M$ in it’s evil ways. We recently bought a new imac, we love it in most ways (except iphoto seems to hate us and we have to force quite it regularly), but what I see about apple is that they do all the same crap that M$ does but they just do it with a hell of a lot more style than M$.

Back to my apple TV ads example, so after watching several ads I click on the next ad and it says that “watching ads requires Quicktime 7.” Hmmmmm really? It seems to me I was just watching several of them without any difficulties, and now I need to upgrade? (I was on my Dell laptop when this happened) Sounds like the same kind of crap that M$ pulls all the time by breaking functionality of some competitor pages in IE and making it hard for some companies to integrate their products with M$ products.

Some people complain about the M$ continual upgrades, Apple does the same thing, if not more often (iLife 07 & 08), and Apple is integrating some features from Leopard more tightly with .mac, which will suck another $99/year out of your pocket.

Apple just has a hell of a lot more style and is more focused on making a great experience for users and has some good interaction design, but they’re both out to control our lives and suck tons of money out of our pockets. They both do this by tightly integrating products and OS tying us to them forever with little chance of escaping. Oh and let’s just go ahead and add Google too, ’cause I can NEVER get rid of my gmail account. Where else can I store all my emails and have them searchable, and who else offers a web mail app that supports the kinds of rules that filters offer in gmail? Take gmail+browser sync+personal search and I may never be able to escape Google, but at this point I don’t want to, I’m happily sucked into their promises and superior products, just as I am starting to be with Apple.

Maybe what I’m actually talking about is the fact that increasingly larger portions of my life are spent online and in computer systems and are recorded in thousands of places. I no longer own me or my life to a large extent and there is a part of me that worries about that, and for the priviledge of doing that I need to shell out money for lots of things, my computer, my software, and my services (ISP, web hosting, and many others).