Slashdot Mirror
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.
I was really hoping to see an updated Mac Mini.
--- Tao
Tiered Pricing.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
3x the charges and lifespan of the industry standard
This is a completely unfalsifiable statement. A Mac user wouldn't be caught dead with this model once the new 17.1" Macbook Pro comes out in six months. No one really knows how long any Apple product "could" last.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Come on, it isn't that hard to make a user removeable battery. Just do it -- people want it. It is a freaking laptop!
I'm glad to see Apple stepping away from a massive release of new products every January. While it was exciting from a geek perspective, it was awfully timed. Introducing a slate of cool new gadgets just after Christmas was a marketing nightmare for Apple - hundreds of thousands of new iPod owners would be upset to learn that their new player was suddenly "last year's model," and many other Apple enthusiasts would simply put off their purchases until after the Christmas season in anticipation of "one more thing" in January. That can't have been good news for retailers who ramp up inventory in the months leading up to xmas. Now, Apple has more control over their release cycle. They can keep their products under wrap until they're ready to unveil them to the world, and can stagger releases for maximum coverage.
If people hadn't wined, would they still have done it?
An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.
Yeah... but those people who claimed $0.99 was too expensive and songs shouldn't cost more than $0.70 will need a new excuse.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Should have better video then 9600m for a $2700+ system come on other laptops have SLI at that price.
And $1200 to go from 4gb to 8gb?
I hope apple has a big Superbowl ad to show off the other new hardware.
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.
" simply cannot fathom why Apple keeps making these things without a number pad. "
Probably because the number pad prevents the QWERTY keyboard from being centered.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
You can upgrade, but apparently not for free. At least I couldn't yet. Not everything I've bought from there wasn't listed as eligible yet however. So it might not be completely implemented yet.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
Still, it's a step in the right direction, and I applaud the people over at Amazon (and everyone else selling music without DRM) for doing it first. Without that step, I'm willing to bet that Apple would have stayed with DRM on their music catalog. It looks like part of Defective By Design's Anti-DRM wishlist came true.
That said, Apple is also now charging if you want to get rid of your DRM (which means upgrading to 256 kbps tracks). From Apple.com:
Yes, just $0.30 per song to get rid of the crap that we forced on you in the first place. Awful.
In other news, I was getting my updates from MacRumorsLive.com, when their feed was cracked by 4Chan. The site crashed half-way through the keynote. Here are some screen caps for anyone interested:
http://www.realfx.com/images/macrumorslive_pwned.jpg
http://www.realfx.com/images/macrumorslive_pwned2.jpg
http://www.realfx.com/images/macrumorslive_pwned3.jpg
The press release at http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/01/06itunes.html claims "... in April, based on what the music labels charge Apple, songs on iTunes will be available at one of three price points--69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29--with many more songs priced at 69 cents than $1.29."
This would seem to indicate that the average price should fall, and that there will be no $2.50 tracks.
Well, with all Apple computers...it is best to buy them with minimal RAM, and put it in yourself from 3rd party purchase. Apple has pretty much always been a rip off when having them to upgrade the ram.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
This article says you can do so for a fee http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1711 but when I tried for my two purchased albums, it did not work crapping out with some "product has changed" error message. It reportedly worked back when they first introduced DRM-free tracks, so maybe it is a temporary problem as things get retooled.
One is that you do save some space by integrating the battery. There is a non trivial amount of extra material for making it removable since it had to be in it's own enclosure and such. So one could claim that is was done to either decrease size, or to increase capacity (by having larger cells).
The other is that this makes the device much more disposable. Apple is in the hardware market, they make their money on buying new gadgets. It would be best for them if people viewed the gadgets as disposable and simply tossed them after a few years.
It is extremely important that Slashdot apprise us of every new product coming from Apple Corporation, in near-realtime fashion.
Please slashdot, tell us more about Steve Jobs' health, Apple Corporation mythology, and Mac purchasing opportunities!
Usually I'd agree with you but this news about DRM is pretty important because it completely changes the dynamic of the music industry in relation to the Internet considering iTunes recently surpassed Walmart in music sales. That is clearly stuff that matters and if you can't see that you're geek license should be revoked on your way out.
32G? Isn't last year's 3G-compatible iPhone good enough?
The CB App. What's your 20?
If you want to upgrade your old purchases to DRM-free status, though, you can pay the "upgrade" price.
I bought three albums on iTunes this past weekend. At least one of them is DRM-laden. Colour me unimpressed, but I'm not really surprised. I don't have rose-coloured glasses on when it comes to Apple. I sometimes use iTunes when it's 3:00 a.m. and I'm hankering for new music. I fire up the Bands Under the Radar podcast and poke around until something catches my fancy. They made it convenient, so I put up with the conversion process to other drm-free formats.
"It's also easy to upgrade your iTunes library to iTunes Plus. You don't have to buy the song or album again. Just pay the 30 per song upgrade price. (Music video upgrades are 60 and entire albums can be upgraded for 30 percent of the album price.)"
Meh, who cares? This isn't about Apple or Amazon. This is about the labels being dragged, kicking and screaming though they are, into the 21st century.
This was a fairly nice development. Let's not cloud it with pointless conspiracies.
BTW, Apple, by definition, can't "sell out". Thanks for playing though.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
That said, the opposite happens too; HP's stock shot up by billions the day Fiorina departed. So when my dad said, "Jobs proves CEOs are worth their pay," I had to disagree. You can't generalize like that.
They're ditching DRM. That's pro-consumer. What you're saying is that they are going to have to charge what the studios want to charge (ie, more). That's not anti-consumer enough to balance out the goodness factor of allowing people to actually play the music they buy on any device they own (which has kept me from using ITMS thus far).
I'm sorry you don't like higher prices. But you finally own what you buy. If you're still concerned about ITMS's prices, you really shouldn't have been using them in the first place as they've always been outrageously expensive.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Sold out? By offering tiered pricing? Really?
In the real world, everything has different prices depending on demand. The "Everything should be 99c" thing may simplify things, but it's hardly fair, either to the labels or to us. Apple was trying to force both the record labels and customers to do something completely ridiculous in the name of simplicity, and consider "The Birdie Song" to have the same value as "Bohemian Rhapsody".
I appreciate like most of Slashdot you have a hate-on for the labels, and therefore consider anything the labels want to do as wrong, but Apple was on the wrong side here.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Maybe, maybe not. Do you think the labels would want DRM-free music? Doubtful. My guess is that amazon only got the deal they did without DRM because Apple was doing so well and wouldn't play ball on the tiered pricing. What if the labels only could concede DRM-free music if Apple gave in on the tiered pricing? It's not an unequivocal victory but if I had to choose I'd much rather have tiered pricing and DRM-free music than DRM-ed music and non-tiered pricing. Now if they'd just let me get the songs off my ipod using iTunes and not having to resort to third party software I'll be happy.
I haven't bought a single song from the iTunes music store because of DRM, I might actually consider it now.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Considering that recent stats. show that less than 10% of the full catalog make 90% of the sale volume, price those at 1.29, 70% at 0.99 and the remaining 20% at 0.69 just to show some goodwill, and everyone will pay an higher price.
You will pay more, unless you really are into those rather odd songs.. ;)
Because with Apple the AirPort Express is your "dock", as most of what you're asking for can already be done wirelessly. Plug your speakers and your printer into your Express, and you're good to go the second you set your notebook down.
Use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. No wires. Do Time Machine backups to Time Capsule. No wires. Actual, physical wires are so... '80s.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Sure the tracks are going DRM free, but will iTunes still prevent me from copying music from my iPod to a new iTunes library? It's incredibly annoying to me that any time I move PCs or operating systems that I can't easily move songs off of my iPod. The tracks may be DRM free all the way through, but it still exists if I can't move my library as I see fit.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Well for one, the battery compartment takes space. External shielding takes up space. Most of all, the battery has to be a certain shape to fit into and out of a laptop .
Take a look at any laptop battery. They can't be the footprint of the entire laptop because there would be no way to install it. They have to be brick shaped. By making the battery non-removable, the battery can be optimizied to take as much space internally as it needs. If you at the MacBook Air, you'd see that 2/3s of the internal space of the machine is battery. You can't do that with a removable battery.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
They stated it can be charged 1000 times. That means if you use your laptop every day you will need a new one in 2.7 years.
if you use it every day, including saturdays and sundays, FOR 8 HOURS A DAY, then in 2.7 years, the battery will be down to an 80% charge or 6.4 hours. Which is longer than your current 5 hour battery lasts.
I seriously doubt many users use a computer 7 days a week, soley on batteries for 8 hours a day!
finally you can replace the battery. There's just no simple pop-out mechanism. But unscrewing the case once in the life of a computer is not a big deal.
Additionally Apple care will cover the battery for 3 years-- that's not something you get on most warantee contracts.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
In the real world, everything has different prices depending on demand.
In the real world, products are both rivalrous and excludable. Downloaded music is neither.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
How does the fact that it is not removeable affect its shape by 40%?
Here's a hypothetical cross section:
Traditional Laptop:
Laptop Case - Battery Case - Battery Cells - Battery Case - Laptop Case
1mm + 1m + 3mm + 1mm + 1mm
MBP:
Latop Case - Battery Cells - Laptop Case
1mm + 3mm + 1mm
Overall thickness reduced by 2mm. The "Battery" part is reduced from 5mm to 3mm, saving 40%, by not having to give the battery a redundant plastic shell.
The only way I could see that happening is if the battery was the size of a watch battery. After all, all you need to do to make a battery removeable is install some contacts (which would have to exist in some form or another anyways) and a latch mechanism (which could be just a simple screw).
Not really a valid example. Comparing the can requirements of a 1 volt battery that delivers milliamps to a 10-14Volt 1-3amp battery. The much larger and more powerful battery needs more insulation and rigidity etc to prevent it from shorting out, catching fire, exploding, etc. In the MBP this is taken care of by the laptop case. In a removable battery, the battery has to have its own suitable enclosure.
Remember "40%" may seem like a lot, but we're talking about a laptop that's only a dozen mm thick. Removing a couple mm thickness from a single part is a BIG deal.
I just want to make the point that Bohemian Rhapsody should be free, considering it entered the moral public domain in 2003 (released in 1975, 28 year copyright term). It's high time our community codified our disdain for perpetual copyright by insisting on a moral public domain.
The Birdie Song (I had to look it up) was released in 1981, so we moral people should continue to pay for it (or better, not listen to it) until sometime later this year on the anniversary of the release date.
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
Most of the news reports are not getting the complete picture. Apple have posted a dedicated battery page that talks about it in more detail. Here's the paragraph that expands on the 1000 charge info:
So it's not 1000 recharges and then throw it away!
Queen, through talent and hard work, created Bohemian Rhapsody. "The public" did nothing to contribute to this, aside from existing, which I suspect they'd do whether Queen made music or not.
What the public did was allow Queen to have exclusive rights to the song for a finite amount if time. If Queen was so intent on limiting others' use of the song, they should have kept it to themselves. It's not like the monopoly granted by copyright is somehow the natural state of things. The public exchanged copyright protection of the work for unfettered access to the work one it started "getting old". Bohemian Rhapsody is now effectively a part of our culture and Queen was payed an enormous sum of money and fame in exchange for it.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.