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Update — No DRM In New iPod Shuffle
An anonymous reader writes "BoingBoing Gadgets has updated their story from yesterday on DRM contained in the new iPod Shuffle. (We also discussed this rumor last week.) It's a false alarm. There is a chip in the headphone controls but it is just an encoder chip. There is no DRM and no reason to believe that third party headphones wouldn't work with the new Shuffle. (Apple would still prefer you to license the encoder under the Made for iPod program, but with no DRM, there is no DMCA risk to a manufacturer reverse engineering it.) The money quote: 'For the record, we do not believe that the new iPod headphones with in-line remote use DRM that affects audio playback in any way.'"
* Mobile phones & Ipods (make sure user can't run Apps which haven't paid the Apple tax)
* In their O/S (Check it's installed on correct hardware)
* ITMS (video)
* Video out of Iphone (make sure you can't use third party docks to watch ipod/iphone vids on your TV.
So frankly, DRM on Apple products was not surprising - it was a natural assumption to make.
Is the real story.
/. for lying, and then a second time for admitting they lied.
What disappoints me is that Boing Boing get on the front page of
The real story is Boing Boing is an unreliable site: who'd have thought that on the interwebs there would be dishonest sites *shock* *horror*!
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
So are all those sites that posted rumors going to retract? iLounge, Consumerist, Engadget, Gizmodo, etc. The only honest source during this whole controversy was boingboing, who said that they are not electrical engineers and can't be sure of what it does.
If a company wants to make an MP3 player with buttons on the headphone cable, instead of on the device, why is that evil?
Why is everyone going mental? So you can't use the headphones you already have, so what? Just buy a different MP3 player!
Lots of people don't care much what headphones they have, they just wanna listen to music while exercising, and they want a small light device to do that. By the end of the month there will even be a handful of other headphones to choose from.
There's no standard way to control a device from a standard headphone jack, and you'll be buried in lawsuits if you do it the same as someone else is doing it, so a new approach had to be made. Why is this such a big deal? We're stifling innovation by making a scene over stuff like this.
This is no place for sensible discussion! (I kid. Mostly.)
The point was brought up several times by several people, myself included, in the last discussion. (Interestingly enough, many of those posts got modded up and down about a dozen times each.) It's a lock in, and only partially - you need an adapter or specially manufactured headphones, but there's nothing to stop reverse engineering, or from using unlicensed headphones/adapters.
On a side note, I wonder if the EFF is going to retract their statement, or issue some sort of apology...
It would be rights management on a digital device. But more to the point, DRM has become a catch-all term for any form of vendor lock-in, specifically lock-in which when avoided is punishable by the DMCA.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
What I mean is the standard 3.5mm jack is simple, and works brilliantly for it's intended role. So why mess with it?
"Made for 3rd generation iPod shuffle" is fairly simple, but 99% of people would have no idea what generation their iclod is (/. crowd aside).
"Plug these in, hear music" is even more simple, and how it should be.
- There is no point, it's like a sphere -
What I mean is the standard 3.5mm jack is simple, and works brilliantly for it's intended role. So why mess with it?
I guess that would be because 3.5mm jacks don't carry remote control signals. Really this whole argument is a joke â" we're complaining at apple because they put a remote interface on their headphones, something that other companies have been doing since god knows when. Not only that, but apple have a good history of allowing 3rd parties to see those specs and get verified as producing a decent quality remote that actually does the right thing.
When was the last time you saw a third party remote for a random mp3 player? If you did by some chance, when was the last time you saw one that didn't go through the exact same process as apple are using here?
My Creative Muvo MP3 player came with a pair standard ear-buds. They were too big for my ears, though, so I replaced them with another pair of standard ear-buds, with no loss in functionality of anything.
This is the same player that uses a standard AAA battery.
But then, I went shopping for something that worked, rather than something popular.
Oh grow up fanboy. They linked to someone elses story, with caveats.
Oh pull your head out. The Boing Boing headline
Remember that old saw about how "a lie travels around the world before the truth has a chance to put it's shoes on"? The original liar obviously deserves most of the blame, but that doesn't absolve everyone who spread the lie of responsibility.
I think it's perfectly valid to complain about that, since the design of the new shuffle is so stupid -- WTF is the point of having separate controls, when the separate controls are almost as big as the damn player itself?! The second-gen Shuffle was a much better design.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You forget the target market for the Shuffle, people who want a ludicrously tiny player -- for whom the nano is excessively large... They like to work out while their player is clipped some random place, and they don't want to go looking for the buttons if they want to change tracks or whatever. The corded controls make a lot of sense for this segment -- buttons on the unit as well would probably have been way to tiny to use, most likely. Really what they should have done was just put inline remote support in a chassis like they had, but they were obviously feeling some pressure from somewhere to make it tinier.