Discussion on:

an alternative history: how the apple became rotten

Very bitter person you are. You sound like a typical techie who doesn't care about quality or ease of use. You use open source (so do I) and you think everything should be free and people shouldn't make any money off of technology. Well, got a newsflash for you laughing boy... there's a cost to everything, even open source. If you're not paying for something that just works with Apple products you're paying in the form of inconsistency, crappy hardware, bad interface and seamless integration or extremely difficult to use environments like Ubuntu Linux (which I use everyday) that will never be ready for the average Joe user. They have had 10+ years to get the interface right and get it compatible and they still have problems with the many variations of hardware and software. I have never had to re-install my video drivers everytime I had a kernel upgrade on any other OS as I have had to do with Ubuntu. They need to get their act together or forget about the masses and keep the 1% tech users they are making happy now. Regardless of what you think about Apple's products and innovations the millions of users out there enjoy the experience or they wouldn't be as popular. That's why open source will never be as user friendly is they lack the vision of 1 person leading them to produce a single, unified look and feel that appeals to the masses.
You may not have problems installing the latest codecs but can you see the typical housewife installing codecs on their system to be compatible with the newest format or do you think it's more reasonable for them to just download and listen to their favorite music.
Think about what simplicity does for humans. You may not care about simple but most people do.