No amount of in-depth and expert technical explanation will ever get past that.

1984 wasn’t like 1984, we aren’t in Kansas anymore and Apple isn’t the same company it was in 1993.

Imagine if you will, Apple buys the rights to all the games and then all you need is an Apple TV to get the football on your TV. Even better, I thought, they might give it away for free. Something that a company with $80 billion in the bank could do quite easily. Perfect trojan horse to get Apple TV instantly into millions of homes in the UK. Lovely.

Except when I thought about it a little more I realised it wasn’t very Apple really. For them to do this they’d have to actually broadcast the games meaning that Apple would have to replace all the infrastructure, commentators, camera operators, pointless expert match pundits. Not likely.

Perhaps the rumour in the Daily Mail that Apple was negotiating for the football wasn’t too far from the mark however. It could be as simple as Apple wanting to sell the Sky Package on the Apple TV. Not a million miles from what it does already with Virgin Media. So, not a massively exciting sport on TV paradigm shifting earthquake of innovation. Sadly.

Still, Sky Sports subscriptions though the Apple TV and entered into with just your Apple ID? Nice idea.

I was in PC World the other day and another customer asked the salesman “What’s that?” The salesman replied “It’s a Mac, basically it’s a bit like a Windows PC, but different” And with that the customer bought a PC. If Apple can’t solve this conundrum then it’s never going to grow sales.

There were variations on this theme. Why do I bring this up now? Well, the other day I was in PC World and a guy picked up an Android tablet and asked the salesman “What’s this?” Salesman replied “it’s a bit like an iPad, but different”

Game. Set. Match?

After 15 straight months of using Windows Phone, going back to the iPhone is like going back in time, and while I appreciate that this won’t make sense to those who have never gazed out beyond their sheltered iLives, I can tell you that Microsoft’s smart phone OS is better, more efficient, and more beautiful to look at.

The bitter, bitter irony of this piece from Paul Thurrott is that were you to reverse the preference and call the shots and tone in favour of iOS and the iPhone he’d simply *roll his eyes* and cite it as another tiresome example of how the ‘Apple backed media’ twists itself in knots trying to favour Apple over any competitor.

Try it, read almost any of his Apple coverage and where the word Apple or an Apple product appears replace it with Microsoft or an Microsoft product. But then he probably sees it as his one man crusade to defeat the Apple biased media and their fixation with the company and their reporting on it in a wholly unquestioning and positive light.

For the record I use a Windows phone day-to-day and though it does have some nice touches I do not recognise this utopian world of modern discovery that Thurrott espouses. Not at all.

AirPlay and iMessages are just two. Describe them and they sound like neat technologies. Use them and suddenly you see how the roots grow, twist and tangle around dragging you deeper and deeper into the Apple ecosystem.

It won’t affect everyone and there will always be alternatives, but I think Apple has just laid down the next 20 years of its dominance. It may not come to fruition, but as it stands iOS 5 is just the start.

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Looks like he was right.

Guaranteed never to go pink.