Historically, Apple have always had an excellent record for supporting their own old hardware. I guess that doesn’t apply to the post MTV Generation lead mobile phone market, where the attention span of a gnat is to be looked upon as something pretty darned big and intense.

As for the C$ thing, Apple don’t like middlepeople. Apple like to deal with customers on one side, and developers on the other. Apple do not like giving any level of control to the middlepeople on either side of the scales. Apple begrudgingly allow some stores to sell their hardware, but would really rather prefer you bought direct from them (whilst closing down all their own retail outlets so you never actually know what you’re buying before you buy it). Apple want software developers to write applications for their devices, and sell them through Apple so that Apple get to say when something is good enough (NB: flash is not good enough).

What Apple do not want is some middlesuits encouraging numps to throw together some bunch of happyfrogcrazychick fluffyweecunt horribly poor quality shitware and fleecing people with a weekly fee whilst breaking every other app and running batteries down in seconds. Because Apple understand people. Apple know that people see degraded performance of the iPhone due to badly written turd-party apps and think that this is because the iPhone isn’t very good at running the stuff that everyone else is running this week that makes you attractive to the ladies or whatever.

A scenario put forward in another article on the subject is that if Apple update their OS, and the middlesuits are slow to adopt or adapt to those changes, and everything made through their converters stops working then people are going to be crazy-mad-angry … at Apple.

So thanks for the awesomely interesting article, SWW – I’m dying to know what Shannon thinks about this one.

You bastard.