To correct your analogy, what happened to the Amazon customer in question is that he streaked Home Depot and they banned him from visiting the store in the future. They didn't repossess his lawn mower.
In other words, his Kindle works fine - it's just that if he deletes the ebooks he already has he loses them (if he takes a crow bar to his lawn mower, he can't get a new one from Home Depot).
Ah, but Amazon didn't revoke anything they had already sold. He was free to continue using ebooks he had already downloaded. He wasn't promised the ability to continue to buy *new* ebooks except under the condition that he continues to abide by their Terms of Service - he broke their terms of service, and they terminated his account. This should surprise no one.
In other words, you're claiming my hypothetical brick-and-mortar bookstore customer loses access to the books still on his shelf at home just because he was banned from buying from my store. That's ridiculous.
You're not the first person to misrepresent the situation.
If you buy the ebook, you have access to that ebook as long as you keep it on your Kindle, whether or not you have access to your Amazon.com customer account. The situation changes if you delete it and then your account gets disabled, but that shouldn't be surprising. Furthermore, the term "rent" does not apply when dealing with computer files, because "rent" implies the paid use of an item that must be returned.
It's not a rental, in any sense. As long as either a) your account is active, or b) you don't delete the eBook, you will be able to read it.
An active Amazon.com account is not necessary to use already-downloaded Kindle ebooks, and having your Amazon.com account disabled does not erase your already-downloaded Kindle ebooks.
You're misrepresenting the situation here. The customer in question did not lose access to books he had already downloaded; anything on his Kindle when the account was suspended stayed there. He simply lost the ability to purchase new books, and his subscriptions were canceled. He misused a service (his Amazon account), and that service was terminated - again, his Kindle was not affected except that it could no longer purchase new books on that account.
What happened to this customer has nothing to do with DRM, no matter how you stretch it. This story's title is almost deliberately misleading, and doesn't reflect the content of the article. The customer himself calls his Kindle a "brick", but given his own descriptions it's obvious that he is misusing the term.
To be fair, I'm sure the Terms of Service mentioned something about misuse of the service resulting in account termination. Really, why should we be angry at Amazon for terminating a service he was probably misusing?
If I were running a brick-and-mortar bookstore, and one particular customer constantly bought books and returned them a few days later (perhaps having obviously read them), I'd start refusing service to that customer. Would anyone be complaining about my decision?
The only difference here is that Amazon suspended an account in place of refusing service in a physical store. They did not take away books he already had downloaded; they did not brick or otherwise disable his Kindle; they simply disabled his account and canceled his subscriptions. The story title is quite misleading - his Kindle did not "die" in any sense as a result of his account suspension. I'm sure he could even tie the Kindle to another Amazon account and continue purchasing books that way.
I maintain there is little difference between what Amazon did and my brick-and-mortar bookstore example; I see nothing wrong with what they did, and there's nothing resembling DRM related to what happened here.
You might as well claim that it's DRM if Google disables my Gmail account for spamming the universe. Account suspension as a result of misuse of services is not DRM, no matter how you stretch the term.
Need what key? Every retail copy of Windows I've ever purchased has come with the license key attached. XP just reactivates over the internet automatically after a reinstall, using the same license key. Sure, if you do it six times in a row they'll start denying the activation request, but they're pretty lenient about it.
When I do price comparisons, I make the specs as close as possible, and where they are different, I point out what those differences are. For example, in my previous post I mentioned that the Inspiron 15 has a slightly lower screen resolution, but a bigger hard drive. If memory serves, everything else was the same, but I'm not sure if I checked the RAM speeds.
In other words, I'm as fair as I can be when I do price comparisons;) Unlike most people who do Mac vs PC price comparisons, I don't have a particular view I want to support - I don't like Apple's marketing practices, but I don't have anything in particular against Macs or OSX other than their price. If Apple were to lower their prices to a comparable level, I would probably buy an Apple machine. I would accept a $100 higher Mac price as comparable; $600 is far too much.
Several of Apple's "Mac vs PC" ads have quite clearly claimed that Apples are fun but [Windows] PCs only know how to do boring things like make spreadsheets.
They conveniently neglected to mention that the gaming market for Windows is much, much, much bigger than it is for OSX.
I know they're not targeting gamers; that doesn't change the fact that they're being deliberately misleading.
I wrote a forum post here about some of the misleading or outright false things in Apple's ads. It was written in August of 2007, so it obviously doesn't deal with any ads newer than that. Perhaps it's time to revisit the subject...
Sorry to reply to myself, but I wanted to add that if you buy the parts and build the machine yourself, you can save even more than that (except in the "extremely low end" market, but Apple doesn't compete there so it's irrelevant).
The article on The Register addressing this tried to find a Dell that was the same specs as the Mac in the original article and cheaper, but couldn't. They found one that had slightly lower specs and cost around $500 more.
Then the author of that article was a blind idiot. Over the last four years, I have found that Dell machines are consistently around $600 cheaper than equivalent Apple machines. (I spend a few hours every four months or so pricing Apples and Dells just to see if things have changed. They haven't, yet.)
If our theoretical end-user who just wants a web-browser and photo organizer is savvy enough to understand that he doesn't want to be part of a botnet, that same end-user is savvy enough to download any of a number of free antivirus programs that prevent becoming part of a botnet (alternatively, they're savvy enough to not do anything sufficiently idiotic to get a virus in the first place).
Protip: If you don't want a virus, make sure you run antivirus, don't go to porn sites (but if you do, don't download "codecs"), and don't pirate software (especially not via p2p networks).
If you follow those three pieces of advice, you'll almost never get a virus. (It has worked for me for years... I don't see why it should be different for anyone else.) I'm not saying that the aforementioned activities always result in virus infestations, I'm simply saying that in my experience, most virus infestations are a direct result of one of the aforementioned activities. Anecdotal evidence, YMMV, etc.
Oh, and implying that Mac desktops are comparable in price to Windows desktops is just silly. I just priced a Dell Vostro 420 with the same specs as a base iMac and the Vostro is $461 cheaper. Both machines come with 20" monitors, but the Vostro has a better (read: not integrated) video card. The Vostro has a quad core 2.66GHz processor instead of the iMac's dual core 2.66GHz processor. The Vostro has 3GB of RAM instead of the iMac's 2GB, though the iMac uses 1066MHz DDR2 instead of 800MHz DDR2.
When your iMac's total price is $1199, a $461 savings is extremely significant - it's 38%! How does that justify your claim that "there probably won't be a price difference"?
Another protip: don't buy "bargain sh*tbox PC"s, as you seem to have done. Buy new parts (and, if necessary, an OEM XP cd) from newegg or mwave or somewhere, and build the machine yourself. You'll save money and get a better machine.
Well, the fact of the matter is: Mac comes with just about everything. Non-linear video editing, photo editing and organizers and they're very powerful.
Since when did OSX come with that stuff for free? Last I checked (thirty seconds ago), Final Cut Express 4 costs $199 to add to a MacBook Pro when you order, iWork '09 is $50, Aperture 2 (photo editor) is $199... the list goes on.
I hope you're not deliberately misrepresenting Apple's product line.
Um... you realize that you have stories from both because they both get their hardware from the same place, right?
What I mean is, Dell sells me a Seagate hard drive in my laptop, and Apple sells me a Seagate hard drive in my laptop. It's not quite fair to say "Apple's hard drive" or "Dell's hard drive" because neither hard drive was made by either company.
By the way, I'm writing this on a two-year-old Dell, and it works just as well as it did when I bought it. Before you say "I said my Macbook is four years old!", I used an IBM Thinkpad (pre-Lenovo) for eight years without issues.
IMHO, laptop longevity is much more a function of how the user treats the laptop than of how the manufacturer made it. In other words, if you treat your laptop like a textbook, it's (generally) not going to last very long, no matter who you bought it from.
Most of the time on TV I see Dells with the Dell logo on the lid of the laptop covered by a nondescript sticker (the trained eye can still recognize the case as Dell's handiwork). Shows aren't going to advertise for a computer company for free; they'd take the sticker off if Dell would pay them...
It doesn't necessarily matter that x86 isn't the best - it matters that it's everywhere. As a developer, I don't want to have to worry about what hardware my customers are going to be using, I just want my software to work - that's what Microsoft did, they made sure their OS would work (for certain definitions of "work") on as wide a range of hardware as possible.
OSX may be better than Windows in terms of stability, but I'd like to see how Apple would fare if they had to support the wide range of hardware that Microsoft has to support. I really doubt they'd be any better than MS.
(And before anyone accuses me of being a Microsoft fanboi, I'll point out that I'm writing this post in Gentoo Linux...)
I bought my phone (a Sony Ericsson w580i) in part because of its music playing capabilities. Unfortunately, the need to carry around separate headphones just for the phone means that I rarely use it to play music - I carry around headphones for my laptop already, so it seems idiotic to have to carry around a second pair for my phone.
But, even in the Windows world, you don't need to copy-and-paste music files to your non-Apple media player. Windows Media player does it all quite seamlessly.
I don't know about Apple, but Dell's educational discount was significantly less than their Small Business discount. I saved ~$200 more and got a wider selection by buying through their Small Business site instead of their Educational site.
I think the biggest problem with PC durability is that people treat their laptops like textbooks. If people would stop throwing their computers around, they would last years just fine. People complain especially about Dell being lower quality cases, but my Dell laptop has lasted the last two years without any issues (I guess recently Windows bluescreens at random, but Linux runs just fine).
In high school, I myself was guilty of treating my old laptop like a textbook - but that was a Thinkpad, and back then, Thinkpads were built like tanks. It finally died of old age after 8 years of faithful service.
Stop throwing computers around, and they'll stop breaking. That's what I always tell people, but do they listen?... I'll let you guess the answer to that.
I must quibble with your last claim. You see, in order to develop for Linux, one merely needs to have possession of any generic PC. In order to develop for OSX, one must have possession of a Mac.
As has been pointed out by myself and others many times, Macs are more expensive than PCs. Therefore, it is easier to develop for Linux than for OSX for a few reasons:
- The required hardware is cheaper. - Apple's OSX SDK's license is not, as far as I am aware, compatible with some of the various standard OSS licenses. Feel free to correct me on this. - Though Apple's SDK is available for free, not all components of OSX are open source, and therefore it is possible - or dare I say likely - that some things would not be as easy to develop for OSX as they are for Linux.
I guess I must quibble with your first claim as well. Do you not consider a 100% markup to be "extremely overpriced"? I've shown elsewhere that, as of the time of this writing, a Dell Inspiron 15 equivalent to a baseline MacBook Pro is $1070 cheaper - the MacBook Pro costs $1999. The Dell is over 50% cheaper!
(Before someone starts telling me about hardware durability, I'm not sure I can agree there either - a friend of mine used to work in an Apple repair shop. They break just as easily as any other machine. Anecdotal evidence, YMMV, etc.)
I think anyone with a brain & who can afford it, will buy Apple - even if you want to wipe it to install Ubuntu. The rest of you either need to save more to get a real system, or will have to settle for substandard windows systems running MS Vista:P
I didn't have an argument with your comment until I got to this bit at the end... why would anyone in their right mind buy a Mac just to delete OSX and install Ubuntu? That's like flushing money down the toilet. It's far more cost-effective to custom-build a desktop and install Linux on that.
And are you trying to imply that decent non-Mac desktops cost more than Apple's machines? I challenge you to show me a single instance where it's cheaper to buy a Mac desktop from Apple than to build an equivalent desktop from parts and install Linux on it.
You see, I don't have to settle for substandard anything by not buying Apple - and my wallet stays heavier than yours. Put another way, if I were to spend as much on a desktop as you would spend on an iMac or Mac Pro, I'd have a much better machine...
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Except that they didn't disable his device.
To correct your analogy, what happened to the Amazon customer in question is that he streaked Home Depot and they banned him from visiting the store in the future. They didn't repossess his lawn mower.
In other words, his Kindle works fine - it's just that if he deletes the ebooks he already has he loses them (if he takes a crow bar to his lawn mower, he can't get a new one from Home Depot).
Ah, but Amazon didn't revoke anything they had already sold. He was free to continue using ebooks he had already downloaded. He wasn't promised the ability to continue to buy *new* ebooks except under the condition that he continues to abide by their Terms of Service - he broke their terms of service, and they terminated his account. This should surprise no one.
In other words, you're claiming my hypothetical brick-and-mortar bookstore customer loses access to the books still on his shelf at home just because he was banned from buying from my store. That's ridiculous.
You're not the first person to misrepresent the situation.
If you buy the ebook, you have access to that ebook as long as you keep it on your Kindle, whether or not you have access to your Amazon.com customer account. The situation changes if you delete it and then your account gets disabled, but that shouldn't be surprising. Furthermore, the term "rent" does not apply when dealing with computer files, because "rent" implies the paid use of an item that must be returned.
It's not a rental, in any sense. As long as either a) your account is active, or b) you don't delete the eBook, you will be able to read it.
An active Amazon.com account is not necessary to use already-downloaded Kindle ebooks, and having your Amazon.com account disabled does not erase your already-downloaded Kindle ebooks.
You're misrepresenting the situation here. The customer in question did not lose access to books he had already downloaded; anything on his Kindle when the account was suspended stayed there. He simply lost the ability to purchase new books, and his subscriptions were canceled. He misused a service (his Amazon account), and that service was terminated - again, his Kindle was not affected except that it could no longer purchase new books on that account.
What happened to this customer has nothing to do with DRM, no matter how you stretch it. This story's title is almost deliberately misleading, and doesn't reflect the content of the article. The customer himself calls his Kindle a "brick", but given his own descriptions it's obvious that he is misusing the term.
To be fair, I'm sure the Terms of Service mentioned something about misuse of the service resulting in account termination. Really, why should we be angry at Amazon for terminating a service he was probably misusing?
If I were running a brick-and-mortar bookstore, and one particular customer constantly bought books and returned them a few days later (perhaps having obviously read them), I'd start refusing service to that customer. Would anyone be complaining about my decision?
The only difference here is that Amazon suspended an account in place of refusing service in a physical store. They did not take away books he already had downloaded; they did not brick or otherwise disable his Kindle; they simply disabled his account and canceled his subscriptions. The story title is quite misleading - his Kindle did not "die" in any sense as a result of his account suspension. I'm sure he could even tie the Kindle to another Amazon account and continue purchasing books that way.
I maintain there is little difference between what Amazon did and my brick-and-mortar bookstore example; I see nothing wrong with what they did, and there's nothing resembling DRM related to what happened here.
You might as well claim that it's DRM if Google disables my Gmail account for spamming the universe. Account suspension as a result of misuse of services is not DRM, no matter how you stretch the term.
Need what key? Every retail copy of Windows I've ever purchased has come with the license key attached. XP just reactivates over the internet automatically after a reinstall, using the same license key. Sure, if you do it six times in a row they'll start denying the activation request, but they're pretty lenient about it.
No, not quite like that guy.
When I do price comparisons, I make the specs as close as possible, and where they are different, I point out what those differences are. For example, in my previous post I mentioned that the Inspiron 15 has a slightly lower screen resolution, but a bigger hard drive. If memory serves, everything else was the same, but I'm not sure if I checked the RAM speeds.
In other words, I'm as fair as I can be when I do price comparisons ;) Unlike most people who do Mac vs PC price comparisons, I don't have a particular view I want to support - I don't like Apple's marketing practices, but I don't have anything in particular against Macs or OSX other than their price. If Apple were to lower their prices to a comparable level, I would probably buy an Apple machine. I would accept a $100 higher Mac price as comparable; $600 is far too much.
I dunno about everyone else, but I've never had to call Microsoft to reactivate Windows after a reinstall. Maybe I'm just lucky?
Several of Apple's "Mac vs PC" ads have quite clearly claimed that Apples are fun but [Windows] PCs only know how to do boring things like make spreadsheets.
They conveniently neglected to mention that the gaming market for Windows is much, much, much bigger than it is for OSX.
I know they're not targeting gamers; that doesn't change the fact that they're being deliberately misleading.
I wrote a forum post here about some of the misleading or outright false things in Apple's ads. It was written in August of 2007, so it obviously doesn't deal with any ads newer than that. Perhaps it's time to revisit the subject...
Sorry to reply to myself, but I wanted to add that if you buy the parts and build the machine yourself, you can save even more than that (except in the "extremely low end" market, but Apple doesn't compete there so it's irrelevant).
The article on The Register addressing this tried to find a Dell that was the same specs as the Mac in the original article and cheaper, but couldn't. They found one that had slightly lower specs and cost around $500 more.
Then the author of that article was a blind idiot. Over the last four years, I have found that Dell machines are consistently around $600 cheaper than equivalent Apple machines. (I spend a few hours every four months or so pricing Apples and Dells just to see if things have changed. They haven't, yet.)
If our theoretical end-user who just wants a web-browser and photo organizer is savvy enough to understand that he doesn't want to be part of a botnet, that same end-user is savvy enough to download any of a number of free antivirus programs that prevent becoming part of a botnet (alternatively, they're savvy enough to not do anything sufficiently idiotic to get a virus in the first place).
Protip: If you don't want a virus, make sure you run antivirus, don't go to porn sites (but if you do, don't download "codecs"), and don't pirate software (especially not via p2p networks).
If you follow those three pieces of advice, you'll almost never get a virus. (It has worked for me for years... I don't see why it should be different for anyone else.) I'm not saying that the aforementioned activities always result in virus infestations, I'm simply saying that in my experience, most virus infestations are a direct result of one of the aforementioned activities. Anecdotal evidence, YMMV, etc.
Oh, and implying that Mac desktops are comparable in price to Windows desktops is just silly. I just priced a Dell Vostro 420 with the same specs as a base iMac and the Vostro is $461 cheaper. Both machines come with 20" monitors, but the Vostro has a better (read: not integrated) video card. The Vostro has a quad core 2.66GHz processor instead of the iMac's dual core 2.66GHz processor. The Vostro has 3GB of RAM instead of the iMac's 2GB, though the iMac uses 1066MHz DDR2 instead of 800MHz DDR2.
When your iMac's total price is $1199, a $461 savings is extremely significant - it's 38%! How does that justify your claim that "there probably won't be a price difference"?
Another protip: don't buy "bargain sh*tbox PC"s, as you seem to have done. Buy new parts (and, if necessary, an OEM XP cd) from newegg or mwave or somewhere, and build the machine yourself. You'll save money and get a better machine.
Well, the fact of the matter is: Mac comes with just about everything. Non-linear video editing, photo editing and organizers and they're very powerful.
Since when did OSX come with that stuff for free? Last I checked (thirty seconds ago), Final Cut Express 4 costs $199 to add to a MacBook Pro when you order, iWork '09 is $50, Aperture 2 (photo editor) is $199... the list goes on.
I hope you're not deliberately misrepresenting Apple's product line.
I was going to say "I don't live in a basement and I still have dandruff!" but then I realized my apartment is a half-basement...
I'm pretty sure OpenOffice comes preinstalled on Ubuntu... so there's nothing to figure out.
And the tops of the keyboard keys would erode over time from my fingernails with normal typing.
You're supposed to cut those every few weeks, you know ;)
Um... you realize that you have stories from both because they both get their hardware from the same place, right?
What I mean is, Dell sells me a Seagate hard drive in my laptop, and Apple sells me a Seagate hard drive in my laptop. It's not quite fair to say "Apple's hard drive" or "Dell's hard drive" because neither hard drive was made by either company.
By the way, I'm writing this on a two-year-old Dell, and it works just as well as it did when I bought it. Before you say "I said my Macbook is four years old!", I used an IBM Thinkpad (pre-Lenovo) for eight years without issues.
IMHO, laptop longevity is much more a function of how the user treats the laptop than of how the manufacturer made it. In other words, if you treat your laptop like a textbook, it's (generally) not going to last very long, no matter who you bought it from.
Most of the time on TV I see Dells with the Dell logo on the lid of the laptop covered by a nondescript sticker (the trained eye can still recognize the case as Dell's handiwork). Shows aren't going to advertise for a computer company for free; they'd take the sticker off if Dell would pay them...
It doesn't necessarily matter that x86 isn't the best - it matters that it's everywhere. As a developer, I don't want to have to worry about what hardware my customers are going to be using, I just want my software to work - that's what Microsoft did, they made sure their OS would work (for certain definitions of "work") on as wide a range of hardware as possible.
OSX may be better than Windows in terms of stability, but I'd like to see how Apple would fare if they had to support the wide range of hardware that Microsoft has to support. I really doubt they'd be any better than MS.
(And before anyone accuses me of being a Microsoft fanboi, I'll point out that I'm writing this post in Gentoo Linux...)
I bought my phone (a Sony Ericsson w580i) in part because of its music playing capabilities. Unfortunately, the need to carry around separate headphones just for the phone means that I rarely use it to play music - I carry around headphones for my laptop already, so it seems idiotic to have to carry around a second pair for my phone.
But, even in the Windows world, you don't need to copy-and-paste music files to your non-Apple media player. Windows Media player does it all quite seamlessly.
I don't know about Apple, but Dell's educational discount was significantly less than their Small Business discount. I saved ~$200 more and got a wider selection by buying through their Small Business site instead of their Educational site.
Anyone know if Apple is similar?
I think the biggest problem with PC durability is that people treat their laptops like textbooks. If people would stop throwing their computers around, they would last years just fine. People complain especially about Dell being lower quality cases, but my Dell laptop has lasted the last two years without any issues (I guess recently Windows bluescreens at random, but Linux runs just fine).
In high school, I myself was guilty of treating my old laptop like a textbook - but that was a Thinkpad, and back then, Thinkpads were built like tanks. It finally died of old age after 8 years of faithful service.
Stop throwing computers around, and they'll stop breaking. That's what I always tell people, but do they listen? ... I'll let you guess the answer to that.
I must quibble with your last claim. You see, in order to develop for Linux, one merely needs to have possession of any generic PC. In order to develop for OSX, one must have possession of a Mac.
As has been pointed out by myself and others many times, Macs are more expensive than PCs. Therefore, it is easier to develop for Linux than for OSX for a few reasons:
- The required hardware is cheaper.
- Apple's OSX SDK's license is not, as far as I am aware, compatible with some of the various standard OSS licenses. Feel free to correct me on this.
- Though Apple's SDK is available for free, not all components of OSX are open source, and therefore it is possible - or dare I say likely - that some things would not be as easy to develop for OSX as they are for Linux.
I guess I must quibble with your first claim as well. Do you not consider a 100% markup to be "extremely overpriced"? I've shown elsewhere that, as of the time of this writing, a Dell Inspiron 15 equivalent to a baseline MacBook Pro is $1070 cheaper - the MacBook Pro costs $1999. The Dell is over 50% cheaper!
(Before someone starts telling me about hardware durability, I'm not sure I can agree there either - a friend of mine used to work in an Apple repair shop. They break just as easily as any other machine. Anecdotal evidence, YMMV, etc.)
I think anyone with a brain & who can afford it, will buy Apple - even if you want to wipe it to install Ubuntu. The rest of you either need to save more to get a real system, or will have to settle for substandard windows systems running MS Vista :P
I didn't have an argument with your comment until I got to this bit at the end... why would anyone in their right mind buy a Mac just to delete OSX and install Ubuntu? That's like flushing money down the toilet. It's far more cost-effective to custom-build a desktop and install Linux on that.
And are you trying to imply that decent non-Mac desktops cost more than Apple's machines? I challenge you to show me a single instance where it's cheaper to buy a Mac desktop from Apple than to build an equivalent desktop from parts and install Linux on it.
You see, I don't have to settle for substandard anything by not buying Apple - and my wallet stays heavier than yours. Put another way, if I were to spend as much on a desktop as you would spend on an iMac or Mac Pro, I'd have a much better machine...