Steve Jobs Wanted To Lock You To Your iPhone Forever

As Apple and Samsung get ready to sue each other yet again, all sorts of fun little tidbits are beginning to be put on the public record. Most of them, of course, surround Steve Jobs, who we already knew was kind of a dick. Turns out, Jobs might also have been just a little, er, overzealous

The most interesting email out of the piles of documents currently being scanned and fired off by lawyers includes a “Top 100” meeting email from 2011 analyzed by CNET. Called “Holy War With Google”, just to give you an idea about the tenor of the proceedings, it revealed that essentially, the minute you bought an iPhone, Jobs wanted to trap you in Apple’s ecosystem for good:

Jobs wrote in an e-mail to employees in October 2010 outlining his itinerary for his company’s annual Top 100 meeting — an event attended only by Apple’s top 100 employees to discuss the company’s future — that his goal would be to find a way to connect his firm’s products in such a way that customers would have no choice but to stay with Apple.

“Tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem,” Jobs wrote in a bulletted list of items he wanted to discuss at Apple’s 2011 Top 100 confab.

Apple has always been a proponent of “closed architecture”, wherein the company provides you with the hardware and thus “just works.” And it uses everything from file formats to asinine proprietary connectors to ensure that happens. However, Jobs seemed to want to be more drastic. We can only theorize what form this “lock-in” would have taken, but the fact that Jobs seems to have mistaken his company for a religion tells you a lot.

If anything, Apple seems to have stepped away from this strategy, slightly, which is good. Now just finally install a USB port on your iDevices, guys. Nobody cares about Lightning.

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