The four major issues with Apple’s cur­rent prod­uct line and strat­egy that are “sti­fling the indus­try, con­sumer choice and pric­ing”, accord­ing to Jason Calacanis:

  1. Destroy­ing MP3 player inno­va­tion through anti-competitive practices.
  2. Monop­o­lis­tic prac­tices in telecommunications.
  3. Dra­con­ian App Store policies.
  4. Want­ing to own almost every exten­sion of the iPhone platform.

It’s tough to dis­agree with these points (or Jason’s rea­son­ing) but a typ­i­cal response could be:

The restric­tions Apple places on its prod­ucts are nec­es­sary to ensure the qual­ity of the user expe­ri­ence, that Apple deserves to be paid for the inno­va­tions it has brought to the mar­ket­place and the con­sumer free­dom it has enabled to use things like the mobile inter­net, to make online music easy and fun to use etc.

Both of the above arti­cles are anti-Apple (or at least anti-Apple strat­egy) and I agree with them both—but my stance is def­i­nitely that of pro–Apple (a recent devel­op­ment since own­ing an iPhone, swiftly fol­lowed by a Hack­in­tosh).

The ROI I get with Apple prod­ucts is pos­i­tive despite these issues and as such I’m will­ing to pay a pre­mium. This isn’t a finan­cial ROI, but a time/enjoyment ROI. For an idea of what I mean, this short tirade against open source usabil­ity from an arti­cle look­ing at how to com­pete with open source soft­ware (via @zambonini) may help:

At a salaried job mak­ing $80k plus ben­e­fits your time is worth around $55/hour. […] And thus it is with the major­ity of open source software:

Open source soft­ware is free if your time is worth nothing.

[…] I’ve used main­stream image edi­tors like Pho­to­shop, Paint.NET and Gimp; some of my best friends are main­stream image edi­tors. And when I saw Gimp I almost went blind. Chil­dren were weep­ing; fruit was bruis­ing. The UI could kill small animals.

Are there excep­tions in the open source world? Absolutely.

When an open source project gets enough tal­ented peo­ple work­ing on it, it can become a down­right masterpiece.

In UI and UX terms the major­ity of open source appli­ca­tions are behind or on par with PC-based soft­ware. These are then both behind Mac-only appli­ca­tions. There are excep­tions, of course, but they’re exactly that—exceptions.

Granted; there are unnec­es­sary and debil­i­tat­ing restric­tions on Apple prod­ucts, and when these restric­tions make prod­uct use cum­ber­some I’ll switch in a heart­beat. But it seems that these restric­tions are part of a larger strat­egy: to build the best user experience.

This, from a TechCrunch arti­cle look­ing at Apple’s strat­egy:

“Our goal is not to build the most com­put­ers. It’s to build the best.”

That was Apple COO Tim Cook two days ago dur­ing Apple’s quar­terly earn­ings call. Sure, it may sound like spin from an exec­u­tive who doesn’t have a bet­ter answer as to why Apple isn’t com­pet­ing in the low-end of the mar­ket, and thus, gain­ing mar­ket share. But it’s not.

You need look no fur­ther than num­bers released today by NPD to under­stand Apple’s strat­egy. Its rev­enue share of the “pre­mium” price mar­ket — that is, com­put­ers over $1,000 — is a stag­ger­ing 91%.