I find it interesting that you can now buy music in FLAC format (from well known digital pioneers such as Metallica!) yet you can't play them on your Apple devices, instead they push their own home grown format, which they don't seem to licence widely and so generally undermine the whole concept of lossless audio.<p>Kind of shows up their stance of <i>we want to use the best and most widespread format</i> (as does the crappiness of their H.264 encoder compared with the x264 encoder that they could just adopt).<p>They never made any official announcement, but there were reports of Apple employees claiming that the ever handy bogeyman of <i>patents</i> were preventing them implementing FLAC.<p>Shortly after they implemented their own ALAC (note that's the exact same name with <i>Free</i> replaced with <i>Apple</i>) which reverse engineering showed to be built with the exact same technology they claimed was under a patent cloud with a few extra bits which were actively avoided by FLAC because of patent worries.<p>Having experienced that, and been quite disappointed as an Apple fan and owner, I can't take their stance of H.264 seriously.