I hear a lot of complaining/whining from the Mac camp since the keynote address last week. The restructure of iTools into the fee based .Mac service and the full price charge for the new version of the Operating System (Jaguar) have some people up in arms. I don’t doubt that the reality of the situation is that Apple knew that these moves would not please a good chunk of folks. I think the reality here is just that times are not so great in the PC sector, and that companies need to squeeze out revenue wherever possible. Apple looks at possible revenue streams that do not include the purchase of hardware, and these two are pretty obvious choices. I think if they started charging for the iApps, they would have defeated the purpose of having those apps to begin with, and probably made people even more angry than they are now. Servers for something like iTools aren’t cheap, and even though it really is not Apple’s core business to be in a business like this, the opportunity was there. Most of their forays into territory like this (remember eWorld?) have ended in failure, so I would say “stay tuned”. I think people should recognize that, in the climate that they are in, Apple needs to do whatever they can to sustain/create revenue, and this includes charging for something they probably wanted to keep free. Personally, I could care less about a mac.com email address, but I’m not the Mac-bigot that I once was. I’m mostly using Windows XP these days, and NT at the office for software reasons. Mac OS X is brilliant, I love it, and I wish that I could use it at the office, but it’s not sooo much better than Windows XP. Well, just some thoughts I wanted to post last week but couldn’t.