Apple up to its old tricks, pushing unwanted software onto PCs
I don't own a lot of Apple products. My wife has an iPhone (she loves it), but I don't. I have an iPod Nano that I keep around for compatibility testing, but I haven't plugged it into a PC in this office in more than a year.
Context & Ripple Effects
Ed Bott's complaint lands on top of a documented pattern rather than a one-off: his own site covered Apple's updater quietly phoning home back in July 2006, and by March 2008 the default-on behavior of Apple Software Update was already a running grievance among Windows users who plug in an iPod or iPhone and find extra Apple applications offered to them.
The irony he leans on has its own history in this corpus — Microsoft took the same criticism in 2007 when readers asked what exactly Microsoft was doing with their computers — so the piece positions Apple's updater as the mirror image of the vendor-behavior Windows users have long complained about. That symmetry is what gives the story traction beyond one blogger's annoyance.
First-order effects
- Windows PC owners who connect an iPod or iPhone are presented with pre-checked offers for Apple software they did not ask for, making an opt-out decision part of routine device maintenance.
- Apple gains installs of its Windows-side applications at near-zero acquisition cost every time the updater runs, which inflates usage numbers for products like Safari on a platform where they otherwise compete from behind.
Second-order effects
- The practice hands Microsoft's defenders an easy rebuttal to 'Mac vs. PC' cleanliness arguments, forcing Apple to spend goodwill earned on design and security messaging to defend installer defaults.
- Security and IT writers scrutinizing updater defaults raise the bar for all vendors: any pre-checked box in a trusted update channel now invites the same coverage Apple is getting here.
Third-order effects
- If vendor updaters keep doubling as distribution channels, the trusted-update relationship itself becomes contested territory — users learn to distrust the very dialog meant to deliver patches, which is a structural cost to platform holders on both sides of the Mac/PC divide.
- Consumer-software installation defaults become a reputational battleground where the accusation of 'unwanted software' migrates between vendors depending on who last got caught, normalizing the criticism as a category rather than a company-specific flaw.
The trend: Vendor software updaters are quietly becoming distribution channels, turning installer defaults and consent checkboxes into the recurring flashpoint between platforms and their users.