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Apple Intros 17" Unibody MBP, DRM-Free iTunes
Phil Schiller delivered the keynote at MacWorld, the first after the Steve Jobs era of keynotes. Here is Engadget's live blog. The big news, predicted by many rumor sites, was the introduction of the unibody 17" MacBook Pro. As rumored, the battery is not removable, but it's claimed to provide 8 hours of battery life (7 hours with the discrete graphics): "3x the charges and lifespan of the industry standard." $2,799, 2.66 GHz and 4 GB of RAM, 320GB hard drive, shipping at the end of January. There is a battery exchange program, and there is an option for a matte display. The other big news is that iTunes is going DRM-free: 8M songs today, all 10+M by the end of March. Song pricing will be flexible, as the studios have been demanding; the lowest song price is $0.69. Apple also introduced the beta of a Google Docs-like service, iWork.com.
Two semi-glaring points:
-What about TV show and movie purchases? What level of DRM can be expected there (I don't know level of DRM applies now, so feel free to call me a clod who's talking out of an orifice other than stdout ). The verbiage seems to very carefully mention "songs" only, no other iTunes available media.
-What about my current iTunes song library? Will the DRM magically disappear with my next update? Do I need to download my library again, (and thereby lose the totally pointless play count next to my songs? What will I do? That's how I keep score damnit!)
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
No, docks are so you don't HAVE to waste time plugging and unplugging your monitor, keyboard, mouse, external speakers, USB/Firewire devices, Etc. Just slap down (or slide in) the laptop and fire it up. Business-class laptops have had and still have this feature. For some reason home PC users and Mac users don't get that option.
I have yet to hear a logical reason why beyond "well, you can just manually plug them in." Which isn't a good reason because it doesn't address the inevitable wear and tear (and breakage) on a port that constant removal and reattachment of connectors causes.
Heck, this is why Apple swapped to the magnetic power plug! Why are the rest of the connections less important?
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
That's about what I'd expect. Karaoke songs, cover bands, independent bar bands, etc, will all probably have their stuff at $0.69. There's no shortage of that stuff on iTunes. The really old (but still not major) mainstream songs will likely be $0.99.
Everything with a bit of popularity and all the new released I'll bet will be $1.29.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
"ignoring the problem entirely since macs don't really "do" games"
Unfortunately, I do games. So do a lot of other Mac users. Recently with the World of Warcraft expansion a lot of Mac users had to turn down their graphic levels to play the game acceptably. This is on fairly recent machines such as the previous generation Macbook Pros and iMacs. Sadly there is no upgrade path aside from getting a new Mac. I guess ultimately that benefits Apple.
I switched back to using my 2 year old PC because the performance was better with a more powerful video card.
Sometimes my arms bend back.