Apple understands a great many things. Apple understands hardware, Operating Systems, Interfaces, and how to make Hardware / Software sexy. I mean, to the point of nearly being a cult sexy.
I am a huge Apple fan. I’m writing this on my customized MacMini (which I should throw some pics up of someday – it’s a portable with a 20″ screen), and make part of my posts on here on my iPhone (and all my Tweets are done on the iPhone – I never bother loading the webpage anymore.)
Apple even understands developer tools. XCode rocks (in my opinion. Some people’s opinion is different, but ya know this my blog, so my opinion is the one that counts. So there! 
What Apple doesn’t understand is developers.
The iPhone shipped as a locked down device – you couldn’t use it on other networks, and you couldn’t add your own software. Developers quickly created the Jailbreak techniques to load your own software on ‘em. Petitions were set up to call for Apple to open up the iPhone for development. Apple finally released the App Store, which allows you to purchase software and load it on the iPhone.
Great! Developers can use XCode to develop for the iPhone. Except… that pesky Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) that says, well… the first rule of iPhone Development is don’t talk about iPhone Development. This resulted in at least one book being canceled on developing iPhone applications (and I’m sure more than one was probably put on hold), since developers couldn’t say anything about the internals.
Then that changed finally…
