This argument falls into the 'Don't try to teach/. about aesthetics', because the/. crew are too left-brained to understand things like this(note this isn't an insult, it's a reference to the inherently mathematical aspect of slashdot users, common amongst programmers, and completely opposite to designers), where it's all about a list of features and not about how a single one of them work.
From that I'm not sure exactly where to begin with your argument, but I can say at a minimum it wasn't researched, some parts it lacks so much reason that it makes no surprise that the closed mindedness on this issue keeps it making news on slashdot.(Why they seem to care so much about buttons is beyond me, especially when it's clear they don't use the hardware for any real length of time.)
For starters an end user isn't really to know whether or not their software is running on a 8, 16, 32, 64 bit machine. The reality is with much video acceleration and vector calculators often code is running on 128 bit machinery, but you don't know this until you bother going under the hood. This however doesn't change their UI experience, while the mouse button does, and the photoshop argument still stands to reason from your particular slant.(If you wanted to take it down you might have noted that it's one button nature is really to cope with graphics tablets anymore than it is to cope with the Mac platform.)
As for Maya, you might have not noticed recently, but even according to Alias, the promoted Alias user base and even the images used for press, OS X is the preferrered platform for Alias Maya.(At this stage it's most likely a marketing slant i'm sure) But you'll find them noting things like that the loading screen was created by a Maya user on OS X, to OS X being listed above Windows and linux in just about every drop box on the alias.com website.
So sure you might not be trolling, but you are on the other hand haven't done any useful research before hitting reply.(Try that this time before you reply to this.)
So Maya -requires- a multibutton mouse, not from Windows, but from PowerAnimator days on IRIX. Additionally since Maya doesn't ship with OS X as standard, I don't see why it should be made sole-mouse button friendly. If you can afford maya, I think you can afford a new mouse.
Also take a look at apple laptops, be amazed with the shock and awe that they too only feature one button on the track pad... So it's definitely something they like to keep up on all their hardware not just their mice.
This sort of topic presented on slashdot is such a perfect example of why a lot of software for windows and linux is poorly presented and generally unconsumable, the average person in this crowd doesn't 'get' the idea of the one mouse button(nor is interested to), to them it's about a list of technical advantages over an aesthetic design choice, and they most certainly don't get any other subtleties that come with dedicated UI refinement. (Notice that word refinement.. it means not adding crap just because you can, but removing items because you can, the second mouse button, a third...or 7th on some MS mice.. that's the excessive crap that needs removing.) Design relies heavily on what you can take away without having an expense on the experience, the mouse button comes under this.
As a result of this design ethic, you won't find extra buttons on apple keyboards for instant mail, instant internet, instant shopping, etc etc. Which interestingly counters another argument 'would it be so confusing to add another button to the keyboard?' in short 'no, but it'd be stupid and probably damn ugly' *thinks compaq, hp and dell*
The design ethic follows through to most other design choices, from having things in plain white, or plain brushed metal, to having no exposed latches, hooks, etc on their laptops, while other brands are fine having plastic hooks sticking out of their screen.
For the wider/. audience, if you don't get it by now, then don't bother trying anymore, it's clearly not for you.
If you do a good job of it, apple don't have any real way of telling if you opened your mac mini(as any damage can be blamed on the person who opened the mac mini to check.. it's like the quantum cat in the box). Besides those that have dealt with apple know that they are quite fair(read: lenient) with their warranty policies (such as all those people that have dropped their ipods in water and got them replaced free of charge.)
Also when you open the mac mini you don't actually break the clips, it's just like in the ipods, the clips will make cracking noises but they don't actually break. (they do ware down a little if you repeat this too many times though)
Now considering the platform's target audience and apple being a business not a charity, there is nothing wrong with them asking consumers to not attempt to crack open their hardware and add ram etc. The reality is, if you can add it, then you can remove it should you need to give it to an authorised apple repair centre. The majority of hardware sold does not ever need to go to a repair centre anyway, so i don't see why this is such a huge issue.
As for the g4/g5 crisis that seems to exist in the press, I can assure you that not that many people actually care, people with any memory will remember that 'the g4 is too hot to be put in a powerbook'.. that was until it was put in an enclosure that was not only incredibly thin, but thinner than the g3 powerbooks.
Doing a little bit of research shows that the G5 doesn't have monster heat and power requirements when you run them below that 1.8ghz threshold, and that was before IBM did a transistor shrink on the architecture. The delay is really getting enough supply of g5 chips and enough of the models built so apple don't have a depressing wait time, like they manage to get for every new product they release, like with the g4 powerbook, they know this will be another monster release.
Unlike the colourful iMacs, the mini isn't so much of about being an emotional choice for a computer as it's main sales drive will come from it's price, and the market gap (cheap macintosh). Essentially the mini and the cube are quite similar products, just different price points.
As for the one button mouse being 'wrong', I don't think wrong is the word, unsuitable for Windows yes.. suitable for the mac 'yes', as the first advert for the one button mouse stated "one button mouse, it's very difficult to press the wrong button."
System Preferences -> Network -> Select a Connection -> Set DHCP -> Enter a DHCP id, do this for every device you want, ensuring you use the same DHCP id... and tada everything will multihome together.. Best of all finder already handles doing things like.. halfway through copying a file over airport, you plug in your ethernet cable and tada the file begins roaring in over both connections simultaneously.
I was thinking of the apple computer as being the headset for your bluetooth phone, since it already lets you do most other things (such as write smses)
Oh also look at the salling clicker software, use it for the remote control of popular software functions (such as DVD player and iTunes) through your mobile phone. It's a nice way to turn your mobile into a remote control for say your mac mini dvd player, or mac mini music juke box.
The OS X platform takes advantage of blue tooth with phone interfacing. A user can keep their mobile in their drawer, and screen calls, write smses, update their address book and calendar, transfer files (images, mini, mp3 etc) etc etc with the included iSync software and Address book. It's expected that head set support will make it's way in too.
Also due to the clever way in which OS X is designed, you can set up a high speed network utilising your firewire, bluetooth, wifi and ethernet ports all simultaneously, with the file being threaded across the available connections.
I suppose the main reason they left it out, was that it can be easily added with a bluetooth dongle if wanted, otherwise they can't justify the extra expense.
All they need to do is just listen to the rumour mills and create the product that gets the most fan fare....
Apple employee: They seem to want the mini to act like a video iPod
Jobs: But that's just stupid, the drive it's so tiny!
Apple employee: They think that once the movies are compressed for downloading in AVC that they'll be both high quality and small file size..
Jobs: Excellent, I'm a genius. We'll release in Spring, now sue think secret for springing the idea early, we don't want anyone copying our genius today.
The main ethic between Apple and the majority of PC makers is that the PC is still on large designed for people who want a really cheap computer. Such is the success of Dell.
A PC maker would never create a mac mini clone, as the engineering efforts would outweigh their bottom line on the system. They would be able to make a slightly larger box, but the temptation to use things such as full sized hard drives is too great a temptation for them.
The other problem is heat, the system will definitely be based around laptop technology for it's size and heat production, which is going to up the price even further.
Ultimately when you work with PC's the Speed, Price, Design triangle applies, I.E in the PC world you can get any two of the three, always at the expense of the 3rd. It only takes an experienced electronics company that is used to making small(iPod, 1" Total thickness Powerbooks, ultra thin displays, sunflower iMac, flatpanel iMac, etc) devices to pull off a good price, reasonable speed and fine design balance.
Another issue is that the moment you get some *useful* software for the low end PC the price bellows outward significantly and the result is that it will cost far in excess of the mac mini which ships with excellent(Award winning even) software, not trials/demos of paintshop pro and crippled OS's that don't let you connect to server volumes. So now you say, oh we'll just pirate all the software we need from our friend, which to any unscrupulous person is a good tactic to get around that price barrier. The problems don't end there though, the moment you want acceptable video in the unit you will be forking out for a separate video card, as on board video using shared memory is woeful to say the least. This is then going to be run on the cheapest architecture that the PC maker could phathom, so performance of that card is going to be cut up significantly. Finally there are numerous issued to do with your optical drives, for computer manufacturers combo drives work out to be more expensive than individual cd and dvd rom readers. Such as in the low end dell offering, you can't get a combo drive, instead you have to get two individual drives one for reading dvds and one for burning cd-r/rw.
Anyway the point is made, for PC makers the numbers don't make sense, you'll get more cheap offerings, but as with the nature of going-on-the-cheap, the units will always be lack lustre.
There seems to be confusion that Windows market share and MS's endless $$$ means their product is good. When it's just a monopoly, they can release garbage and people have to, and do, use it.
Yes we know gnome et al aren't entirely original and have to copy -something- here and there, it's inevitable that they'll endup copying something that was used sometime in history. However their direction(i.e what to copy) is best served by looking at which products still exist today despite the overwealming MS market, if you're going to copy something, copy these products as they clearly have something which MS can't quench.
Although you'll never get to see this because you're using anon coward. I can't make it clear enough how important it is for the product to reflect it's own unique culture in it's UI design.. and not say the culture of Netscape on Windows 3.1 with just a few more gradients.
Congratulations for something that looks consistent, but zero points for them trying to be the better alternative that they claim to be.
Disregarding any 'con' has been the plight of some open source projects for quite a long time. It's not aggressive, it's constructive, take them on board remember them for next time, evolve, and today it's 'don't rip off windows we all know it's lame'.
He's right though, if they had a broader history in OS design, and what OSes look like, they'd begin to notice that their UI is looking very windows like. It's not some evolutionary 'this _is_ the best way', it's just utter rip off, they're just emulating what they are most likely used to instead of creating a new solution that serves the purpose best in their own unique way, while reflecting their culture.
Like with everything, why copy what you proclaim to be better than.
I suppose that might be one reason why creative are trying so hard to copy the look of the ipod. Then again, the main problem with copying is that it's just flattery, when you copy something you can never be better than the original. The original design features 'originality' and the company (apple) are respected for that, and so when a consumer will look for a player, they know the originality is coming from apple, and the knock off to be coming from creative. It's not a good marketing stance to take on an item which is selling in part due to it's esteem value.
The main differences you find between very "mac" software and "windows" software is that, the mac software usually has one place to do one function, while windows software tends to have many, often more than 5 places to do the same function. What this does is confuse the user, as they never learn just one way to do something, rather than it being about just picking the most convenient. E.g instead of just an item being found in the menu consistently across all applications, in a windows application such as explorer, you can right click, use the menu, use the side bar, the keyboard combination, a button on a menu bar etc.
In the end a window may only be displaying 5 unique operations, however there are some 30 individual items on the screen. In that sense it's confusing. It's not a zealot behaviour that people assume of macintosh users (sure they exist, windows ones exist too, linux ones, et al)
Much of the debate of the mouse button that spawns is usually based on what it would be like for a windows user to use a sole mouse button. The mac software well demonstrates that productivity doesn't decrease with one less mouse button, it's an evolutionary thing, if only one button existed, then they wouldn't design for one mouse button, and had to place alot of thought into how things were to be laid out on the screen, instead of just tucking things away in the parallel (and dynamic, i.e confusing) menu system that the contextual menu provides
Engineers are fine calling things A#2343VF or build no. 86.33.059A.
Unfortunately those don't sell. Marketers on the other hand begin with their job title, "I'm a human to product relationship consultant, my work load is scalable while energising each new solution. etc etc"
oh when i mentioned fake pics, i didn't mean the photos were fake, the photos are real, they are taken from an australian deep sea discovery project and are available online for anyone to download. however the site proclaiming they came from a tsunami is fake. Also in general waves don't tend to carry in things, they just make them bop up and down on the spot. a crashing wave will bring something in, as that's when the large scale displacement occurs.
Ahh garbage mathematics at it's best...
follow this pattern for me sometime
1/9 = 0.1111..
2/9 = 0.2222.. . .
8/9 = 0.8888..
so 9/9 must equal 0.9999....
wait hold on.
therefore 0.0000..0001 is equal to zero, yet greater than zero..
also i might like to add, that there is a mistaken belief that mac users hate multiple mouse buttons. however this isn't the case, the support for the sole mouse button comes from the fact that apple software isn't dependent on right clicking on everything to get some functionality. mac software tends to be more short cut orientated, hence a one hand on the keyboard, one on the mouse is common mac usage. Adding to this, since one hand is on the keyboard, accessing the "second mouse button" i.e contextual menus is trivial, as it's simply the ctrl key.
the thing is apple software is not so right mouse button dependent anyway. like in windows you can't do much without accessing the contextual menus, while in mac software it's really been designed around. (i,e programmers had to design a better interface instead of being lazy)
The case must be made that Apple are forcing users to purchase iPods. However this is difficult (probably impossible) because there are numerous other services selling an identical product, with an identical set up. Additionally iTunes plays many open formats, as does the iPod. A user needs only burn their cd of music and re-encode it to whatever format they please to permanently remove the DRM, a trivial yet unnecessary procedure. (you can enjoy your music in the spirit of the agreement just fine.)
Additionally no company has to open it's product to another company simply because it's a monopoly. There needs to be an abuse of that monopoly, which must then be proven that the abuse of the monopoly led to some kind of damages to the competition or consumers, i.e the prevention of others from entering their arena(Despite my wording this does in no way apply to rhapsody being locked out of iPods, as no consumers are damaged by their player not working with iTMS). Since a monopoly can only be established if apple were selling things that you couldn't get any where else, then it can also be argued that no monopoly exists.(I.e a question that can be asked is that if the company were to close, would a replacement quickly fill the void, the answer is yes.) Since Apple are not unique in having music, a music players or a juke box software it makes a case for monopoly very difficult. i.e there is no case.
Apples lead in the market would be easily proven by it's strong customer base and higher quality of product and product esteem. None of these things -force- any user to purchase 1. music from apple 2. music players from apple, 3. juke box type software from apple, or 4. even an apple computer. The growth of the iPod was significant, but this also occured in droves before the iTMS existed, the iPod beat other consumer music devices out in cost per megabyte, and hence provided better value, despite it's higher price, while simultaneously delivering a better experience as well as addressing that consumers have more than say 128mb of music.
Unlike the windows monopoly any user can enjoy high quality music from their favourite artist before and after apple came onto the scene. The only type of monopoly apple can force onto another company is by making a certain record companies music perform poorly on the iTunes Music Store. (Similar to how MS prevented competitive companies software from working correctly in windows.)
I thought a more obvious asset of upgraded bandwidth is that downloading software from MS's competitors becomes a much quicker task.
A big reason why so many people used IE is that it took so long to download another browser. With upgraded bandwidth users can begin to treat their computers with an al a carte approach to software.
Slashdot Mirror
From that I'm not sure exactly where to begin with your argument, but I can say at a minimum it wasn't researched, some parts it lacks so much reason that it makes no surprise that the closed mindedness on this issue keeps it making news on slashdot.(Why they seem to care so much about buttons is beyond me, especially when it's clear they don't use the hardware for any real length of time.)
For starters an end user isn't really to know whether or not their software is running on a 8, 16, 32, 64 bit machine. The reality is with much video acceleration and vector calculators often code is running on 128 bit machinery, but you don't know this until you bother going under the hood. This however doesn't change their UI experience, while the mouse button does, and the photoshop argument still stands to reason from your particular slant.(If you wanted to take it down you might have noted that it's one button nature is really to cope with graphics tablets anymore than it is to cope with the Mac platform.)
As for Maya, you might have not noticed recently, but even according to Alias, the promoted Alias user base and even the images used for press, OS X is the preferrered platform for Alias Maya.(At this stage it's most likely a marketing slant i'm sure) But you'll find them noting things like that the loading screen was created by a Maya user on OS X, to OS X being listed above Windows and linux in just about every drop box on the alias.com website.
So sure you might not be trolling, but you are on the other hand haven't done any useful research before hitting reply.(Try that this time before you reply to this.)
So Maya -requires- a multibutton mouse, not from Windows, but from PowerAnimator days on IRIX. Additionally since Maya doesn't ship with OS X as standard, I don't see why it should be made sole-mouse button friendly. If you can afford maya, I think you can afford a new mouse.
Also take a look at apple laptops, be amazed with the shock and awe that they too only feature one button on the track pad... So it's definitely something they like to keep up on all their hardware not just their mice.
This sort of topic presented on slashdot is such a perfect example of why a lot of software for windows and linux is poorly presented and generally unconsumable, the average person in this crowd doesn't 'get' the idea of the one mouse button(nor is interested to), to them it's about a list of technical advantages over an aesthetic design choice, and they most certainly don't get any other subtleties that come with dedicated UI refinement. (Notice that word refinement.. it means not adding crap just because you can, but removing items because you can, the second mouse button, a third...or 7th on some MS mice.. that's the excessive crap that needs removing.) Design relies heavily on what you can take away without having an expense on the experience, the mouse button comes under this.
As a result of this design ethic, you won't find extra buttons on apple keyboards for instant mail, instant internet, instant shopping, etc etc. Which interestingly counters another argument 'would it be so confusing to add another button to the keyboard?' in short 'no, but it'd be stupid and probably damn ugly' *thinks compaq, hp and dell*
The design ethic follows through to most other design choices, from having things in plain white, or plain brushed metal, to having no exposed latches, hooks, etc on their laptops, while other brands are fine having plastic hooks sticking out of their screen.
For the wider /. audience, if you don't get it by now, then don't bother trying anymore, it's clearly not for you.
Also when you open the mac mini you don't actually break the clips, it's just like in the ipods, the clips will make cracking noises but they don't actually break. (they do ware down a little if you repeat this too many times though)
Now considering the platform's target audience and apple being a business not a charity, there is nothing wrong with them asking consumers to not attempt to crack open their hardware and add ram etc. The reality is, if you can add it, then you can remove it should you need to give it to an authorised apple repair centre. The majority of hardware sold does not ever need to go to a repair centre anyway, so i don't see why this is such a huge issue.
As for the g4/g5 crisis that seems to exist in the press, I can assure you that not that many people actually care, people with any memory will remember that 'the g4 is too hot to be put in a powerbook' .. that was until it was put in an enclosure that was not only incredibly thin, but thinner than the g3 powerbooks.
Doing a little bit of research shows that the G5 doesn't have monster heat and power requirements when you run them below that 1.8ghz threshold, and that was before IBM did a transistor shrink on the architecture. The delay is really getting enough supply of g5 chips and enough of the models built so apple don't have a depressing wait time, like they manage to get for every new product they release, like with the g4 powerbook, they know this will be another monster release.
Essentially the mini and the cube are quite similar products, just different price points.
As for the one button mouse being 'wrong', I don't think wrong is the word, unsuitable for Windows yes.. suitable for the mac 'yes', as the first advert for the one button mouse stated "one button mouse, it's very difficult to press the wrong button."
by the way, I've been crapping you. It only selects one connection simultaneously, however you can still multihome them all.
System Preferences -> Network -> Select a Connection -> Set DHCP -> Enter a DHCP id, do this for every device you want, ensuring you use the same DHCP id... and tada everything will multihome together.. Best of all finder already handles doing things like.. halfway through copying a file over airport, you plug in your ethernet cable and tada the file begins roaring in over both connections simultaneously.
I was thinking of the apple computer as being the headset for your bluetooth phone, since it already lets you do most other things (such as write smses)
Oh also look at the salling clicker software, use it for the remote control of popular software functions (such as DVD player and iTunes) through your mobile phone. It's a nice way to turn your mobile into a remote control for say your mac mini dvd player, or mac mini music juke box.
Also due to the clever way in which OS X is designed, you can set up a high speed network utilising your firewire, bluetooth, wifi and ethernet ports all simultaneously, with the file being threaded across the available connections.
I suppose the main reason they left it out, was that it can be easily added with a bluetooth dongle if wanted, otherwise they can't justify the extra expense.
a more serious side note:
the iPod was never marketed for the iTMS either. It was quite some time before iTMS came out.
Apple employee: They seem to want the mini to act like a video iPod
Jobs: But that's just stupid, the drive it's so tiny!
Apple employee: They think that once the movies are compressed for downloading in AVC that they'll be both high quality and small file size..
Jobs: Excellent, I'm a genius. We'll release in Spring, now sue think secret for springing the idea early, we don't want anyone copying our genius today.
A PC maker would never create a mac mini clone, as the engineering efforts would outweigh their bottom line on the system. They would be able to make a slightly larger box, but the temptation to use things such as full sized hard drives is too great a temptation for them.
The other problem is heat, the system will definitely be based around laptop technology for it's size and heat production, which is going to up the price even further.
Ultimately when you work with PC's the Speed, Price, Design triangle applies, I.E in the PC world you can get any two of the three, always at the expense of the 3rd. It only takes an experienced electronics company that is used to making small(iPod, 1" Total thickness Powerbooks, ultra thin displays, sunflower iMac, flatpanel iMac, etc) devices to pull off a good price, reasonable speed and fine design balance.
Another issue is that the moment you get some *useful* software for the low end PC the price bellows outward significantly and the result is that it will cost far in excess of the mac mini which ships with excellent(Award winning even) software, not trials/demos of paintshop pro and crippled OS's that don't let you connect to server volumes.
So now you say, oh we'll just pirate all the software we need from our friend, which to any unscrupulous person is a good tactic to get around that price barrier. The problems don't end there though, the moment you want acceptable video in the unit you will be forking out for a separate video card, as on board video using shared memory is woeful to say the least. This is then going to be run on the cheapest architecture that the PC maker could phathom, so performance of that card is going to be cut up significantly. Finally there are numerous issued to do with your optical drives, for computer manufacturers combo drives work out to be more expensive than individual cd and dvd rom readers. Such as in the low end dell offering, you can't get a combo drive, instead you have to get two individual drives one for reading dvds and one for burning cd-r/rw.
Anyway the point is made, for PC makers the numbers don't make sense, you'll get more cheap offerings, but as with the nature of going-on-the-cheap, the units will always be lack lustre.
Yes we know gnome et al aren't entirely original and have to copy -something- here and there, it's inevitable that they'll endup copying something that was used sometime in history.
However their direction(i.e what to copy) is best served by looking at which products still exist today despite the overwealming MS market, if you're going to copy something, copy these products as they clearly have something which MS can't quench.
I can't make it clear enough how important it is for the product to reflect it's own unique culture in it's UI design.. and not say the culture of Netscape on Windows 3.1 with just a few more gradients.
Congratulations for something that looks consistent, but zero points for them trying to be the better alternative that they claim to be.
Disregarding any 'con' has been the plight of some open source projects for quite a long time. It's not aggressive, it's constructive, take them on board remember them for next time, evolve, and today it's 'don't rip off windows we all know it's lame'.
Like with everything, why copy what you proclaim to be better than.
I suppose that might be one reason why creative are trying so hard to copy the look of the ipod.
Then again, the main problem with copying is that it's just flattery, when you copy something you can never be better than the original. The original design features 'originality' and the company (apple) are respected for that, and so when a consumer will look for a player, they know the originality is coming from apple, and the knock off to be coming from creative. It's not a good marketing stance to take on an item which is selling in part due to it's esteem value.
In the end a window may only be displaying 5 unique operations, however there are some 30 individual items on the screen. In that sense it's confusing. It's not a zealot behaviour that people assume of macintosh users (sure they exist, windows ones exist too, linux ones, et al)
Much of the debate of the mouse button that spawns is usually based on what it would be like for a windows user to use a sole mouse button. The mac software well demonstrates that productivity doesn't decrease with one less mouse button, it's an evolutionary thing, if only one button existed, then they wouldn't design for one mouse button, and had to place alot of thought into how things were to be laid out on the screen, instead of just tucking things away in the parallel (and dynamic, i.e confusing) menu system that the contextual menu provides
Unfortunately those don't sell.
Marketers on the other hand begin with their job title, "I'm a human to product relationship consultant, my work load is scalable while energising each new solution. etc etc"
oh when i mentioned fake pics, i didn't mean the photos were fake, the photos are real, they are taken from an australian deep sea discovery project and are available online for anyone to download. however the site proclaiming they came from a tsunami is fake. Also in general waves don't tend to carry in things, they just make them bop up and down on the spot. a crashing wave will bring something in, as that's when the large scale displacement occurs.
it's what you get for posting fake pics, then again it's in russian for all we know they're talking about dinner.
Ahh garbage mathematics at it's best...
.
.
follow this pattern for me sometime
1/9 = 0.1111..
2/9 = 0.2222..
8/9 = 0.8888..
so 9/9 must equal 0.9999....
wait hold on.
therefore 0.0000..0001 is equal to zero, yet greater than zero..
also i might like to add, that there is a mistaken belief that mac users hate multiple mouse buttons. however this isn't the case, the support for the sole mouse button comes from the fact that apple software isn't dependent on right clicking on everything to get some functionality. mac software tends to be more short cut orientated, hence a one hand on the keyboard, one on the mouse is common mac usage. Adding to this, since one hand is on the keyboard, accessing the "second mouse button" i.e contextual menus is trivial, as it's simply the ctrl key.
the thing is apple software is not so right mouse button dependent anyway. like in windows you can't do much without accessing the contextual menus, while in mac software it's really been designed around. (i,e programmers had to design a better interface instead of being lazy)
Additionally no company has to open it's product to another company simply because it's a monopoly. There needs to be an abuse of that monopoly, which must then be proven that the abuse of the monopoly led to some kind of damages to the competition or consumers, i.e the prevention of others from entering their arena(Despite my wording this does in no way apply to rhapsody being locked out of iPods, as no consumers are damaged by their player not working with iTMS). Since a monopoly can only be established if apple were selling things that you couldn't get any where else, then it can also be argued that no monopoly exists.(I.e a question that can be asked is that if the company were to close, would a replacement quickly fill the void, the answer is yes.) Since Apple are not unique in having music, a music players or a juke box software it makes a case for monopoly very difficult. i.e there is no case.
Apples lead in the market would be easily proven by it's strong customer base and higher quality of product and product esteem. None of these things -force- any user to purchase 1. music from apple 2. music players from apple, 3. juke box type software from apple, or 4. even an apple computer. The growth of the iPod was significant, but this also occured in droves before the iTMS existed, the iPod beat other consumer music devices out in cost per megabyte, and hence provided better value, despite it's higher price, while simultaneously delivering a better experience as well as addressing that consumers have more than say 128mb of music.
Unlike the windows monopoly any user can enjoy high quality music from their favourite artist before and after apple came onto the scene. The only type of monopoly apple can force onto another company is by making a certain record companies music perform poorly on the iTunes Music Store. (Similar to how MS prevented competitive companies software from working correctly in windows.)
A big reason why so many people used IE is that it took so long to download another browser. With upgraded bandwidth users can begin to treat their computers with an al a carte approach to software.