Apple Arrogance: I’ve always believed that when it comes to humility, customer service and corporate social responsibility, Steve Jobs and Apple make Bill Gates and Microsoft look like paragons of virtue, so there’s nothing in this Joe Nocera article that surprises me, except that someone is covering the facts rather than buying into the cult.

“At this particular moment, of course, Apple is special, and it can get away with being arrogant. It has a product that everyone wants, and for which there is no serious competition.

“But it seems to me that Apple is on a dangerous course. Yes, it has strong incentives to minimize tech support, but to say ‘Not Our Problem’ whenever an iPod dies is to run the serious risk of losing its customers’ loyalty…. The day will come when the iPod has a major competitor…. At which point, Apple will reap what it is now sowing….

“A final note: You may have noticed there is no Apple spokesman defending the iPod or Apple’s customer support in this column. When I called Apple, wanting to know, among other things, how long Apple believes an iPod should last, I got a nice young woman from the PR department. She said she’d try to find someone at the company to talk to me. That was on Wednesday.

“I’m still waiting.”

By the way, if you want to know whether Nocera's article struck a chord, consider that on Sunday morning it was number one on the Times' list of its most e-mail articles... despite the fact that it's stuck behind the "Times Select" barrier, so only about one in a thousand Times readers can access it.