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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.
I was really hoping to see an updated Mac Mini.
--- Tao
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.
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.
Sorry this is an Apple article. Apple not only gives the consumers what they want but the list of what they are supposed to be wanting in the first place.
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.
Of course they could do a removable battery. The point they made in the keynote was that a removable battery takes up a bunch of space. By making the battery non-removable, they gained 40% more room for a bigger, longer-lasting battery. The design trade off here was removable battery for more battery life. The market will decide whether that was a good trade.
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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 it makes the laptop smaller and lighter, some poeple (myself included) happily will give up a replaceable battery.
Thinking back over the last 15 years for the seven or eight laptops I've owned (two Mac, the rest various brands of Linux/Windows laptops) I've bought a new battery I believe twice, both as replacements not secondary batteries.
I've never carried two at a time so I could swap one when it was dead.
Apple isn't a stupid company. They wouldn't make that change if they didn't believe that loud-mouth-whiners-aside, it would impact sales in the least.
Case in point -- they dropped Firewire from the MacBook. That means you can't use your family's DV or HDV camcorder anymore with a MacBook to use the new iMovie to edit your videos... and yet sales took off of the new laptop. That feature excluded that laptop from my consideration, but the fact that I don't like it doesn't mean it wasn't the right decision for them.
Just because you don't like a fixed battery doesn't mean "people want it" or it was a bad decision.
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!
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.
Well, it depends how much volume you use having to create a bay for the battery, with walls to cut it off from internal components, then a way to hold the battery in, so tabs on one side and a mechanism on the other to latch it in (or some other metod to hold it in there), then a study connection point for the terminals inside this bay.
Now you have to engineer your removable battery to be more sturdy than an internal one only (since it has to be able to easily survive in a computer bag, or through repeated handling that an internal-only battery doesn't have to be so concerned with, since it has the external case to protect it and is not subject to removal and handling as often.
Also now, you can create a very oddly-shaped battery to fill awkward spaces that would otherwise be wasted if you had to use a more conventional shape that is easy to remove (and more difficult to damage).
So all together you have a battery that has a) less duplicated protective casing (battery itself and battery bay in laptop), b) capable of being moulded into odd shape to take advantage of extra space, c), no need for latches and other components to hold the battery in and enable it to interface with the DC board (you can just have it fixed inside the case with a smaller system, and just have a couple of flying leads and a simple IC plug to mate it to your power system - no need for quick release terminals.
As soon as these things go on sale you know someone is going to take it apart and see what they've done inside the case. 28% more volume doesn't sound outlandish when you can dispense with a lot of the compromises you have to make when the computer itself has to be designed around the battery being removable - the battery might be really thin and sandwiched very intricately around all the components, which have now been able to spread out a little since there's no defined battery bay any more.
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.
You should look at the x-ray images they showed. You do indeed lose even more that 30% of your space. And this is pretty obvious too since the fill factor for cyllinders is on that order. They went to flat pack batteries.
So they not only made the battery last longer but it also is thinner.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
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.