There is something fundamentally wrong with Apple.

Currently, it’s hard to find a day in the tech news without some news about Apple rejecting another application or kicking one out. Sure, they are in the news because so many people are using the iPhone and other products developed by Apple, but if you consider just what is happening there: it’s kind of very sad, isn’t it?

Apple is company that understands like no other what it means to create the most desirable hard- and software there is these days. Maybe not from a developer perspective, but from a user perspective it’s just a dream come true. And most iPhone users probably don’t hear the stories about yet another rejected application, but some do, some blog about it and hopefully there is a bit of a front developing against Apple’s way to do business.

There are always critics for almost anything. It’s basically an epic battle between Microsoft, Apple and Linux. Everybody is criticizing everybody and Microsoft fans suffer the most. Then there are the Linux people like myself, who still considered to be just way to nerdy to think clearly or objectively.

And then there are the Apple users.

They are considered a special breed. They can claim that they are Unix because they fulfill they basic needs which an Unix OS has to have and they have the design argument, because everything in the Apple world is pretty and it’s actually working out of the box.

But this working out of the box comes with a price and I am not talking about the money. I don’t really think of Apple products as overpriced, if relating them to the user experience. They do just work after all. No, I’m talking about the closed system that Apple has created. OS X is only working on some few hardware components and same goes for the iPhone version of OS X. So in future, please don’t compare the OS X with other OS, because they actually do work on millions of different components and in case of Linux they are actually free.

Still, this isn’t my largest concern with Apple and their products. I’m kind of a bit afraid about talking about this part of my issue with Apple, but here it comes: my biggest problem is Apple’s user base.

Some of you may imagine, why I’m actually having trouble on talking about this issue. Basically every friend that I have is an Apple customer of some kind. Either they have an iPhone, iPod, Macbook, iMac or in some cases just everything.

At the same time my friends and in a way my total extended network is fighting for openness and freedom on many different topics, but they don’t seem to care that Apple is contradicting those ideas on a daily basis. And just sometimes, I’m asking myself: if somebody can create censorship that is as pretty, well designed and is just working out of the box as Apple products, would we still end up with 140.000 people signing a petition against censorship?

And yes, I am very well aware of the fact that it’s an unfair comparison, but fact is: everybody could use free software that works. It might not be working as good as Apple products and it’s not a pretty at some places, but imagine what would happen, if people that are so knowledgeable in designing pretty things for Apple products would start developing with the same creativity for open software?

(Open Source Developers: don’t get this the wrong way. I think you are all heroes the likes of Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. Really!)

As most of you know, I am Linux user. My notebook is running an openSUSE 11.1 with KDE. I work with it on a daily basis. Sometimes it’s hard, because my ecosystem is not prepared for me using Linux, but I’m investing my time into solving this problems because I think that it’s important to show people that there are open and free alternatives. So yeah, it’s not perfect, but it’s free (free as in price and as in freedom). Why wouldn’t you want to actually use free software?