[chucker]

Originally Posted by iFerret Jeez, Chucker, are you like... a god or something? All the answers, all the time.

Nah. I just owe it to myself to deeply understand the company whose products I buy every now and then, and whose stock I own a few shares of. Even when they do something I don't approve of, don't agree with or would have done differently – or not at all – , I need to at least try to understand their rationale.

This isn't gonna be a popular opinion, but I think here's something Apple and Microsoft do have in common: they hate partners. Which ties in with your question:

It would work, but would Apple do it?

Consider PlaysForSure. Microsoft wanted – nay, needed – a solid competitor to the growing threat of Apple's iPod+iTunes dominance, so they tried to build up a competing platform (though they prefer the term "ecosystem"). But even though they touted the large choice of different players from different brands (Samsung, SanDisk, Creative, etc.) as an advantage to their customers, they did not actually believe in that themselves. If it had been up to them at the time, there would have been exactly one vendor of PlaysForSure players, namely themselves. Sound familiar? Yes, not only is that pretty much the iPod model; it's also precisely what they did as soon as they could, with the Zune.

Then, consider the iPhone. Only a fool would think Apple likes being with AT&T. That's a big corporation with the image of a big corporation, and not positively so at all. They're one of those old nasty giants, brand-wise, even though the actual company that now owns the brand has resulted from a bunch of recent mergers no average person could possibly understand. As soon as Apple can, they will get rid of their contract with AT&T. The only reason they made one to begin with is that they were running out of time in shipping the iPhone. Competitors would have killed off the iPod through superior smartphones too early on. The iPhone, while not a perfect solution (due to AT&T, or O2 in the UK, or T-Mobile in Germany, or possibly even Orange in France), is more than good enough at providing a strong contender in the smartphone space while the iPod continues to battle (and win, by a wide margin) in the portable media player field. By the time those do become outdated, all other phone vendors will have been busy trying to imitate the iPhone (and fail, just like music player makers did with the legendary "iPod killer"), whereas Apple will already have been working on revisions three, four and five. And AT&T? They won't be needed any more. By then, if things go as planned, cellular networks will be on the way out in favor of WiMAX. The iPhone will continue to offer cellular radio for years to come, but many will prefer to use WiMAX, or, where possible, WiFi.

Or the iTunes Store. All the shenanigans with NBC Universal or UMG? Apple has better things to do. The only reason they did partner with such customer-hostile companies to begin with is that they weren't given much of a choice; independent content is definitely on the rise, but won't be sufficiently popular with the mainstream for a long time.

Any major instance of Apple partnering up with a different company is one where Apple would rather not, and one where they have a long-term exit plan, no matter how vague. For the benefit of themselves, and of their customer base.