@Bob D
$20 is certainly worth the upgrade price for those apps, I happily paid for it myself and use those apps all the time. I just think that charging users who bought an iPod touch less than 6 months ago $20 for an upgrade is ridiculous.

@CouchGuy
True, Apple's big-evilness pales in comparison to the likes of Microsoft and Wal-Mart, but these are signs that Apple is starting to slide that way.

@James
I, too, am a shareholder, and in the financial respect Apple is indeed doing just fine. That's my point really though...it seems that Apple is trading some of it's ideals to make a buck. I want to see Apple succeed, but it is able to do that without stepping on it's users. HFS+ has certainly been the standard disk format on the Mac platform for years, so I agree that Time Machine should be optimized for use on that filesystem. However, Mac OS X supports several filesystems, and to design a piece of software around a single filesystem is foolish, especially when rumors have it that Mac OS X will eventually run on ZFS (currently in beta) by default. Right now I use rsync for my backups, and that suits me fine, but Time Machine's inflexibility makes it all but useless for the vast majority of Mac users. I'd be interested to see just how many people have started backing up because of Time Machine. I'm sure there is a much higher percentage of Leopard users who don't bother.

@Ghibertii
I may do that.

@Doug
You make some good points, not all of which I think contradict my argument.

1) I agree that the iTMS is somewhat responsible for the higher availability of DRM-free music for sale online, which is great. However, I'm not going to raise Apple up on a pedestal for a side-effect that was never intended.

2) I don't find the .Mac service all that incredible of a deal at all, but besides that, the 2 step process of publishing to any other web location is what I'm arguing with respect to iWeb. Sure, you could publish to a WebDAV folder, but 99% of users have an ISP that gives them web space via FTP, so why not support that and not force a .Mac subscription down your users' throats?

4) I believe your first scenario to be true...you're certainly welcome to believe the latter.

5) I hope we haven't heard the last on this. I didn't even mention the users who bought Airport Extreme Base Stations expecting to be able to hook up a USB HD and use that for backups. Seems like Apple will probably support that configuration, at least I hope so. Hourly clone backups might not be the best option, but what about weekly clone backups, or even just a single backup copy? Most backup systems can make a single backup copy to a remote disk.

@Zato
As a developer myself, I am well aware of the amount of work that went into creating those 5 iPod touch apps. However, these apps were finished before the iPod touch even shipped, and again, my issue is with charging an upgrade fee less than 6 months after the product was released. I don't have a problem paying for increased functionality after a reasonable period of time.

Regarding DRM:
The music/movies Apple sells indeed does not belong to them, so DRM is necessary if the music/movie industry sees fit. Apple has opened spoken out against DRM though, and it strikes me as something they should avoid if they don't believe in it. Would this have killed the iPod? Perhaps, but I think the iPod succeeded for reasons other than strictly the iTMS.