I regularly purchase Windows software, open the packaging, then return it to BestBuy. BestBuy will also do the same for CDs. It's cheaper than iTunes to just buy the CD, rip, and return. I don't know when the last time I rented a movie was. I jsut get a first run $21.00 DVD from Circuit City, take it home and watch it, then return it for a full and curtious refund.
You are an unfortunate victim of software piracy that has forced _all_ companies to have strict return policies. It does not matter your sob story, the fact is, they CAN NOT tell wether you are telling the truth or trying to get a free copy of Motion.
Now, had you asked to exchange the Mac mini for an iMac G5 that can run Motion, I am certain Apple would have accomodated you. Had you had some sort of statement from an Apple Website or something else, perhaps you could have struck some kind of bargain.
Unfortunately, you assumed everything works with everything and Motion, a $299 software package for realtime video editing, would work fine on a $599 entrylevel computer that fits in the palm of your hand.
As many others have and will continue to flame, Apple offers a 30 day free trial which you didn't use, and posts minimum system requirements ON THE MOTION BOX.
I _do_ feel sorry for your situation, but not because Apple was in the wrong, I feel sorry that you obviously feel no responsibility and are trying to bash Apple to reconcile to yourself how you could have made such a big mistake.
Oh an eBay keeps listings of completed items. I looked up Motion sales and saw a few academic versions sold and a couple sealed versions, but no one who sold a retail version unsealed.
If this were a USB connector, I might be convinced it was intended as an iPod dock. As of now, all iPods support USB, though only mini's and larger even have Firewire (the iPod Shuffle does not). Maybe I am totally wrong because the dock interface on the bottom might support firewire - I just don't know. What I do know is that my iPod mini is much smaller than a regular iPod / iPod Photo and I don't see how a universal dock could work.
_Perhaps_ the reason this interface didn't see the light of day (until now) is that it was designed for Firewire and got too far down the development chain when Apple Marketing determined the USB route was the way they wanted to go. So with no time to change the circuit to USB, they nixed the dock concept.
Or _perhaps_ they just liked the clean lines the mini has, or felt that at $499, they couldn't justify the feature.
There are plenty of resons why they didn't.
The question really is, if they _had_ would it have increased sales? It would be a "cool" factor, but I don't know that it makes me want a Mac mini any more than I already do.
For the same engineering/component dollars, maybe Apple could increase the ram (much discussed ad infinitem) or bumped up the graphics card - these are the universal #1 and #2 complaints I hear of the mini (forget those who "claim" they would buy at price point X $499).
No one ever bitches that there isn't an integrated iPod dock.
What we are getting right now is a "lifetime" rental on the songs we choose. Can't sell them, can't do squat with them. Can you imagine in 10 years someone dieing and leaving his iTunes collection in his will? That can't happen today as far as I know.
Using a bit of imagination, I can see 'gifting' all my iTunes to my wife/children/friends - just give them your user name and password. I can do it today.
Maybe I don't understand how netflix works. I don't think you are allowed, under the terms of netflix, to copy the DVDs they send you. Yes you can do it, but I don't think it is in the legal agreement. In fact, I would not be surprised if the agreement explicitly states you are _not_ allowed to. Perhaps you can clarify?
get my DVDs through Netflix, and pay about $1 per DVD (the whole thing, with any extras that may be on the disk). Netflix recently lowered their price (so now I pay about $0.90/DVD)
But you are renting - this is buying
I agree, the $0.99 song is a good price point. If the prices go up (in the near future, I can deal with price increases over time with inflation), I for one, will go back to "other means" of acquiring digital music. And _no_ it won't be buying CDs.
iTunes can stream music to the stereo via AirTunes. The user can still be using the computer and the non-iTunes sounds from other applications are played through the computer speakers.
I agree that using industry standards to interconnect is the wave of the futuere. As long as software interconnect standards like XML (and XHTML) are used, who gives two bits whether the server is OS X, Linux or XP as long as the content is delivered in a common format.
Already I can copy a MP3 from a Mac to XP and then over to Linux so who cares about the platform? I can't "share" my software but in the end, wouldn't the software companies prefer that?
I love my Mac. I have MS Office, I have Firefox and I have iTunes. I can play any music I want while I connect to my POP3 or IMAP mail server and browse as many HTML documents as I want with whatever Javascript, Java, Flash, Shockwave, what-have-you and it all just works (without spyware and viruses too!)
I think it was a wise decision for the regularly tight lipped CFO to give some insight from the company. Here's why:
(1) Usually it is Jobs that announces any sort of strategy or "feelings" Apple may have on a technology. This helps investors feel like someoen other than the CEO is running the ship.
(2) With iPod obviously so huge, it is important to know if Apple is seeing itself as a music playrer company or what. Also, with TIVO rumors abounding, it is important for Apple to stake out their position on the DVR battle field.
(3) Stating the intent of the Mac mini. Obviously people are seeing cool applications for the Mac mini and as the CFO said, some people will try to use it as a home media PC, but he clearly states that it isn't that which helps to determine what the thing IS - a Windows Switcher PC.
(4) A glimp into Apple's crystal ball. It is interesting how he proclaimed the death of the personal video players. Jobs has said this before but with people trying to make the iPod Photo into a video player, it is interesting to hear another cheif reiterate the position.
(5) Points 3 (Mac mini not a PVR) and 4 (iPod Video not in the future) help us to see Apple's implementation of the Digital Hub more clearly. At home, the Mac becomes a dual purposed iLife Workstation as well as a media server. Using products like AirTunes to stream audio around the house and one day perhaps AirFlicks (FireFlicks?) to deliver a 21st century family slideshow, streaming video from DVD, or even PVR style recordings.
Should Device Drivers be the responsibility of the hardware manufacturer or the OS company?
On the one hand, you have the market force that would make HW manufacturers want to provide quality drivers to the three OSes. On the other, you have the OS companies that want to support many drivers.
If Apple sells the same percentage of iPods to Mac/Win owners as the 3%/95% mac/win computer ownership, or even close to those percentages, then chances are Apple is shipping pretty white firewire cables that most users aren't ever unwrapping.
This is just a case of serving your market. New Macs support USB 2.0 and iPod buyers that don't have USB 2.0 can purchase the FireWire cable.
Yeah it stinks that the APPLE owners are the ones to get burned on this deal, but it doesn't make sense to offer a feature most of your users cannot make any use of when an alternative feature exists that most can.
Yeah, that is very cool of Apple to allow you to change your iPod 40GB to an iPod Photo 60GB for $50.
But if you think that is cool, just try one of their computers! My _enjoyment_ of using computers has two clear deliniations in the timeline. Before and after I discovered girls, and before and after I got an Apple PowerBook G4. Now I'm not saying I like computers as much as I did before I recognized the wonders of "woman", but I do enjoy using them a whole lot more now!
Interesting market share news
on
Apple Updates iPod
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
For the third quarter of 2004, the iPod accounted for 92.1% of the market for hard drive-based music players, according to the NPD Group, up from 82.2% a year ago. Players from Creative Technology and Rio were a distant second and third, with 3.7% and 3.2% of the market, respectively. Market share numbers for the fourth quarter have yet to be released.
So for hard drive players (~60% of the portable digital music player market) that is: - 92.1% Apple iPod (all non-shuffle varieties) - 3.7% Creative (all HD models) - 3.2% Rio (all HD models) - 1% Other HD players
This is a breathtaking dominance of the market space that serves as an indicator for the related on-line music purchase/subscription market. If 7.9% of the hard drive players are non-Apple, and we assume the larger capacity HD player market space is where the most volume from these services is coming from, then that is a small piece of pie for all the players (Napster, Buy, Wal-mart, others?) to carve up into a successful and sustainable (profitable) business.
Further, Apple's iPod Shuffle is targeting the remaining ~40% flash-based player market. Even if the Shuffle is 50% as effective in market penetration as big brother iPod is, that would leave Apple with a (wildly) estimated ~45% of the flash player market. So again, competition would be nosing for larger nibbles, instead of the crumbs of the HD market, but still a far smaller pie to distribute.
All this points (for me anyway) to an impending consolidation of WMA related service offerings. Specifically, I would look for Napster to end it's offerings after Wallstreet destorys an already paltry stock for the failure of a $30M campaign against iTunes Music Store with the "Do the Math" campaign. Also, I would look for Buy.com to further phase out their download music store in favor of higher margin CD sales as they find even offering $0.79 selected tracks isn't creating market traction. The "hope" for WMA may be in Wal-Mart - the icon of the price elastic shopper - who may prefer $0.89 downloads (and $189 players) to Apple's $0.99, $199 combinatons.
Sounds to me like Apple works like the cops on Law & Order. They find the lowly perp and tell them the whole job is gonna come down on their unsuspecting and mildly involved act unless they give up their boss.
I agree with this tactic.
The 23 yrs old "kid" (at 28 am I a "teenager"?), acted as the distributor, but Apple really wants the supplier, the chink in the NDA armor for their developer network.
So the "kid" (I just love assigning that term to a med-student), needs to giveup his source or serve the sentence for supply and distribution.
Hey, I know it aint cool to back the global-enterprise, but when you spent hundreds of millions of dollars on R&D, all you have protecting the investment is the word of your development team and the law. Take away the law, and you don't have much.
I am interested to know how widespread/main stream the knowledge of this workaround is. If Napster is posting a rebuttal on their homepage, are news sites covering the story too?
If the incidents of this 'abuse' of the Napster user agreement go from dozens to hundreds to thousands, the record labels will expect Napster to put an end to the abuse one way or another.
I would expect step one to be eliminating the 14 day free trial. Step two may be restricting the 'all you can eat' model to a limited number of stracks per month.
As submitter of the original story to Slashdot, I am embarrassed to post this retraction based on new information from Mac Observer.
Though Motorola demonstrated the E1060's ability to play iTunes music at the GSM World Congress "the E1060 is not going to have the ability to play iTunes songs" according to Jason Gales of Mobile Tracker.
Yet the coffee was poored into a disposable cup, carried by an employee to the drive through window, handed to the driver, then handed to the victim, then placed between her legs?
Okay, fine. Not her fault. Not every anyone's fault. I'm gonna go be a victim now. Maybe I won't have to work anymore either.
If a journalists prints something, anything, that someone else disputes and the journalist cites an "anonymous source", then how can the person disputing the journalist prevail in the argument?
If I declare I am a journalist, and I write that I have an analymous source that says m50d is a terrorist, then how can you prove you aren't if you don't know the source?
so instead, journalists should live in constant fear of what to report because it might cause someone else harm?
Look, the journalist in this case didn't "accidently" release trade secrets. They had a public call for insider information (with anonymous tips) and publicised the availability of said information.
ThinkSecret and others knew this information was not public, solicited it, and now Apple is cracking down.
Yeah, Journalists should live in fear that if they report it, it better be true and it better be legal. There are slander laws they must abide by, why not this as well?
As an investor in Apple, I live in fear that the stock price will drop because someone _miss reports_ information and it is taken as truth. Sure they can print a retraction, but the damage is done.
McDonalds acted in a stupid and irresponsible way which they knew was injuring their customers.
Are you out of your feaking mind? McDonalds was selling HOT COFFEE. This was not a law suit about justice, it was a law suit about money. Had it been Bob's Doughnut Shop there never would have been an issue.
This isn't misinformation or other BS. It is the truth. The stuff is sold in an insulated cup with a lid. If you are careless with it, that's not the seller's fault.
How about this instead? Fuck Apple. The benefits of an unencumbered press so outweight the success of Apple's next product launch I can't believe this is being debated at all.
How about this instead? Fuck Accountability. The benefits of being able to do or say anything you want as a member of the press and cite it as "journalistic priviledge" far outweigh the need to hold people accountable for their actions and able to footnote their source of information so it can be refuted and/or discounted I can't believe this is being debated at all.
P.S. In a court room, it is called hearsay and is not admissable.
I do not believe in petty lawsuits over cigarettes that kill or McDonald's coffee that was too hot when spilt into the lap while driving. What I do believe in is accountability for one's action and that is where the issue truly lies.
Journalists live and die by the "tips" they get.
The question is the "harm" they can cause by releasing the information.
If a journalist gets a tip that the police are looking for a suspect, releases said tip, and the suspect evades capture by getting the heads up, then the Journalist has, wittingly or not, obstructed justice.
In this instance, wittingly or not, the journalist has revealed trade secrets.
Another example? How about embedded reporters disclosing their whereabouts while in a military operation overseas (hypotethically, of course this would never happen). They endanger the lives of service men and women as well as the operation, but don't even need a source - they (or their GPS) are the source.
Being a "journalist" doesn't give one free reign to break laws.
My vote is that those who disclose confidential (NDA protected) information to a Journalist are breaking the law (civil law vs. criminal law - can be fined but not incarcerated) and the Journalist can choose to use that information if they are willing to also stand before a civil court for their actions.
If they did not know the information was priviledged, then they can just turn over the source, and have that source answer for their actions.
To a company like Apple, the infrasturcture and the risk of the capitol to build ($$) that infrastructure make a profit, even as 'large' as $50M negligable.
Apple was so freaking brilliant with their strategy - $0.99 per song is too slim a price point (due to the low net profits) for a company to stay profitable if that's all they sell, even if they control the entire market. That's why even a company like Wal-mart can still only cut per song prices to $0.89.
If you have revenues of $.25B and only have profits of $50M you are making a 20% margin. Industry analysts think Apple makes more like 2-5 cents per song ($5M - $25M net or 2.5% - 10% profit). Apple's margins are in the 30-40+% range.
Bottom line, Apple does NOT want to make money on iTunes, they want to sell the product so inexpensively, there is no money to be made and thus, shut everyone else out so they sell more iPods. Brilliant.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of "Wow, this is a great computer for $499", people would think "This is a $499 iPod toy".
Great point!
Apple is already seen as "the iPod company" - they need to help people realize they make great computers too.
Wow that's a really odd problem you had.
I regularly purchase Windows software, open the packaging, then return it to BestBuy. BestBuy will also do the same for CDs. It's cheaper than iTunes to just buy the CD, rip, and return. I don't know when the last time I rented a movie was. I jsut get a first run $21.00 DVD from Circuit City, take it home and watch it, then return it for a full and curtious refund.
You are an unfortunate victim of software piracy that has forced _all_ companies to have strict return policies. It does not matter your sob story, the fact is, they CAN NOT tell wether you are telling the truth or trying to get a free copy of Motion.
Now, had you asked to exchange the Mac mini for an iMac G5 that can run Motion, I am certain Apple would have accomodated you. Had you had some sort of statement from an Apple Website or something else, perhaps you could have struck some kind of bargain.
Unfortunately, you assumed everything works with everything and Motion, a $299 software package for realtime video editing, would work fine on a $599 entrylevel computer that fits in the palm of your hand.
As many others have and will continue to flame, Apple offers a 30 day free trial which you didn't use, and posts minimum system requirements ON THE MOTION BOX.
I _do_ feel sorry for your situation, but not because Apple was in the wrong, I feel sorry that you obviously feel no responsibility and are trying to bash Apple to reconcile to yourself how you could have made such a big mistake.
Oh an eBay keeps listings of completed items. I looked up Motion sales and saw a few academic versions sold and a couple sealed versions, but no one who sold a retail version unsealed.
Care to explain yourself?
If this were a USB connector, I might be convinced it was intended as an iPod dock. As of now, all iPods support USB, though only mini's and larger even have Firewire (the iPod Shuffle does not). Maybe I am totally wrong because the dock interface on the bottom might support firewire - I just don't know. What I do know is that my iPod mini is much smaller than a regular iPod / iPod Photo and I don't see how a universal dock could work.
_Perhaps_ the reason this interface didn't see the light of day (until now) is that it was designed for Firewire and got too far down the development chain when Apple Marketing determined the USB route was the way they wanted to go. So with no time to change the circuit to USB, they nixed the dock concept.
Or _perhaps_ they just liked the clean lines the mini has, or felt that at $499, they couldn't justify the feature.
There are plenty of resons why they didn't.
The question really is, if they _had_ would it have increased sales? It would be a "cool" factor, but I don't know that it makes me want a Mac mini any more than I already do.
For the same engineering/component dollars, maybe Apple could increase the ram (much discussed ad infinitem) or bumped up the graphics card - these are the universal #1 and #2 complaints I hear of the mini (forget those who "claim" they would buy at price point X $499).
No one ever bitches that there isn't an integrated iPod dock.
What we are getting right now is a "lifetime" rental on the songs we choose. Can't sell them, can't do squat with them. Can you imagine in 10 years someone dieing and leaving his iTunes collection in his will? That can't happen today as far as I know.
Using a bit of imagination, I can see 'gifting' all my iTunes to my wife/children/friends - just give them your user name and password. I can do it today.
Maybe I don't understand how netflix works. I don't think you are allowed, under the terms of netflix, to copy the DVDs they send you. Yes you can do it, but I don't think it is in the legal agreement. In fact, I would not be surprised if the agreement explicitly states you are _not_ allowed to. Perhaps you can clarify?
get my DVDs through Netflix, and pay about $1 per DVD (the whole thing, with any extras that may be on the disk). Netflix recently lowered their price (so now I pay about $0.90/DVD)
But you are renting - this is buying
I agree, the $0.99 song is a good price point. If the prices go up (in the near future, I can deal with price increases over time with inflation), I for one, will go back to "other means" of acquiring digital music. And _no_ it won't be buying CDs.
Who's with me?
iTunes can stream music to the stereo via AirTunes. The user can still be using the computer and the non-iTunes sounds from other applications are played through the computer speakers.
(or is it hear hear? Anyway...)
I agree that using industry standards to interconnect is the wave of the futuere. As long as software interconnect standards like XML (and XHTML) are used, who gives two bits whether the server is OS X, Linux or XP as long as the content is delivered in a common format.
Already I can copy a MP3 from a Mac to XP and then over to Linux so who cares about the platform? I can't "share" my software but in the end, wouldn't the software companies prefer that?
I love my Mac. I have MS Office, I have Firefox and I have iTunes. I can play any music I want while I connect to my POP3 or IMAP mail server and browse as many HTML documents as I want with whatever Javascript, Java, Flash, Shockwave, what-have-you and it all just works (without spyware and viruses too!)
Yeah Apple.
I think it was a wise decision for the regularly tight lipped CFO to give some insight from the company. Here's why:
(1) Usually it is Jobs that announces any sort of strategy or "feelings" Apple may have on a technology. This helps investors feel like someoen other than the CEO is running the ship.
(2) With iPod obviously so huge, it is important to know if Apple is seeing itself as a music playrer company or what. Also, with TIVO rumors abounding, it is important for Apple to stake out their position on the DVR battle field.
(3) Stating the intent of the Mac mini. Obviously people are seeing cool applications for the Mac mini and as the CFO said, some people will try to use it as a home media PC, but he clearly states that it isn't that which helps to determine what the thing IS - a Windows Switcher PC.
(4) A glimp into Apple's crystal ball. It is interesting how he proclaimed the death of the personal video players. Jobs has said this before but with people trying to make the iPod Photo into a video player, it is interesting to hear another cheif reiterate the position.
(5) Points 3 (Mac mini not a PVR) and 4 (iPod Video not in the future) help us to see Apple's implementation of the Digital Hub more clearly. At home, the Mac becomes a dual purposed iLife Workstation as well as a media server. Using products like AirTunes to stream audio around the house and one day perhaps AirFlicks (FireFlicks?) to deliver a 21st century family slideshow, streaming video from DVD, or even PVR style recordings.
Should Device Drivers be the responsibility of the hardware manufacturer or the OS company?
On the one hand, you have the market force that would make HW manufacturers want to provide quality drivers to the three OSes. On the other, you have the OS companies that want to support many drivers.
If Apple sells the same percentage of iPods to Mac/Win owners as the 3%/95% mac/win computer ownership, or even close to those percentages, then chances are Apple is shipping pretty white firewire cables that most users aren't ever unwrapping.
This is just a case of serving your market. New Macs support USB 2.0 and iPod buyers that don't have USB 2.0 can purchase the FireWire cable.
Yeah it stinks that the APPLE owners are the ones to get burned on this deal, but it doesn't make sense to offer a feature most of your users cannot make any use of when an alternative feature exists that most can.
yeah, the battery life of the new iPod Mini, 4 and 6 GB versions, it 18 hrs. a full ten hours more than the first gen iPod mini.
...with 92.1% of the hard drive player market according to recent reports.
Yeah, that is very cool of Apple to allow you to change your iPod 40GB to an iPod Photo 60GB for $50.
But if you think that is cool, just try one of their computers! My _enjoyment_ of using computers has two clear deliniations in the timeline. Before and after I discovered girls, and before and after I got an Apple PowerBook G4. Now I'm not saying I like computers as much as I did before I recognized the wonders of "woman", but I do enjoy using them a whole lot more now!
Macobserver quoted the following:
For the third quarter of 2004, the iPod accounted for 92.1% of the market for hard drive-based music players, according to the NPD Group, up from 82.2% a year ago. Players from Creative Technology and Rio were a distant second and third, with 3.7% and 3.2% of the market, respectively. Market share numbers for the fourth quarter have yet to be released.
So for hard drive players (~60% of the portable digital music player market) that is:
- 92.1% Apple iPod (all non-shuffle varieties)
- 3.7% Creative (all HD models)
- 3.2% Rio (all HD models)
- 1% Other HD players
This is a breathtaking dominance of the market space that serves as an indicator for the related on-line music purchase/subscription market. If 7.9% of the hard drive players are non-Apple, and we assume the larger capacity HD player market space is where the most volume from these services is coming from, then that is a small piece of pie for all the players (Napster, Buy, Wal-mart, others?) to carve up into a successful and sustainable (profitable) business.
Further, Apple's iPod Shuffle is targeting the remaining ~40% flash-based player market. Even if the Shuffle is 50% as effective in market penetration as big brother iPod is, that would leave Apple with a (wildly) estimated ~45% of the flash player market. So again, competition would be nosing for larger nibbles, instead of the crumbs of the HD market, but still a far smaller pie to distribute.
All this points (for me anyway) to an impending consolidation of WMA related service offerings. Specifically, I would look for Napster to end it's offerings after Wallstreet destorys an already paltry stock for the failure of a $30M campaign against iTunes Music Store with the "Do the Math" campaign. Also, I would look for Buy.com to further phase out their download music store in favor of higher margin CD sales as they find even offering $0.79 selected tracks isn't creating market traction. The "hope" for WMA may be in Wal-Mart - the icon of the price elastic shopper - who may prefer $0.89 downloads (and $189 players) to Apple's $0.99, $199 combinatons.
Sounds to me like Apple works like the cops on Law & Order. They find the lowly perp and tell them the whole job is gonna come down on their unsuspecting and mildly involved act unless they give up their boss.
I agree with this tactic.
The 23 yrs old "kid" (at 28 am I a "teenager"?), acted as the distributor, but Apple really wants the supplier, the chink in the NDA armor for their developer network.
So the "kid" (I just love assigning that term to a med-student), needs to giveup his source or serve the sentence for supply and distribution.
Hey, I know it aint cool to back the global-enterprise, but when you spent hundreds of millions of dollars on R&D, all you have protecting the investment is the word of your development team and the law. Take away the law, and you don't have much.
I am interested to know how widespread/main stream the knowledge of this workaround is. If Napster is posting a rebuttal on their homepage, are news sites covering the story too?
If the incidents of this 'abuse' of the Napster user agreement go from dozens to hundreds to thousands, the record labels will expect Napster to put an end to the abuse one way or another.
I would expect step one to be eliminating the 14 day free trial. Step two may be restricting the 'all you can eat' model to a limited number of stracks per month.
As submitter of the original story to Slashdot, I am embarrassed to post this retraction based on new information from Mac Observer.
Though Motorola demonstrated the E1060's ability to play iTunes music at the GSM World Congress "the E1060 is not going to have the ability to play iTunes songs" according to Jason Gales of Mobile Tracker.
A thousand pardons.
she WAS BURNED TO THE BONE.
Yet the coffee was poored into a disposable cup, carried by an employee to the drive through window, handed to the driver, then handed to the victim, then placed between her legs?
Okay, fine. Not her fault. Not every anyone's fault. I'm gonna go be a victim now. Maybe I won't have to work anymore either.
Good point, but please answer this:
If a journalists prints something, anything, that someone else disputes and the journalist cites an "anonymous source", then how can the person disputing the journalist prevail in the argument?
If I declare I am a journalist, and I write that I have an analymous source that says m50d is a terrorist, then how can you prove you aren't if you don't know the source?
so instead, journalists should live in constant fear of what to report because it might cause someone else harm?
Look, the journalist in this case didn't "accidently" release trade secrets. They had a public call for insider information (with anonymous tips) and publicised the availability of said information.
ThinkSecret and others knew this information was not public, solicited it, and now Apple is cracking down.
Yeah, Journalists should live in fear that if they report it, it better be true and it better be legal. There are slander laws they must abide by, why not this as well?
As an investor in Apple, I live in fear that the stock price will drop because someone _miss reports_ information and it is taken as truth. Sure they can print a retraction, but the damage is done.
And don't use that Reductio ad absurdum crap about Oceania.
McDonalds acted in a stupid and irresponsible way which they knew was injuring their customers.
Are you out of your feaking mind? McDonalds was selling HOT COFFEE. This was not a law suit about justice, it was a law suit about money. Had it been Bob's Doughnut Shop there never would have been an issue.
This isn't misinformation or other BS. It is the truth. The stuff is sold in an insulated cup with a lid. If you are careless with it, that's not the seller's fault.
How about this instead? Fuck Apple. The benefits of an unencumbered press so outweight the success of Apple's next product launch I can't believe this is being debated at all.
How about this instead? Fuck Accountability. The benefits of being able to do or say anything you want as a member of the press and cite it as "journalistic priviledge" far outweigh the need to hold people accountable for their actions and able to footnote their source of information so it can be refuted and/or discounted I can't believe this is being debated at all.
P.S. In a court room, it is called hearsay and is not admissable.
I do not believe in petty lawsuits over cigarettes that kill or McDonald's coffee that was too hot when spilt into the lap while driving. What I do believe in is accountability for one's action and that is where the issue truly lies.
Journalists live and die by the "tips" they get.
The question is the "harm" they can cause by releasing the information.
If a journalist gets a tip that the police are looking for a suspect, releases said tip, and the suspect evades capture by getting the heads up, then the Journalist has, wittingly or not, obstructed justice.
In this instance, wittingly or not, the journalist has revealed trade secrets.
Another example? How about embedded reporters disclosing their whereabouts while in a military operation overseas (hypotethically, of course this would never happen). They endanger the lives of service men and women as well as the operation, but don't even need a source - they (or their GPS) are the source.
Being a "journalist" doesn't give one free reign to break laws.
My vote is that those who disclose confidential (NDA protected) information to a Journalist are breaking the law (civil law vs. criminal law - can be fined but not incarcerated) and the Journalist can choose to use that information if they are willing to also stand before a civil court for their actions.
If they did not know the information was priviledged, then they can just turn over the source, and have that source answer for their actions.
Sorry but your math is wrong.
You have look at _return on investment_
To a company like Apple, the infrasturcture and the risk of the capitol to build ($$) that infrastructure make a profit, even as 'large' as $50M negligable.
Apple was so freaking brilliant with their strategy - $0.99 per song is too slim a price point (due to the low net profits) for a company to stay profitable if that's all they sell, even if they control the entire market. That's why even a company like Wal-mart can still only cut per song prices to $0.89.
If you have revenues of $.25B and only have profits of $50M you are making a 20% margin. Industry analysts think Apple makes more like 2-5 cents per song ($5M - $25M net or 2.5% - 10% profit). Apple's margins are in the 30-40+% range.
Bottom line, Apple does NOT want to make money on iTunes, they want to sell the product so inexpensively, there is no money to be made and thus, shut everyone else out so they sell more iPods. Brilliant.
Check this out:
You pay $275 for the Creative 60GB player
Then you pay $0 to use the 14 day free trial of Napster To-Go to load it up with 60 GB of audio.
Then you discontinue the Napster service and for $275 you have 20,000 (60GB / 3MB) songs to listen to whenever you want.
Thanks Napster, I guess you _still_ are the source for free music after all!!!
(I'll stick to iPod and iTunes, thanks anyway)