Insight: Starbucks vs Dunkin Donuts Starbucks vs McDonalds (McCafe) Starbucks is having it's "mug" handed it to it because they are an image/experience based company that is selling in a market that is resistant to paying premiums for value-adds like "experience" due to the economic downturn. Why would Apple sell what everybody else is selling ($500-$1000) and reduce their margins to be price competitive for similar features? They wouldn't. They would keep the same percentage of margin and be higher priced feature for feature and still not gain appreciable market share. Also, the negative backlash for selling "underpowered" machine (Vista-Ready, anyone).

If my memory serves me correctly. If you work in sales and you want to sell something(Apple Approved Apps)other then what the company(Apple), whose customers(Iphone Owners) you are targeting)wants you to sell. You are free to go off on your own and start a company and sell whatever you want, but any company(Apple) worth it's salt has some sort of no-compete agreement(SDK Agreement) to ensure you aren't going to offer their customers a product you create because you do not want to do business there way. These developers are saying, "I want to sell my app to your customers, that I built with your SDK, that I am able to use because I agreed that I would do things your way. But now I don't want to do things your way anymore." I mean welcome to business. You agree to Apple's terms to become developers and now you want to break the agreement but still benefit from the access the agreement gave you. If Apple sucks so bad then develop for another platform. Cell phone apps have been around before the Iphone was released. But I bet it's more appealing to develop for a device with an install base of 12M and a standard interface across every single one of them. I'm not a huge Apple fan, but either you take the good(customer base, SDK) with the bad(App Store, maniacal control) or you do business elsewhere, it's that simple.