Make no mistake, Apple make lovely products, they look good, feel good and generally work well. Superbly thought out and developed user interfaces etc. etc. BUT ………….

Ethical ? Not in my opinion.

Fair? Not in my opinion.

Ruthless? Yes, in my opinion.

Controlling? Yes, to the extreme, in my opinion.

Unreasonable? Again yes, in my opinion.

Why? You may ask. Well I have spent (wasted) a large chunk of my day at work crawling through the fog of Apple’s MFi program trying to find a datasheet or even just simple connection details for their MFi Authentication chip. Sorry but can’t go into too many details as the boys from Apple will come round and beat me up, it says so in para 31415926.2 of the MFi licence agreement, the one way contract where Apple get all of our stuff but we still can’t get diddly squat from them. ( that was all of course a light hearted joke!).

Eventually I found an email contact, no search facility on the MFi Portal, and emailed them with my request. Got an auto response saying they will try to get back to me in 3 working days – ah well at least I have an excuse for 3 of the days late the project will be.

Forgot to say that whilst searching for the info I wanted I wasted another 30 minutes following Apples advice and signed up for the Developers section, yet more terms and conditions!, where apparently I would find more information. Well there is b$#@er all there to do with hardware, its all software development.

Rant over!

Royal Instition Christmas Lectures next…………