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Is Piracy the Pathway to Apple Profit?
An anonymous reader writes "Over at Apple Matters Chris Seibold writes an interesting piece hypothesizing that Apple's strategy may bank on people pirating OS X for their Intel boxes."
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Apple computer: Is Piracy the Pathway to Profits?
by Chris Seibold
Jun 13, 2005
If you remember the heady days of the first incarnation of Napster chances are you downloaded a song and later discarded the foul bit of pop. Chances are also pretty strong that you downloaded a song and ended up buying the compact disc from your local music store. For me the discarded song was Come on Eileen by Dexy's Midnight Runners. I am sure the music industry chalks that up to a lost CD sale, but honestly, there was no way I was ever going to buy any music by Dexy and his intrepid band of late night dashers. On the other and when I downloaded Devil's Haircut by Beck I went out and actually purchased the entire CD.
The above is a simplification of how piracy can actually move product. Chances are very good that without the illicit download one less copy of Odelay would have been sold. So, for no great investment on his part, Beck sold one more album that he normally would have thanks to being pirated. Software companies have understood this concept for quite some time. They will grudgingly put up with piracy if it sells more copies in the long or if it prevents a competitor from gaining a foothold. Say, for example, someone company produces a legitimate competitor to Adobe Photoshop. The new product feature all of the pixel manipulating goodness of Photoshop but retails for half the price. In basic economic theory the new product would soon displace Photoshop as the image editor of choice. In reality that is not necessarily the case. If Adobe Photoshop gets passed around on P2P sites there is no incentive for theft happy users to try the new competitor, both are stolen and to the end user stolen=free. Years later the one pirate removes the eye patch and becomes burdened with kids and full employment. Suddenly spending hours on the internet looking for registration codes and illegal copies no longer holds the same appeal, it has become easier and safer just to purchase a legitimate copy.
Which brings us to the question of Apple computer and piracy. You, as a reader of fine Apple oriented commentary, are no doubt aware of the recent announcement that Apple is switching to Intel. This has some interesting ramifications, one of the foremost is that you will now, in all probability, be able download a copy of OS X on a P2P site and run it on any plain vanilla Wintel box by employing some sort of hack. To many Apple fans this is a nightmare scenario. "Why" they wonder "would anyone ever buy another Mac if they can run OS X on a Wintel box?"
Before considering why people might still buy Macs even if they could hack a Wintel to do the job let us consider the benefits of OS X piracy. For years interested parties have heard people complain: "Macs are too expensive." At this moment most people are thinking about only of the retail price. This is a mistake, the cost of Macs to a fence sitting switcher encompasses much more than the price tag. To get in the world of Mac you have to be willing to take a massive leap of faith. You must be convinced that a Mac will serve all your computing needs admirably and you probably have to accept that as a truth without extensively using a Macintosh. It is also wise to remember that for most computer users it is an "either/or" decision, not many have the resources necessary to grab a Windows for safety and a Mac just to decide if it a suitable OS. Faced with a decision like that it is not hard to understand why people, time and time again, choose the OS with the greatest amount of familiarity. With rampant piracy suddenly this is not an issue. People can play with OS X on their Wintel box and make an informed decision when they make their next computer purchase. It is not hard to imagine that actually being able to use OS X for a significant period of time might result in more switchers than Apple's ads ever dreamed of producing.
Here one suspects Apple will face a careful balancing act. If hacking a PC to run OS X is triv
I wouldn't trust a .exe ;) .iso or .bin/.cue pair.
If it was real, it would be a
Not to be a stickler but Jobs said that the heart of the MAC (not Apple) is the operating system. That makes more sense too since the ipod makes up such a large chunk of the Apple revenue.
The original premise was that an x86 release for generic x86 hardware (non Apple firmware) was already released. This however turned out to be a hoax. I doubt Apple is trying to make a revolution giving an OS away.
iTunes worked with a large number of MP3 players before the iPod was even a seed of an idea, and it still does.
It is possible that you are confusing the fact that iPod only officially works with iTunes, but that doesn't mean the reverse is automatically true.
**** lying is wrong even for sleeping dogs
From Apple throws the switch, aligns with Intel (June 6):
However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac," he said.
And don't download them, you can find them on torrentspy and torrentreactor, the problem is that the >900MB one is a goatse.cx picture weighting 1GB once uncompressed and the other one, >600MB, is stuck at 13% for everyone, plus 600MB for MacOsX is dreaming wide awake, Tiger weights alot so don't expect it to be that small even compressed.
:)
What I mean is that all those article you read about osX being pirated are wishfull thinking, which is then used as a fun opportunity for malware writers.
If you want to create a buzz about osX on x86 this is the worst way, wait till you have actually found a working copy, personnaly found it, not being told about it and then talk about it. Right now those stories are pissing people off because all they get is a wide opened ass or an interminable wait... and I really don't understand how can this help Apple sell more MacOsX or create a buzz before releasing it. If you want this type of marketing to work don't spoil it before it happens because once the good copy is out there people will be very hesitant to get it... and the marketing tactic will fail, and we don't want that
Anything authoritative will be covered by NDA, and Apple will likely not release specs of the Developer Transition Kit, since it doesn't represent a shipping product anyway, and for various other reasons.
But the BIOS version has been posted around publicly on forums; also, note http://macintouch.com/macintel04.html:
MacInTouch Reader
In response to the BIOS statements, the Intel Developer Transition Platform is NOT a "PHOENIX BIOS". PHOENIX is a specific BIOS maker, and this is not a PHOENIX BIOS. It is an Intel BIOS.
Further, it's no mystery how to get into almost any BIOS under the sun: just hold F2 at boot (F2 and alt-enter cover the vast majority of PC BIOSes). However, this means little, since this is merely a developer testing and transition platform only; the developer systems also don't have FireWire 800, or Bluetooth, or AirPort.
Does that mean that final products won't have these? Of course not. The transition platform's BIOS also has floppy support. Does that mean that Intel Macs will have floppy drives? No. The point is that the developer platform does not represent what will - or won't - be in shipping products. To see what Apple will be shipping with Intel processors in a year or two (or longer), look to Intel's roadmap. To see what technologies Apple will include, look to Apple's history and the current products: shipping Intel-based Macs will have all of the Mac features and functionality we have come to depend on.
Further, Apple has not forgotten about the 64-bit marketplace. But let's take this transition one step at a time.
Not sure I can say the same for games, but when an app is something you can make a living off of, 'piracy' does have a way of making it necessity.
At the college where I once taught, piracy of the types of apps that you've described (e.g. Maya, Softimage, Lightwave, etc.) was rampant. However, most of the IT and teaching staff recognized that this would go on and, generally, turned a blind eye to it.
We understood that many of the students could not afford to buy these apps, even with substantial educational discounts. Therefore, piracy was perhaps the only way to access these apps outside of class or lab times. Much of the piracy may have been instigated by the fact that the majority of our students were using a different OS than the one that we used in our labs (we used Macs exclusively).
Eventually, though, most of the students did end up buying legitimate copies of the apps once they had graduated and begun to earn a living in the graphics and video fields.
I honestly don't think these would be around if not for piracy. At least some companies understand the value of giving something a worthwhile long-term test drive.
One of the companies that didn't seem to understand the value of a "test drive" was Macromedia. This was exemplified by their practice of releasing two versions of an app; the commercial version and the academic version. For example, the academic version of Director had all of the features of the commercial version, but at a huge discount. Sounded great at first, but what none of the students who were sucked into buying the academic version realized (because they hadn't read the EULA in which Macromedia states that the academic version cannot be used for comemrcial purposes) was that their finished products would display non-removeable splash screens that declared "Created with the academic/non-commercial version of Director". The students then found that upgrading to the commercial version would cost $799 CDN. Considering that they'd already spent $649 CDN for the academic version, they ended up spending almost the same amount as if they'd just shelled out for the commercial version ($1499 CDN) in the first place.
Then, to add insult to injury, many of the students noted that prospective employers were not impressed when shown presentations created by the academic version due to the aforementioned academic/non-commercial usage splash.
So, I suppose that the point of the foregoing screed is that some companies occasionally burden their apps with cumbersome EULA provisions that sometimes prompts people to pirate them. This is not the right thing to do, of course, but I can see why it happens.