Apple urges users to delay Vista upgrade

IT CONSUMERS WERE treated to a show of Apple revealing its petty streak today when the designer of plastic stuff made in China told Microsoft customers not to upgrade to Vista because it had not got its iTunes jukebox to work on the new operating system Vista.

Apple says that there were "compatibility issues" which would create some problems like a failure to play music and video purchased from the iTunes store; poor animation performance; and a failure to automatically synchronise media, contacts and calendars.

In technical terms that means iTunes is fairly buggered running in Vista, but Apple telling consumers to 'wait' before upgrading seems to suggest that it did not really want punters to upgrade at all.

Apple's support website said a new version of iTunes for Vista should be ready "in the next few weeks", which is nice and specific, but there has to be a major question as to why it is not ready now.

Apple made much hay about how Vista was delayed for years. Yet for some reason its development teams couldn't manage to pen an upgrade for iTunes in that time.

We understand that Apple would not want its customers to upgrade to a competitors' operating system. However, it is usually considered an anti-trust issue if you use your monopoly in a second area to stop clients jumping ship. Microsoft tried to do the same thing with Windows Media Player and got into much hot water. And, according to recent figures, Apple controls some 70 per cent of the music download market in the US, so its position may be considered monopolistic.

An anti-trust court might take a dim view of the fact that Apple had been spending a fortune trying to get users, who might be thinking of upgrading to Vista, to change to OSX instead. It might just think that telling users that they can't connect their iPods to Vista and should wait for an unspecified time before upgrading might be just using the iTunes monopoly to buy time for more people to switch to OSX.

More here. µ