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Palm Pre To Sync Seamlessly With iTunes
Wired is reporting that Palm's new handheld device, the Pre, will be able to sync automagically with Apple's iTunes. Thanks to a team of ex-Apple engineers the Pre will sync everything but iPhone applications and some of the older Fairplay DRM music. "It does it by faking out iTunes, making the jukebox software think that it is connected to a real iPod. Hook it up and you'll be given three options: USB mass storage device, charging only or iTunes sync. This is a ballsy move from Palm, and we totally love it: a big fat middle finger at Apple. Apple will, we are sure, be readying its legal attack dogs as I write, and don't be at all surprised if an iTunes update pops up around June 6th. This fight just got a lot more interesting."
Honestly, who bases a whole product line on a "faking out" feature.
I'm no fan of DRM, and wish iTunes was more open to other devices, but to publish a whole iPhone "killer" on a kludge is just asking for trouble.
WTF are consumers going to do when Apple pushes an update that breaks this (intentionally, or not) and all of a sudden this marvelous sync stops working?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Am I the only person on earth that sees this as a direct affront to a free market system?!
I do not think that term means what you think it means: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
iTunes currently supports about 20 non-iPod devices
The big deal is that it seems as if Apple decides what gets supported and what doesn't. It should be built so that any device maker can choose whether or not to build an adapter so that their hardware can interface with iTunes? Where does this leave iRiver, Archos, Sandisk, Microsoft, Centon, Nextar, etc?
Apple decides who lives and who dies. That's the big deal.
My work here is dung.
I was with you up until the DRM part. The iTunes store is almost entirely DRM-free by now.
If you don't like AAC either, Amazon.com sells MP3 downloads that are cheaper than iTunes downloads, and has about the same selection. iTunes was once a monopoly, although Apple's DRM practices ironically ended that rather quickly.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I guess you're entitled to view them as monopolists, but that doesn't mean that view accords with real world legal definitions. There are other sources for digital content online, and there are other players - Apple has a big chunk of the market, but by no means do they have total control - facts you note at the end of your post. Also, let's not forget that a big chunk of the pricing of content is driven by the deals the content providers are willing to cut with Apple - remember the recent change to a tiered pricing scheme from the $.99 for all music.
How is Apple a monopoly, if we understand the term monopoly to mean something other than "a company you don't like/does things that displease you?"
Meh. Lock-in across product lines is older than dirt. Its practice doesn't make a company "monopolistic" (though its practice by a monopoly can sometimes be illegal, which may be why you associate the two things).
Anyway, you appear to be wishing for legal action based on how much you like each company's actions rather than on any legal facts; which means you're also not looking at an accurate picture of the costs and outcomes if legal action does occur.
I won't speculate on the issues that would matter in a court case (such as whether any trade secrets were utilized by the ex-Apple engineers that allegedly made this work), but I will say that without knowing the details of those issues, I wouldn't be begging anyone to start casting legal stones.
Is this a problem with the driver, sync app, or OS? Honestly, I would wonder why my OS couldn't protect itself from something going on with USB.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Not a huge deal, considering Apple doesn't sell AAC Protected songs anymore.
The Pre is pretending to be an iPod in order to sync. Whilst killing monopolies is great, I'm fairly sure that imitating the iPod crosses a legal line somewhere (presumably reverse engineering employed in order to respond to iTunes' requests etc.) and that Apple have every right to sue.
The DMCA is the regulation that makes breaking DRM-based vendor lock-in illegal, regardless of other legal issues. Perhaps you don't understand what you linked to.
I'm so damn tired of reading about the Palm Pre. It's everywhere, and it's annoying.
I wish I had mod points because this is a smart response. I hate it when people use the word "monopoly" as a synonym for "I don't like them." If there's a real reason not to like Apple--even a bad one, like, "I always prefer the underdog," is better than none--then use it. Don't just call it a monopoly.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Perhaps you don't understand what he linked to. Let me reproduce the very first sentence again.
"A free market is a theoretical term that economists use to describe a market which is free from government intervention (i.e. no regulation, no subsidization, no single monetary system and no governmental monopolies)."
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Hardware manufacturers can write a driver so their junk interface with iTunes. Nomads and RIOs work with iTunes.
Palm Pre syncs with iTunes? Big deal. The real story (or "fuck you") is that they're using webkit.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Let's see...
They have the lion's share of the player market.
They have the lion's share of the online media market.
They place artificial compatability barriers excluding others from their media market and players.
The whole reason that music went DRM free is because the
actual producers/distributors of the music realized just
how much power they had handed Apple.
The DMCA gives Apple a nice club that they can beat anyone
over the head with should they dare to reverse engineer
enough information to get an iTunes movie onto the player
of their choice or get an iTunes song onto the OS of their
choice.
The labels have started to route around the problem but that
is still a work in progress.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You mean the same negotiating power that introduced "variable pricing", which meant that "pretty much any vaguely popular or contemporary song" immediately jumped 30% in price, from 99c to $1.29, whilst Apple fanboys tried to spin it as "well, most tracks are going to go DOWN to 69c!", where "most tracks" was a synonym for "obscure low selling acts that you're lucky to have heard of, let alone desire to purchase" (seriously, did anyone but the most deranged Apple fan honestly believe that Apple and the record labels were going to voluntarily offer up a 30% reduction in revenue?)?
Who won out of that? Apple got a nice kick, and so did the labels. You and I didn't.
I'm not exactly sure why you're trumpeting that as a testament to "Apple's negotiating power", but okay...
Caveat emptor.
They were on the verge because PalmOS is crap and Palm Desktop is steaming crap, and they both look rosey compared to palm's technical support.
I just threw away my T2 and got a touch, and love it. From repeated bad experiences of my own and almost everyone I know with palm, I hope apple reams them good, give them a twist for me while you're at it.
Too little, too late, palm.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Amarok 1.4 works with every other MP3 player I've tried it with ... so I don't see why not.
I'd much rather use Amarok than iTunes.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Why is this fraud? It should be fraudulent to block other players from accessing my software.
Its really incredible how people instinctively side with bad corporate policies. How about my rights as a consumer? How about the right to tinker? How about educating people about Apple's horrible policies?
I see nothing wrong with this. I hope its a wake up call to the industry and I hope it shows all the apple fanboys whats wrong with their favorite company.
Reverse engineering is perfectly legal for interoperability, if you don't copy the implementation code. My friend's company legally clean-room reverse engineered all of CIFS, so their proprietary boxes can act as a stand-in for Windows.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Wasn't that all to do with the music industry refusing to let Apple sell DRM free music? As opposed to "Apple's DRM practices".
So a market is "free" so long as the monopolies aren't "governmental".
A monopoly is "governmental" if the monopolist uses the power of the state to maintain it, even if the monopolist is a business in the private sector. The DMCA anti-circumvention powers, like the other powers granted to copyright owners, are a government-granted monopoly. What monopolistic business methods were you thinking of that don't involve the power of the state?
Yes, but RTA - the guys working on the project are ex-Apple employees. Dodgy much?
Very possibly. Apple's people internally have been crying foul about this stuff, and they've been whining about their talent drain following Jon Rubenstein over to Palm for awhile now. It seems a lot of the guys who were inside at Apple during their big turnaround put their loyalties with Rubenstein rather than Jobs or the other corporate types that are really running Apple these days. Apple did the same thing a few years ago when they stripped Palmsource of all the developers they could find to make the iPhone, and had been pulling away top guys from Palm even before that when they were creating the iPod.
Is anyone really surprised that Apple's gone evil? Listen to the rhetoric. Apple, with every passing day, has been acting more and more hardline and closed to competition than even Microsoft. Apple fanboys are sounding off the same soundbites that the Microsoft guys did years ago about Linux.
The truth is that Apple doesn't want just anyone buying music from their near monopoly on pay music downloads(which, coincedentally, was helped to become a monopoly by Bono of U2, who also just so happens to be a member of Elevation Partners, one of the major shareholders in Palm). They only want the "approved" companies that swear not to actually compete with them to work with their stuff. This is the type of thinking that sent Apple down the tubes back in the late 80's/early 90's.
Lock-in has nothing to do with a monopoly. It's their player, they can do whatever they want with it. Buy a different player.
Of course it does. Having a monopoly is legal. Abusing a monopoly to create lock-in is the illegal part.
... aren't they? Not really.
In fact, these - non-iPod - devices seem to have been out of production for nearly a decade now.
I seem to recall that some of the mentioned players were current (and indeed, supported by iTunes 1.2 or so) in the days of Mac OS 9, circa 1999 or 2000, like the Nomad series by Creative and the Rio series by sonicBlue.
That was the first real battle that Apple lost against the RIAA. Apple threatened to stop selling if the pricing went over 99 cents, but that bluff was called.
Wow, and you want more proof that Apple has a monopoly? [/sarcasm]
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck