I both love and dislike Apple at the same time. It's getting to be a problem.
I love their computers. My Macbook Pro is delightful, fast and easy to use. Mac OSX 10.6 is pretty brilliant too. Were it to break, get stolen or otherwise disappear, I would probably end up biting the bullet and spend the $1800 Canadian Apple wants for a 15 inch unibody Macbook Pro. Also, if they ever make iPhones illegal, you can tear mine from my cold dead fingers, nothing comes close, and I have tried all of the competitors in Canada. But there would be something nagging at me.
Steve Jobs, in my opinion is a bloody genius, and indeed Apple's stock prices seem to rise and fall in step with his involvement, and rightly so, Apple prospers when Jobs is at the helm and in control. But that control can also be a double edged sword. Jobs is very cautious about who he lets develop consumer products for Apple products. Just google "iPhone app censorship" to get an idea of what I'm talking about.
From one perspective (that of Apple) a policy of strictly policing software is a very good thing, since, ideally, it would mean that only top quality apps are released for apple products, helping to maintain their high quality image. However, with 25,000 apps as of March 2009 (some reports put the current number at more than 50,000), and as many as two billion downloaded, it's hard, if not impossible for Apple to thoughtfully consider each one before allowing it to be distributed in the App store. From the perspective of the consumer, or app developer, on the other hand, the hand of Apple can be a drawback.
Consider Apple's recent "purge" of any app that could be used for displaying pornography. On the outset this could be seen as a good thing. Apps that display naked women don't exactly convey the image that Jobs would like his company to have. Yet at the same time Apple has been criticized for this move on two accounts.
First, some claim that the purge was too general, and removed apps from the store whose intention was to never display pornography, but were used for that purpose by a scant nefarious few.
And second, that it was a hypocritical move, considering the iPhone's Safari based browser can connect a user to as many pictures of naked women as Google Image Search will facilitate (which is undoubtedly somewhere in the bagillions).
So, to summarize a long post, love Apple, don't really care for the short lead Jobs likes to keep on developers. Right now it isn't really an issue for me, however I do foresee a day when Mac OS is closer to that of the iPhone and upcoming iPad, which would mean that the programs available to a user would be greatly compromised. For example, Apple does not allow apps which mirror the iPhone's core apps . . . meaning that, for the here and now, if you own an iPhone, safari is the only browser you can use. I shudder to think about a similarly constrained Macbook.
As for recent sensationalized reports of apple using child labour in factories, not to trivialize child labour in any way, but anyone who took the time to read the articles, instead of just posting the headlines to facebook, would have read that it was 11 cases of Apple suppliers employing people who were 15, in countries where the labour laws say that no one under the age of 16 may be employed. Furthermore, this was not uncovered by Dateline's "To catch a Predator" as some would have you believe, but through an internal audit by Apple, who choose to make the information public, and in each case, the audits revealed that the problems had been corrected independently by each supplier.
Frankly, aside form the irrational desire some have to make Apple look bad, I don't see how this is news.
It's March, and that means it's sandal season! I love sandals, but some people talk trash about them. 
