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Apple To Make "Music To Your Ears" Announcement
supa_k writes "According to an offical Apple invitation sent to the good folks at
MacCentral, on April 28th
Apple will make 'announcements that will be music to your ears.' It remains to be seen if this involves a purchase of Universal - something Apple offically denied just a few days ago but it will undoubtedly be the announcement of their online music subscription service and the other announcement will surely be new iPods."
...that it's really just going to be an opportunity to get drunk with Jobs and listen to Doobie Brothers really loud
Dell's been doing deals on iPods lately, probably getting rid of stock for Apple. New higher capacity iPods on the way, is my wager.
:-D
Yeah...really going out on a limb there.
At the Apple retail store I work at, we've been waiting for some sort of an announcement. People come in asking when new iPods with color screens and video players are supposed to ship, and we have to say "nothing has been announced." One guy even tried to say that we HAD announced a 970 version of the iPod, and wanted to know when he could pick it up. Hopefully this will quiet a lot of those folks.
I would like to see the new TravelStar 80GN in some sort of small iPod-ish MP3 player. Given, it's a 2.5" drive, but damn!
... or maybe not
that they keep the 5 gig and drop the price down to $200. That would bring the mp3 jukebox revolution to an even larger market. I know a lot of people who choke at $300 but would jump on one in a hearbeat if the prices was lowered to around the $200 mark. Might not be have high profit margins, but it would get lots of Apple equipment into lots of hands which is part of what Apple is trying to do right now.
*New iPods (likely will have 10, 20, and 30 GB capacity)
*New Music Download service integrated with iTunes
*iTunes 4, with music service and AAC encoding (possibly Rendezvous streaming as well)
*I would guess nothing related to Universal at this point.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
I'm guessing it's an iPod that comes with wireless bluetooth headphones. Bring it on Apple!
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Mac rumors hey, the best source of 'news' we can get? forgive the cynicism, but with Apple's typical tight reign on information about just what they're up to I know by now NEVER to trust rumours. How many of the last year's worth have come true?
The iWalk?
Video iPod?
G5?
USB2?
Dualscreen powerbooks?
The best strategy is to NOT go with the rumors people, except for the dull ones.
It'll be just another iPod.
I wonder if Microsoft will be singing along with Apple? I see building competition bt/w WMA 9 series and Apples stategy for AAC (should they announce it).
I would expect to see Apple try to continue what they have done with the iPod - that is, making it easier to get your favorite artists, and listen to them, and maybe even make payment unobtrusive. Only if you have a Mac, of course. So if buying Universal is the only way to do that, then they would love to buy Universal, but chances are better that this is about some secret Apple squirrel society that is available to all Mac owners, but better if you pay.
There. I'm not fried.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
where the iPod body can glow inside with different chaning colors
like the Color Kinetics Sauce LED products here
Cheers, Joel
The new iPods should be available in 10, 15 and 30 gig versions according to ThinkSecret. They also say it should also include a docking station.
For all those people who do not believe the rumor sites ThinkSecret has proven time and time again to be nearly always correct. It is not MacOSRumors. :-)
A press release announcing that there will be some announcement made next week, and it's a frontpage story on Slashdot?
News sure ain't what it used to be.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
actually, I found that the new 1.2.6 version of the ipod firmware solves the problem quite nicely; once again I can get 10 hrs of music off one charge.
http://www.iweenie.com/ipod.shtml (iweenie)
has the latest firmware, as well as the older versions and all the tools you need.
-- No Sig is a Good Sig
If Apple does indeed buy Universal, what does that mean for it's old settlement with the music label called Apple? Apple is the label that put out the Beatles music, and they have a settlement in place that says Apple Computer cannot enter the music industry, or something of the sort. If Apple does get Universal, how can Apple Music respond? I think that could be an obstacle to Apple's purchase...
All I really want is Cocoa version of iTunes. I don't download music off the internet and I don't have an iPod. I just want the apps I use most on OS X to be true OS X apps. But all I am expecting is iTunes 3.1 with music service integration and new iPods. Hopefully Panther will usher in a Cocoa Finder, Cocoa iTunes, and Cocoa Quicktime.
1) firewire 800 (yay!) 2) bigger hard drive (duh) 3) more color schemes?
-- No Sig is a Good Sig
A 64kbps Ogg file will blow away a 128kbps MP3
From personal experience, that is not true. Although ogg will beat MP3 at about the same bitrate.
-You may license this sig for only $6.99.
Ok, so the event is in San Francisco on the 28th. Apple would not let its plans leak easily, but I think we can get better clues by doing some detective work.
1. Are any Universal senior executives going to be in SFO on 28th? Maybe any friends, collegues can answer?
2. Any other recording company executive planned to be in SFO on 28 - with no event planned publicly?
3. Are any major artists (somewhere read Pearl Jam) planned to be in SFO on 28th?
I am sure people can come up with more clues (flight plans, website registration - ok I know about appleuniversal.plan - what else) which can throw more light on the plans.
they put a iridescent apple logo on a stereo and called it "iStereo". hey - i just got an idea for a submission on one of those homebrew mac design sites!!
I also reply below your current threshold.
If Apple is starting a subscription service - they ought to seriously consider the US mobile phone model:
Sign up for one year and get a $XXX discount on one of our pieces of hardware
Imagine how many more people will sign up for a $40 monthly fee if it meant they could finally afford an iPod and have access to an easy to use music subscription service.
* iWalk.
Okay that was just stupid.
* Video iPod.
I wouldn't be suprised if there were a few pieces of hardware floating around in some r&d lab for this. Someone is eventually going to make something like this. Sony just released a portable CD/DVD player that has a small LCD screen that attaches. It isn't too much of a stretch to imagine the drive replaced with a hard drive.
* G5.
970.
* USB2.
This is true since it was recently discovered that new PowerMacs have had USB2 chips in them for a while. Drivers are now out which will enable this.
* Dualscreen powerbooks.
Probably the 17" monster, because asside from the one pc company that is making dual screen machines who else in the world would consider such a thing. Which sounds more plausible a machine with two small screens or this insanely large 17" Apple came out with?
--- I do not moderate.
Ain't happenin' sport.
And OSX themes on XP are just lipstick on a pig.
...something Apple offically denied just a few days ago...
Who is their spokesman, Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf (aka Baghdad Bob)?
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
If you're waiting for Apple to port OS X to commodity PC hardware, don't hold your breath. If they do switch to x86, which I view as unlikely, it'll require an Apple x86 machine with an Apple BIOS.
Personally, I think it's more likely that they'd switch straight to a 64-bit CPU from AMD, but that's just me.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Reuters - Apple Computer Corp (APPL) has announced in a smashing pre-lunch event at its flashy new store in SOHO that the upcoming announcement will focus on the debut of its new pseudo-sentient home robot, capable of interfacing via bluetooth with home devices such as cell phones, bluetooth enabled computers, and the next generation of home appliances.
;)
The product is scheduled to launch with the name "iRobot....."
*DUCK*
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
Cocoa does not equate to better-
Cocoa is an application framework. It will not make things faster or better or whatever, If a Carbon app is optimized it will run as fast or faster then Cocoa apps (e.g. The Finder).
Carbon and Cocoa each have their purposes, which is why they are used in OS X.
Yeah, that deserves a Slashdot article.
Posting an announcement of an announcement about an up comming announcement.
;-)
"This just in! More news will come in later, story at 11"
great marketing on their part. although universal probably likes it more then apple.
hooray! it's a sex wiki
That would be music to my ears
Every bit of speculation I've seen focuses on why (not) Apple is going to buy Universal music.
But this doesn't have to be a black-and-white thing. There have been too many stores in mainstream media for this to be completely groundless (at least, I think so), and Apple can't afford to buy Universal outright, so I believe we should expect either a partial buyout (not even a controlling share), or/and perhaps Steve Jobs taking some significant management position within Universal Music, in addition to his Apple/Pixar duties.
Even if the settlement doesn't preclude all such claims in the future, all Apple would need to do is retain the Universal brand name for its music business. The legal problem arises only when Apple starts selling music under the Apple brand name, not when Apple obtains corporate control of a different brand name that sells music.
WAV :-P
.wav is now more of a container than a real format)
(note to nitpickers: i know
...It remains to be seen if this involves a purchase of Universal - something Apple offically denied just a few days ago...
Make up your mind!
Thank you
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
(1) Get involved with something radical
(2) Deny involvment
(3) Accept involvment
(4) ???
(5) Profit!
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
THAT would be music to my ears.
Score: -9, Way Way Too Accurate
http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?comments=26039
"[...]April 28th, which they say is the day that the Half-Life 2 NDA will be lifted"
Yes, my tongue IS firmly wedged in my cheek.
Correct URL for the Ogg xtra for Director:
s /O gg.htm
http://www.directordev.com/tools/xtras/OggVorbi
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Recently, Apple Computer was approached by beings from the Planet Zog. Zog is the richest planet in known space and all its inhabitants are so intelligent that it has no concept of intellectual property, since anybody is capable of inventing anything he, she or it needs as and when necessary. All Zog software is Open Source, mostly written in VLIW assembler by users as and when required.
Unfortunately the Zog economy is somewhat overheated, despite a rise in income tax to 99%, and Zog is looking for a way to lose some cash. They have offered to merge Apple with a Zog publicly owned corporation called "We really are Universal Music" (ZSE: WRUM), the present stockholders of Apple to retain 51% of the equity.
The idea is to introduce a music-on-demand service by which music will be directly downloaded from Zog. Zog has no equivalent of the DMCA since even the cheapest Zog pseudopodheld can crack any form of encryption on the fly, and has been recording the entire data output of the Earth for the last hundred years on the Ogg recorder in some Zog kid's bedroom. To encourage takeup of the service. the new corporation will give away all its hardware and software free for the next 20 years, and offer to replace all Macs in the field free of charge with new terahertz systems running OS MDCLX.
Jobs then demonstrated the new direct thought to text input PowerBook G93000 which projects a virtual reality 3-D image into the entire visual field, runs for a year on an AAA battery and weighs half an ounce.
Following the announcement, Microsoft shares rose $3 and Apple shares were $12 down at close of trading. The usual suspects predicted the demise of Apple within 3 weeks, citing the failure to keep up technically with the PC market, and Steve Jobs was slightly injured by a troll from slashdot complaining about file copy speed on a 9600/300. ...try to keep posts on topic
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
>Bluetooth (or WiFi, whatever) connectivity.
What would be the point of enable the iPod wireless? Bluetooth is damn slow, 802.11b(and g) is a faster, bur require lots of power. The iPod battery does have short enough life span as it is.
Sure it could be a 'cool' feature, but the increased price, and the decreased battery life will not sell many units.
1. Blasted to atoms in a trench in the Tora Bora mountains.
2. Squashed into jelly under the rubble of a bombed-out restaurant in Baghdad.
3. The Greenbriar, in West Virginia.
4. Syria.
.. How many times do we have to wh1ne about it?
VIDEO IPOD:
360/426x340 color touchscreen, 40GB HDD, firewire + 'proprietary' port (for AV out) + headphone jack, integration into iWatch (which replaces quicktime and DVD players) that lets you rip DVDs down into that smaller framesize in mpeg4. Throw in bluetooth and charge extra for a bluetooth remote control. $699.
Just in time for the direct-deposit tax refund!!!
Nope, it's really true. I would listen to a 64 Ogg over a 128 MP3 any day (of course both have artifacts, but the Ogg's high frequency problems are much less than MP3's swirling hi-hats).
Putting the sig back into +1, Insightful since 1995!
Cocoa is an application framework. It will not make things faster or better or whatever, If a Carbon app is optimized it will run as fast or faster then Cocoa apps (e.g. The Finder).
My rudimentary understanding of Carbon and Foundation event handling is that Carbon needs to poll (albeit that the call doesn't return until the event you want occurs) and Foundation doesn't. Perhaps things are done in the same way underneath, but I couldn't say.
playtime for a few minutes of "Wow! that's neat."
Have you been to a mall in Asia lately?
Kids do this to mobile phone LED lights.
Any battery drain is minimal for the LED,
and the color light effect is pretty cool.
Apple knows that innovative design
gets attention and can drive sales.
And if it has Vorbis,
I'll buy it immediately.
Cheers, Joel
As long as MacOS 9 is supported iTunes will remain Carbon. MacOS 9 may no longer be shipping on new machines but Apple will still be supporting MacOS 9 for years to come. Updated versions of iTunes is an important part of that support.
It was a real simple hack: get your powerbook, buy an LCD monitor, plug it in. In some cases, you may need to hit the "Detect Displays" button in System Preferences.
Cool tip: you can set Virtual PC to full screen mode on the second monitor only. Freak people out by dragging windows across the two systems.
Isn't it obvious? Your Mac (the 9600/300 is a fantastic machine btw) is suffering a breakdown because it has to deal with you all day, since you post this in every Apple story.
Sell it on eBay to someone who doesn't spend the time that most people are having sex/eating/watching tv/commenting intelligently on slashdot and it will be sprightly and effective again.
"User Error: replace user"
i have read that bluetooth is not able to handle the bandwith of a stereo audio signal with quality that would come close to your wired headphones. Let alone the issue of battery power.
Bluetooth cellphone headsets require MUCH less data than music, plus they work in other power saving tricks like intermittent broadcasting.
as attractive as wireless headphones seem, dealing with the battery recharge seems so damn annoying.
- The MPEG-4 Standard supports the possibility of DRM
- but it hasn't been implemented yet
- but they're working on it
I really love the acronym of that last site (Intellectual Property Management & Protection). The obvious pronunciation is "iPimp. The digital pimp for your digital lifestyle."(tm) Yes, Apple has avoided DRM so far, but it's coming.Well, this has only been in the rumor mills for about three months now. I guess you feel even more stupid than you already did, now, don't you?
Dude, the whole Universal thing was just a giant rumor on the web. Apple never made an official announcement that they had any intention of purchasing Universal. Apple has never said anything about Universal until last week when Jobs publicly denied the rumors.
They've given off no mixed message because they never gave off a message to being with.
Pooty tweet
Why wait? I note that the scrappy Archos has long been the underdog in the MP3 player/recorders, but their MPEG4 player/recorder just won the "CES 2003 Best of Portable Video & Best of the Show", apparently.
Da Blog
Just for the sake of argument, were Apple to release an X86 (-whatever extension) computer with a compatible version of OS X, how long do you think it would be before some enterprising hacker devises a workaround? Maybe some easily homemade, add-in EEPROM card that you can flash with whatever reverse-engineered (and probably illegal) code, that will fake the Apple BIOS?
Which is why the post was supposed to be humor, but it's damn difficult to convey subtle humor in text form.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
According to Shawn King of the "Your Mac Life" radio show, Apple is planning to release an FM transmitter for the iPod that will be more flexible and better integrated than the 3rd-party offerings. That should be music to your ... airs.
-- thinkyhead software and media
The service will supposedly be easy to use and will offer a deep catalog and the ability to purchase single songs. Isn't this what everyone has been asking for?
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Im thinking theyre brewing up some dobly 5.1 power macs and a nice set of speakers to come with them.
Never believe a rumour until it's officially denied
"iPimp. The digital pimp for your digital lifestyle."(tm) Yes, Apple has avoided DRM so far, but it's coming.
I have no way to know what Apple is and isn't going to do with regard to DRM. Neither do you. All we have is what they have (and haven't) done in the past. I refer you again to this link. What reason do you really have for insisting that Apple is all about DRM all of a sudden?
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
haven't you guys seen this? No mention of format though.
They denied buying Universal. They didn't say they would never have anything to do with Universal. Read between the lines.
Although an OS X port may be music to your ears, this announcement was billed as "music to your ears," which sort of insinuates that it will have something to do with Apple and music.
Gotta work on it, man. It definitely didn't come across that way. Good try though!
Pooty tweet
and they're gonna jam through the announcement so nobody hears what's said behind the podium.
that's my fantasy, your turn...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
The iPod's "sleep mode" is the real thing that benefits from the update. I went from needing to recharge every 24 hours to needing a charge every 10 days or so. Anyone complaining about battery life should update their firmware.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
...what color will the eighth notes be on the iTunes 4 icon?
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Or as George Carlin said, "If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten."
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
That's what I said. I said "give this guy an extra mod point," i.e., he's good, "just because he knows his grammar well enough NOT to write 'off of'." I.e., "off" is correct, "off of" (the most common thing posted on slashdot) is wrong. Could you please RTFP next time?
Don't worry, it's not you, it's slashcode. Spaces are automaticallly inserted into long 'words' to stop trolls from mucking up the horizontal scrolling of the page by posting really really long words.
Im not homophobic at all.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
But, the rumor was also featured on CNBC, CNN, and other financial news services. That makes me pretty sure that is going to happen.
Yeah, the same thing happened to me when I got my rev b iMac... but it was just a couple of weeks later when Apple updated them to the multi-colored iMacs. The lesson I learned: if an Apple product is more than 6 months old, wait for the update.
- Danny
But by the time I could afford one, Apple would have the G10.
Once you've found a good naming scheme, stick with it!
- Danny
However - if it was releasead for x86, there is no way Apple could keep it bootable "only" on Apple-supplied x86 machines.
All the kernel code can be download here. It would take a motivated (and reasonably knowledgeable) individual not very long to either release a kernel with any special-Apple-only-hardware checks removed or to add in support for other BIOSes, etc.
Or, of course, Apple could un-open-source its code.
I'm sure a few people might do such a thing, just like a few people used to run System 6 on Mac emulators on the Atari ST and Amiga. Not enough to be significant, however.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
However - if it was releasead for x86, there is no way Apple could keep it bootable "only" on Apple-supplied x86 machines.
It's a lot more feasable than you might think -- your standard chipset is a rather powerful processor in its own right, and is more than capable of some sort of rotating-key encryption, which OS X would then require to boot. Ever notice that Apple's chipsets are all made by... Apple? It's quite possible to scatter verification bits, or other unique architectural oddities in so many places of the chipset that it is quite impractical to reverse-engineer;
This is not the same thing as BIOS/Firmware, which is just software, and reading the raw assembly (easy to do) from the EEPROM--
Reverse-engineering this has a complexity along the lines slicing the chipset into layers, and using an SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) to look at the die, then figuring out what is underneath it; this is not something that is undertaken for less than several million-- the tooling alone is astronomically expensive-- SEM's are getting cheaper, but they aren't on your average joe's budget! Anyone able to fund such a venture is too large to slip under the radar, and would lose (everything) to Apple in court.
All the kernel code can be download here [apple.com]. It would take a motivated (and reasonably knowledgeable) individual not very long to either release a kernel with any special-Apple-only-hardware checks removed or to add in support for other BIOSes, etc.
There's a BIG difference between Darwin and OS X. Darwin has the underpinnings of OS X; but since it's a microkernel, it doesn't have to have the code to handle BIOS checking in it-- put that in a user-space module specific to OS X (which is never released in source form). It is not a monolithic kernel like Linux where such reverse-engineering is possible. You don't need anything in the kernel to lock out non-Apple machines. The non-opensource parts of OS X contain the hardware checks. Darwin doesn't have it at all-- it is supposed to boot on non-apple hardware. It's not a matter of #ifdefs in the Mach Kernel.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Interesting. But I still think it might be easier than you're making it out to be (although maybe not as easy as I said originally) - at least as long as Apple doesn't un-opensource the kernel, simply because it still handles all access to the hardware.
:)
Just to make sure I undersand your argument, I'll break out the main points. Please correct as necessary:
1) Apple designs its own chipset for x86
2) This chipset could perform some encryption/decryption of specific data or include "purposeful" mistakes
3) a userland (closed source) program could submit specific data and check results of encryption/decryption or, alternately, look for the "mistakes" to see if it was Apple certified hardware
I guess here's how I think it such a scheme could be defeated:
1) Buy an Apple x86 running OS X.
2) Replace stock OS X kernel with home-compiled kernel (as far as the userland program is concerned, things are still cool)
3) modify home-compiled kernel to dump all requests to access hardware, along with requested data and any returned from-hardware data to file.
4) Compare a dump of this file with OS X booting off a non-Apple x86 box. Isolate the differences.
5) Modify kernel to report back exactly what Apple hardware sends back.
6) Repeat until successful.
Feel free to point out where I've gone horribly wrong. I already came up with "the userland program generated a random number on each boot, and asked the hardware to encrypt/decrypt it, and checks results of encryption/decryption", in which case the above strategy wouldn't work.
But - in that case, couldn't you peak through the binary/assembly of the non-opensourced check program, figure out where it decides the hardware isn't correct, and using your favorite editor make it jump down the "hardware is correct" path instead? I was under the impression this is how lots of cracked binaries of various commercial software programs had been made. And those usually only take a day or two to become available
Why do I get the feeling that Jobs is about to pull the proverbial rug out from under the Archaic RIAA.
Dolemite
________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
The music execs wouldn't go for it without that.
We'll see. I think it's been their wet dream to have a digital download business model that was both sucessful and had DRM. But so far nobody has been able to pull it off. The position of Mr. Jobs, however, has been "let people manage their media on any and all devices they own" etc. He's been against DRM from the start and been quite outspoken about it. (It's sort of irritating to keep running into slashdotters who believe Apple is the DRM king or something. Dunno where they got that idea.)
So who won the fight? Apple or the RIAA? I guess we'll see. I hope Steve won. Because if he did there won't be any post-purchase restrictions on the downloaded files.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Maybe they could offer something like 1,000 free downloads when you buy an iPod.
Well, I'll start with the arguments
1.) This will probably never happen anyway; the state of Darwin on x86 strenghens this belief.
2-3.) OS X will probably barf on you right here. Just because Darwin and Mach is the basis for OSX, it does not by any means imply that OSX will boot from a self-compiled 'Darwin/mach' kernel; I've seen people try. There are still some closed-source bits to the Mach kernel OSX uses, which differs from Darwin's. Just because it's 99.9% the same, doesn't mean it's exactly the same. Most of the 'Darwin' that is open-source are things such as the GNU tools-- which are Free anyway.
4-6.) There would be far, far more differences than just unlocking code-- there's a lot of hardware that OSX supports that Darwin doesn't; you would break far more than you could possibly solve.
And finally, there are plenty of examples where people have tried to get OS X working on a non-apple PPC -- they all fail until they actually get Apple hardware. And Apple isn't above making a 'new' version that is incompatible with the older hardware -- they did exactly that when they killed mac clones. The clone makers tried (and failed) to work around the problem.
The most effective copyright-protect technology is still the hardware dongle -- still found for exotic and expensive software (such as PCBoard Layout programs). This kind of protection easily defeats the software 'work-arounds' you propose; such software is marketed to engineers who can design a computer from scratch-- decompiling and breaking software locks is a piece of cake. So is monitoring the input/output from the port which the dongle is attatched. But breaking the hardware lock is a far, far more difficult thing to do-- so much so that nobody bothers trying.
I'd also like to add that just because it has an x86 chip and an AGP/PCI bus, it by no means equates to being 'x86' compatible. 'x86' compatible hardware still has an ISA bus inside (even if it is wholly contained in the chipset). An apple-built x86 can easily use a different (and wholly incompatible) interrupt structure than a PC uses. A PC uses/or has the equivalent of two 8259 interrupt controllers, with one master, and the slave cascading its interrupts down. This provides 16 hardware interrupts, IRQ 0-15. These are hard-wired quite specifically; even if you did somehow software-map around them, it would be *dog slow* compared to 'real' hardware. There are plenty of other examples.
Apple can easily put an x86 chip in a motherboard, and still have an architecture so different from a PC that it's just not worth it to try to work around it in software. All an Apple/x86 would have to do is use a different interrupt controller, with say 32 interrupts, and suddenly a PC somehow hacked to run OS X would run poorly enough you would rather just buy the Apple hardware; requiring a 2:1 mapping for each interrupt, many of which cannot be remapped - so some interrupts will have a 1:1 relationship, while others have a 10:1 mapping. Then things get *really ugly* inside the kernel. Apple can change the addressing model used for the system busses and components; it would work fine on Apple hardware, but requires even more costly re-maps to make it work on a generic PC.
Ever run a virtualization suite such as VirtualPC? VirtualPC is very, very slow compared to pure hardware. (I say VirtualPC instead of VMware because VMware doesn't do as much re-mapping as VirtualPC, which is one of the reasons why there is no VMware for PPC hardware; but even VMware is dog slow, taking 3-4 minutes to boot WinXP when a 'real' boot of WinXP takes 30 seconds.)
Meaning that while it may be possible to work around it, that doesn't mean that it would be worth it.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Plugging things in is annoying. I've got a palm pilot cradle, a UPS, and a null modem adapter for network switch testing / configuration all trying to share 2 serial ports. It's not always a pretty picture.
Wireless connectivity is a power drain, and there's no point if you have to plug the device in to charge. The only reasonable way to do this would be the combination wireless power / wireless connectivity I mentioned earlier. Apple is the only company with sufficient control of their sandbox to implement something like this, IMHO.
Bluetooth doesn't have to be fast; it only has to be simple. The iPod should retain the firewire connection it has now for sites w/o the charger/sync mat and for bulk data transfers. Bluetooth would be used for maintenance - that is, add a new CD or two to iTunes, and the next morning it shows up on your iPod. Even at 100K/sec (less than 20% Bluetooth's spec'd speed, IIRC), it would be trivial to keep up with 10-20% of the iPod's inventory changing every day.
We've gotten to the point where the vast majority of consumer electronics have all the power they need. Hopefully the end of that race will herald the begining of a race in terms of usability. People I know with cellphones tend to claim that sticking them in a charger every night isn't an imposition, but these are the same people whose phones die because they forgot to. If it were as simple as "empty your pockets on this table here" and all your gadgets would do the Right Thing(TM), I really think people would come running. I have better things to remember than backing up my laptop, syncing my palm pilot, moving new music onto an iPod, etc. If I'm not going to do it, then a computer has to, and wireless is the only way to accomplish that. The technology exists already; it's just waiting for someone to put it all together into an attractive package with the software to back it up and to sell enough to make it cheap. It's either Apple or Sony, and Sony's busy.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
You're right - enough stuff could be changed on Apple-brand motherboards to make it not-very-useful to get OS X running on "standard" hardware. However, short of a hardware lock, I still content some deranged individual would make it happen, solely for the hack value.
But I'd also say that Apple moving OS X to x86 boxes would signal the end of Apple-as-a-hardware company - which I mean from a corporate, strategic sense, as in Steve Jobs saying "we're getting out of the hardware business" Which would mean they wouldn't be designing their own motherboards. Which means this wouldn't be an issue. Of course, I also think that'd be a remarkably dumb thing for Apple to do.
Just as an aside - home brewed kernels are possible - despite your associates having failures. I'm thinking in particular of the instructions for getting OS X to boot on non-Apple supported machines using home-brewed kernels (still Apple boxes, of course).
Thanks - I learned something from your explanations.
It's Ogg, not OGG!
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
wouldn't be too shabby as a quick way to synch contacts/calendars/etc. Then again, since you've got to plug it in to charge it anyway...
Triv
(1) Get involved with something radical
(1a) Stock value decreases
(2) Deny involvment
(2a) Stock value decreases
(3) Accept involvment
(3a) Stock value decreases
(4) ???
(4a) Stock value decreases
(5) Profit!
(5a) Stock value decreases
You mean like this?
Why let the album or two sync over night wireless, when you can push in just a seconds over firewire. The ipod is good for ten hours or less. So when you get up next morning it is drained. And if you use a powercord to charge it over nigh, why not just plug it in the laptop/desktop to charge. I understand and agree with the wireless update of addressboks, and calendar. It would be nice to just leave the ipod in you backpack and it sync without any action from you. But this probably cost a lot, and it would not sell any more ipods.