Why is Apple making me pay Microsoft $100?
My wife surprised me with an iPhone. Huge surprise. I like my Treo 650, except for one major flaw - it periodically freezes up and requires a reset. This was frustrating for me, but even more frustrating for her - if she called and I didn’t answer, she had no way to know if I would get the message in a little while or hours and hours later, when I finally realized my phone was dead.
So she surprises me with an iPhone. I check to make sure I have the latest version of iTunes and plug it in. Then, nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. Windows tries to “add new hardware” but it can’t find the drivers for the iPhone. I try manually looking for them under iTunes’ folder, but no *.inf files are to be found.
Apple is well known for their focus on eas of use, so why am I having problems? My iPhone will work quite happily with my PC, once I pay Microsoft $100 or so.
This might seem a little strange since Apple and Microsoft are bitter rivals. It’s really my fault - I’m a geek and I always build my own PC from parts. I end up upgrading piece by piece over the years and I just never got around to buying Windows XP. Windows 2000 (with service pack 4) works pretty well, runs fairly stably, and I never had any reason to buy the upgrade.
I’m not the only one in this situation, but I am probably in a very small minority. I understand why Apple might not take the time to develop and test for a small number of users. It’s just that I’ve never encountered any hardware or software before that worked in XP and not 2000. Generally even the stuff that says it requires XP will run in 2000 with some minor hack. Also, at least one Apple press release says it will work with 2000 (though the minimum systems requirements page says XP or Vista).
At this point, you are probably thinking one of the following:
- “This guy’s wife got him an iPhone, and he’s complaining?”
- “Are you mad your iPhone doesn’t work with your Commodore 64, too?”
- “A geek with a wife? Something about this story doesn’t add up.”
All valid criticisms. I’m not really upset, but I thought this little factoid might be helpful for any of my fellow geeks out there who are thinking about getting an iPhone - you might need to add the price of an XP upgrade to your budget too.
Also, this is a blog after all. Between whining about some minor inconvenience and talking about the iPhone you cover 68 percent of all posts in the blogosphere. By adding a comment about Ron Paul to the end, like I just did, I just made this the greatest blog post of all time.
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Maybe it is just because I’ve used Linux for the majority of the last 12 years and OS X for the last 2, but I honestly wouldn’t expect a new piece of software/hardware to work with a 7 year old OS. The iPhone doesn’t work with Apples own OS from 2001, OS X 10.0. In fact, the iPhone isn’t even supported on the last major release, 10.3. Windows users should feel lucky that Apple even supports a relatively old OS like XP.
Does this make Mac users suckers for allowing themselves to be “forced” to upgrade like this? Maybe, but I see it as a strength of the platform. Windows is a great example of what happens when you try to remain backwards compatable with every 2 bit piece of software written since 1985 (including DOS here). You get 25 years of cruft and legacy shit. I’m convinced that Windows will collapse under its own cruft sooner or later. While more agile platforms like OS X and Linux will thrive,
October 14th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Hey, Matthew, I admitted in the post that this was a bit of whining. But I have to say, you don’t really sound like most of the Linux guys I know. They usually sing the praises of backwards compatibility - for example, using plain text files for all your configuration rather than something like the Windows registry. I usually get annoyed sighs from them when I can’t remember a command in vi, which has been around since the 1970s.
October 14th, 2007 at 10:21 pm