While I absolutely agree that most consumers will have Home or Basic, just because a user is on Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate does not mean they know what they are doing. And even if they are "restricted" in their ability to add apps in this brave new virtual XP world, odds are slim that Joe/Jill AverageProUser (most of corp world) user will understand. For example, my wife has an iMac and is a fairly savvy user, but still asks me why the printer works sometimes and doesn't work other times when trying to print from Quickbooks. Each time, I tell her that she needs to remember that Quickbooks is running in an XP VM (to which she stares past me blankly), and that because of that she needs to remember to connect the virtual USB port to the printer.

If Windows 7 is going to succeed with their XP VM strategy it needs to be completely transparent to the end user or it will cause more issues than it solves. On the flip side, that level of transparency is likely to come with some trade-offs in stability and/or security between the host and guest environments.

Should be interesting to see how this turns out.

I met the founder of Auditude.com, a competitor to the company that supplies audio fingerprinting for YouTube. Fascinating guy, but even more fascinating technology. They claim they can identify any clip as short as 5 seconds from any portion of the original recording.

You can test them out on myspace, I'd be interested to see how well they stack up in real world tests to YouTube's provider.

You definitely have something there about Apple's secretive nature and their general reluctance to report ongoing software support and maintenance costs. But it could also be a simple bean-counting exercise.

While Apple sells both hardware and software, software development receives special accounting treatment. R&D for any other product immediately goes down on the books as an expense, decreasing net income. However, software R&D (past the proof of concept stage) that leads to a salable product can be capitalized as an asset which has its own amortization schedule. So this allows the company to actually look richer! However, in order to treat the R&D cost as a capitalized asset, you have to show that the "asset" will generate probable future benefits (i.e. revenue). Hence the need to charge. As to how much Apple charges, that's just a simple function of microeconomics. So long as there is a demand, whether derived from their marketing or the social hype engine, they should charge as much as they can to maximize profit. If you don't want to pay, that's fine, you're not one of the customers they are catering to. You have a touch that plays music, videos, games, etc. it is what you paid for... want more, then you have to pay for it. If the point is about Apple's image and relationship with their customers, as stated by a number of others, Apple's customer base is willing to pay for the "privilege" of owning the latest Apple goodie. Until trend slows, they will continue to charge touch users as much as they can.