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Apple's iPod Chip Supports WMA?
John writes "Chip manufacturer Portal Player in Santa Clara builds the embedded PP5002 chip in Apple's iPod (allowing the playing of AAC and MP3). It has emerged that the chip firmware, by default, allows the playing of WMA. However, for some reason this is locked by Apple."
Ya, I can't imagine why they'd like to prevent the proliferation of a competing company's formats. Very strange...
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
This is the same chip used by other MP3 players other than the iPod, which begs the question, why aren't more people supporting AAC on their players. >50% market share should be justification enough, nevermind the subjective debate of which format has higher quality.
In addition there is also a royalty involved. For WMA this is true but for AAC you pay only an upfront fee ($15000) but no royalties. That might be a reason not to support WMA by default in the iPod!?
This isn't as simple as Apple not flipping the iPod WMA bit just to flip off Microsoft,
although that's the implication in the article.
Well yeah, the chip supports it. but that's just a small part of the total system.
Apple would also have to integrate WMA into iTunes for Mac and Windows.
To really do it right, it might be added at a lower level into Mac OS X as well.
That now ties Apple into paying M$ royalties on iTunes and iPod, perhaps even
OS X, and having to continually disclose to M$ on the number of units sold and to who.
I think that Apple would want to avoid any further entanglements with M$ if they
can be avoided. They know well what happens when you dance with the devil.
Apple has probably suffered more from Microsoft's abusive practices than anyone.
And one more thing... Drop the constant whining about OGG. Please.
> It was indeed a bailout. It was termed so inside the tech world, and also in the "secular" business press at the time. Do you want
> some of the many many examples?
And it is well documented that one of the reasons that everybody thought it was a bailout was because nobody was allowed to mention the real reason that it happened. Which was because Apple discovered that MS had stolen the source code for QuickTime and inserted it whole-cloth into their competing product. Lawsuit, settlement, and large investment.
Of course, you've heard all of this before and chosen to ignore it all, so I'm sure I can't convince you of anything. But I worked at Apple for a while, and know a couple of the people who were involved in the trial.
Basically, Apple got some money when it needed it (although they did still have billions in cash and assets, the stock purchase definitely helped), and Microsoft got to look like a 'good company' at a time it needed it. A win-win settlement.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Coupla years ago, I helped write the microprocessor reference manuals for the PP5002C.
There's nothing WMA-specific about the chip. It's (as the above poster noted) basically two ARM7 cores, cache, and some I/O logic that makes it especially well-suited to low-power devices.
Portal Player did not design the PP5002C for the iPod; it is equally well at home playing AIFF, mp3, AAC, whatever - another WMA-compatible player could as easily use the PP5002 as a CPU - but an extremely capable little media CPU is all that it is - there's nothing WMA specific about the PP5002.