14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has always maintained an air of class about itself, never stooping to practices common in the rest of the industry and striving to maintain a respectful relationship with its customers. Despite this, they have recently made a number of dubious choices that will only end up hurting their reputation in the long run. The latest of these is pop-up advertising.
As a company, there is nothing wrong with advertising your products and there are many ways in which you can do so. Print, television, radio and the Internet are all great ways to get the word out about your product, however, that list does not include one thing? a personal computer. With the release of iLife 08, Apple has decided to get the word out to its customers by giving them a nice pop-up that is triggered when launching certain applications such as iPhoto. This pop-up lets you know that a new version is available and gives a nice sales pitch including all the improvements that you can expect once you buy the new software, as well as a list of all the applications that comprise the suite.
While Apple does offer a checkbox that you can use to ensure that the message won't be shown again, there is something fundamentally wrong with doing something like this. Advertising your product is something that costs, depending on where and how you do it, but I don't see Apple paying any of their users for the right to take up their screen space with their ads. Even worse, Apple is actually intruding and pushing ads where no ad should be. One expects to see ads on TV, on the radio and on the web, because those ads pay for the content that you are enjoying for free, but when you push ads in a users' work space, they will not be happy.
Much like the recent stealth update for the iPhone, this is an intrusion of privacy that simply should not happen. I don't remember checking "Tell me about new products checkbox" in the preferences?