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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!
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.
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 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...
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.
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
Posting an announcement of an announcement about an up comming announcement.
;-)
"This just in! More news will come in later, story at 11"
No, Apple is going with AAC. I think slashdotters tend to overestimiate the importance of OGG. Like "if only Apple would add OGG support to their iPod they'd sell a million more of them! Shooting themselves in the foot again. WTF is their problem??" Reality: if they did go to the trouble and expense nobody* would notice.
* Well not "nobody" exactly. About 27 people on slashdot would notice, but only after arguing viciously for months about whether or not Apple implimented it correctly, after which approximately 2 of those 27 would actually purchase an iPod.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
If there's any merit to the Universal rumor, then even the announcement of the press event is news. Remember, the LA Times said that if Apple was going through with the purchase it would be done before the April 29 Vivendi-Universal stockholders meeting.
Put all the naysaying aside: an IT corporation in charge of one the largest record group? In eight days time, our view of the RIAA and its view of the DMCA could be 180 degrees different than it is right now.
That deserves a Slashdot story.
It's worth mentioning that unless the MP3/whatever decoder is in the headphones, bluetooth won't work. It doesn't have the bandwidth for uncompressed CD-quality audio (44.1khz/16 bit/2 channel). IIRC, it tops out at a theoretical limit of 700kbps.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
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.
(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.
The only reason I hold any hope of Apple adding Ogg support to iPod is that it's free (as in both). There's 32MB of EPROM (or Flash?) on every iPod specifically intended for firmware updates. Plenty of room for AAC, Ogg, and the next dozen codecs to come.
THAT would be music to my ears.
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.
- 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.understating the importance of open standards when it comes to something as ubiquitous as digital music, is a mistake.
Ogg support isn't important in terms of customer demand, that's all I'm saying. Add it, don't add it, almost nobody will care or even notice. I am not saying that standard formats aren't important from a "general benefit to the consumer/public" perspective.
And, BTW, in what way is it more open than AAC? Specifically? MPEG4 is, after all, a real standard. What am I missing?
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?