Is Apple getting too big for its boots?

A recent reader’s letter suggesting that I am anti-Apple touched a sore point, as I had been fretting about whether I was guilty of prejudice. The excitement about the new 3G iPhone is only the latest indication that Apple is setting the pace for hardware and interface design in the formats it has chosen to address (even if it has so far ignored the most interesting ones).

I resolved that I would forget the irritations I have with the company and concentrate on its achievements. Then, when downloading a .tif image in the rush to meet a deadline, I found myself yet again confronting an Apple issue.

At some point I must have clicked OK to an Apple Quicktime upgrade on my Windows PC; it had plugged itself into Explorer and signed itself up to open a variety of file formats.

Quicktime opened the .tif within Explorer, no problem; but when I right clicked to save it to disk I got a prompt offering me two choices: Save as source, or Save as a Quicktime Movie. A .tif is not a movie, so I clicked Save as Source as the option that came closest to making sense. I was then presented with a prompt saying that to save this ‘movie’ I needed to buy Quicktime Pro (£20 from Apple UK).

Explorer would happily save this .tif when it is is operating under the standard Windows file associations, so Apple was asking me to pay for functionality that I already had, but which its own software had switched off.

It wasted my time but not my money, because I knew enough to realise what had happened. But many busy users might have bought a program they did not need because it was the only way they could see to get the job done.

Retrying all this later I found that if I changed the file association within the Quicktime control panel, the software simply switched it back again. Switching Quicktime off in Explorer means the picture will not even render in the browser. Only by using the Windows control (My Computer> Tools> Options> File Types) could I persuade the PC not to open .tifs using Quicktime.

Apple may not be guilty of deliberate deception here but it could still be on dodgy legal grounds. Recent rulings on phone-in scandals held companies guilty of institutional laxity when they profited from breaches of public trust even if these appeared to be mistakes. Ofcom says it has no jurisdiction in the matter. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said the Quicktime Pro prompt could be construed as an advert, but it could make no ruling unless I submitted a formal complaint.

I don’t want to get involved in an extended feud with Apple. This is a complex issue: ­ Windows may open some .tifs but not others, for instance, ­ and Quicktime is not the only utility to hijack functionality. There is a need for ground rules (such as ‘you must always match the functionality you are purporting to replace’), and the ASA may not the best body to set them.

All this happened at the end of June, when I wrote a couple of angry blogs on the subject. I asked the company for a comment for our printed edition. Perhaps it would have a simple explanation, a fix, and a pledge to police itself properly in future?

More than a week later I had not had so much as an acknowledgement of my email to Apple’s European press office. Emails to its London PR team elicited an admission that my first email had been received.

Five weeks later, after several emails and calls, I have yet to get a response. I take this as a refusal to comment. To put it more strongly: it seems Apple is turning a deaf ear not just to me, but to tens of thousands of PCW readers.

Resurgent Apple seems to be infected with an arrogance exceeding even that of Microsoft in its bully-boy days of near absolute dominance. Microsoft was always good for a comment, even if you didn’t like what it said. What is astonishing is how Apple gets away with it.

If Microsoft did to Macs what Quicktime does to Windows there would be lynch-mobs of Apple users heading for Redmond. It’s hard to say a word against Apple on the web without getting flamed, often beyond reason.

But Apple won’t be able to carry on like this indefinitely. It will get its comeuppance, just as Microsoft did.