Why are gardens, of the walled variety, so reviled? ⇒

Yesterday while out for lunch, a co-worker expressed surprised that someone with an iPhone did not have a Mac. This surprised me as there are 550 million iOS users and only around 100 million Mac users, so most iPhone owners in fact do not own a Mac. He then mentioned Apple's "walled garden" to those of us with Macs and it made me a tad defensive, seeing how interested I am in owning my data. I really feel that with some thought and planning you can have reasonable access to your data & much of the convenience as well. Outside of the apps (no mobile platform's apps are cross compatible) I am not hugely locked in to anything. My mail is in IMAP (FastMail, my music in DRM-free MP3s. I do have data in Apple containers (calendars, contacts & photos), but they can all be exported quite easily. Only my purchased movies and TV shows are truly locked in, and that is true of any platform (Amazon, Android, etc). If I wanted something less convenient, but more compatible, I could order DVDs, wait for them to arrive, convert them & then load them into iTunes, but that is more work than I am willing to do right now. And I suspect those will go DRM free in the next few years (like music did before it) so that won't be an issue either. I guess what grates me about these types of comments (more here[^1]) is the assumption that Apple is the only platform with lock in. You can't open Kindle books on a non Kindle app/device, nor play Amazon video elsewhere, so what do those people want? Apple, Amazon, Samsung, Google and the like all try to keep us using their devices & services, and rightly so. To do this, they are choosing to deliver convenience instead of compatibility. Why is this so surprising and why do people only accuse Apple of it? [^1]: found via Campbell