Originally Posted by TheSoulBrother:
“If you bought a laptop 4 months before Vista came out, should you be given Vista for free when it is released? Because that becomes the default OS on the same laptop you bought just 4 months earlier. Its "free" for new buyers. .”
That's a flawed analogy, if you bought a PC with Windows XP installed on it after October 26th 2006 then you were entitled to get Windows Vista for just the cost of shipping.
Same deal with Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard (i.e. Apple does it for their products).
With both of them, Apple offered a low cost disc so that you could upgrade a recently purchased Mac.
I think most people's objection stems from these points:
1) The iPod touch is less like the iPhone, it's supposed to be more like an iPod. iPods have simple updates which include new features - it's happened several times before. All for free. Therefore when people bought an iPod touch they expected some continuity - see point 3.
2) Apple identified that there was an accounting issue, so they compensated for that with iPhone and Apple TV - why not with iPod touch? Easy - to get more money from people.
3) The iPod touch is only a few months old, people didn't expect to be paying for new apps already. Perhaps some form of large OS upgrade (perhaps a year down the line), but not just a few apps that are free on the older iPhone. I certainly wouldn't expect to be paying for an upgrade four months after the product was released.
4) People can buy an iPod touch today and it wont include these apps, they will see them on Apple.com and all over the internet but they might not realise they cost extra. With the old iPod software pricing model, that wouldn't have mattered.
5) In terms of "heft" Apple said that with the 802.11n enabler it wanted to make the cost trivial as it was an accounting issue. The only logical conclusion is that Apple sees the iPod touch as a cash cow, sure it's £12.99 now - but what about the next upgrade and the next one? That attitude concerns many iPod touch owners.