Apple is letting me down

A few reasons why I'm troubled by Apple of late:

• They miscalculated the iPhone's pricing strategy. While I think the drop to $399 was a great idea and the right thing to do, it clearly wasn't part of their master plan from the start. It's good to see a company that can make major adjustments to its strategy in mid-stream, but it's also troubling to see how significantly Apple miffed the pricing strategy of its biggest product for 2007 and its biggest strategic product in probably a decade or more.
• This price cut undermines future Apple product introductions in the way that America's intelligence failures with regard to Iraq undermine our assertions about other countries' threats. From now on, "give 'em a few months and they'll knock a few hundred bucks off the price" will be a common refrain held by people upon new Apple product launches, just like eye-rolling is common upon US assertions of, say, Iran's nuclear weapons capabilities.
• Apple's ringtone policy is anti-consumer in a pretty serious way, unlike anything else they've done with DRM to date. Jon Gruber nails this on Daring Fireball and this episode of The Talk Show podcast. Nails it.
• The new interface on the new iPod nano and iPod classic is being reviewed as sluggish and too sweet for its own good with regard to eye candy.
• The iPod touch is crippled in some surprisingly blatant ways feature-wise compared to the iPhone- its lack of "add event" capability in the calendar is the most petty of the artificial omissions, but its lack of the Mail program is actually worse (though not as petty).
  
• The iPod lineup is now more complex than it's ever been- there's no clear "top of the line" device anymore.

These are just a few of the things that have been weighing on my Apple fanboy mind lately. Many of them (particularly the ringtone issue and iPod touch limitations) remind me more of Microsoft than of Apple- and that's no good.

Hopefully this stuff will straighten itself out soon. Hopefully the new iPhone software update will pop up shortly, and sometime after that perhaps Apple will add to the iTunes Wi-Fi store the ability to automatically download new subscribed podcast episodes wirelessly, and maybe, just maybe, that will distract me enough from my concerns to breath easy for a few days.

;)