Ringtones and iPhone 1.1.1
Apple came out with their online store, and they charged for music. They said “We know you can get music from elsewhere, but we’re going to make the user experience so good that you’ll want to get it from us.” And guess what? They were right, it worked!
The tack they are taking with the ringtones, though, is not “We’ll provide such great ringtones that you’ll want to buy from us” but rather “This is all you’re ever going to be able to use, too bad if you want to use something else.” I think they took a winning formula, and got it entirely backwards.
He’s handling the 1.1.1 update (which broke iToner) in a reasonable manner, except that I think it’s misleading to say that iToner uses the same APIs as iTunes to put files on the phone. Sure, they may be API calls (rather than SPI calls) from the perspective of Mac OS X, but the phone itself has no API. It’s closed. To know which APIs to call, you have to reverse-engineer iTunes. There are better and worse ways to gain unsupported access to the phone, but there is no “right way” to put data on it except manually using iTunes.
