I messed it up Billwill, it should have been Do you think we'll see Apple crumble? I am totally clueless about IT so I'm afraid that means little to me, but I do love apple crumble. 
Sorry, I just find the thought that someone took me seriously in a discussion about IT hilarious. It's a bit like going to Jim Davidson for marriage advice.
Quote: DaButt @ October 16 2011, 12:49 AM BSTForget about IOS vs. Android, I'm complaining about Apple's heavy-handedness when it comes to what I'm allowed to load/run on my iPhone. And this is coming from someone who has owned an Apple IIe, 2 iMacs, 2 Macbooks, 2 Mac Minis, 2 iPods, 4 iPhones and spent almost a decade laying out newspaper pages on Macs.
I knew you were a Mac user DaButt but it's nice to hear you're ex Quark. If you had a IIe you must be an even older bastard than me - although I'm not sure the II did much in the UK.
I think it's fairly understandable why they won't enable Flash on the phone - when it slows down and crashes the handset and drains the battery people won't say: "Flash is shit", they'll say: "The iPhone is shit". Apple has far more consumer confidence to protect than Samsung and HTC and Sony. They've already taken more of a battering in a short space of time over the antenna issue and the delays to the white model than they're used to from their computer and music business. You can bet there's been a lot of sweeping up of smashed stuff in Steve's office at 1 Infinite Loop.
And saying the iPhone is 'closed' as you often read in anti-Apple pieces is a false hypothesis since Apple is a lone manufacturer making devices that run a proprietary system. To be closed they would have to license iOS to run on other manufacturers' phones and resist Android on their own.
You can't fit Canon lenses on a Nikon camera for example but Nikon is not a 'closed system' since you can't fit Nikon lenses on a Canon camera either. Nikon is not required to license their lens mount to Canon since Nikon is not a lens mount vendor, they are a camera company. Similarly Apple isn't a software company it is a computer solutions company and always was. Much of the misunderstanding of it stems from comparing it to Microsoft which is a software company.
In the same way that iOS isn't 'closed', Android isn't 'open' because Google doesn't make handsets.