Okay, I’ve just written that I’d like to “intimately integrate with my editor” so I suppose I should wind this down. The thing to understand about MobileMe is that it’s here to support a thoroughly modern take on computing. In an earlier generation, your relationship with a PC or OS maker was limited to dark threats of explosive violence if they didn’t get the damned thing working as well as it does in the commercials.

Today, it’s an ongoing relationship and an open, two-way conduit. Particularly with a company like Apple, which likes to control the user experience.. Their main objections to deleting any sucky music that the iTunes Genius feature finds in your music library are mainly PR ones, not legal or moral.

Apple — with some justification — has a nasty reputation for wanting and exerting this kind of influence and control. If that’s their reputation, why don’t they leverage it to the consumer’s maximum advantage? An Apple computer on an Apple network using an Apple online service to interact with an Apple mobile phone could be an absolutely glorious totalitarian state in which every app, document, and device you use has a passported conduit to everything else you use.

I have infinite control over my Linux boxes and there, I bow to no earthly King. But I almost never use them for any real work. My Apples are the most restrictive systems on the planet, and they’re my favorites. It’s simple: I cede 80 mass units of personal freedom to Apple and they give me 402 units of power in trade.

In the OS world, Freedom is often just another word for nothing left to use.