I think Apple is probably looking even more long term than that. I think one of the keys here is that the only way to make money on music download services is to have enormous sales volume.
So for now, iTMS is essentially break-even. It might be running a small loss, but it is probably close to a rounding error. On the other hand, Apple is selling gobs of iPods, and they make big profit margins on them.
However, it doesn't take a genius to see that the iPod is going to become a commodity piece of hardware in a few short years. Unless Apple can keep extending the iPod platform to keep it a "must have", it is likely that iPods and iPod-like devices will drop below $100 and have very low margins in 5-10 years. So at that point, Apple will no longer have the iPod to subsidize the iTMS
However, I think Apple hopes to have a large chunk of the music download market by then. It is not difficult to think that they could have $1billion revenue from iTMS and $100 million profit annually. That is not a huge profit margin, but it with that kind of volume, it is a good and reliable source of income. You would also be relatively safe from competing startups, because they would need to get up to very large volumes to be profitable.
I think Apple made a very shrewd move by negotiating their cut of the 99c download to be so low. I think they get 34c for each 99c, and they have to pay credit card costs and their own hardware and bandwidth and software costs from that. Nobody else is going to be able to go to the labels and say "We'll sell your music for 99c and give you 50c".
So for now, Apple is using iPod sales as an excuse to lose a little money on the iTMS. Eventually, that will reverse, and Apple will end up selling iPods at close to cost to encourage people to use their real cash cow, the iTMS.
Remember that area goes as the square of the diamater, so this new hard drive is only 72% of the area of a 1 inch drive. They don't mention the thickness, but if it is thinner than the 1 inch drives, then there is better than 30% savings on volume. That is nothing to sneeze at.
As long as my phone has a vibrate mode, I don't think I want a hard disk in it...
One thing to remember is that the smaller the radius of the hard disk platter, the less sensitive it will be to vibrations anyway. That is why iPods are relatively robust (that and good caching, so the hard drive is rarely moving anyway).
One of the reasons that MagLev trains have not hit been deployed in anything other than demontstration trials is the complexity of the control systems. The least expensive type to build is just a row of electromagnets which are timed to attract and then repell similar magnets on the trains. The timing of these magnetic pulses has to be extremely precise, especially when the trains are traveling at over 300km/hr! If just one electromagnet attracts when it should be repelling, the train will crash. Superconductors don't have that problem, but you do have to seriously shield the passenger compartment from the magnetic fields, which adds a lot of weight.
One alternative I've seen to this is a passive maglev system which uses passive copper coils on the track and "hallbach" magnets on the train. The hallbach magnets create a sinusoidal magnetic field, and as the train moves over the passive coils, the coils produce a repulsive field. As long as the train is moving fast enough, it will rise up off the tracks. If the propulsion fails, the train will just slow down until it lands back on the tracks. No complex control system needed. Also, the hallbach magnets have the unusual property that the magnetic field is only on one side of the magnet, so you need less shielding for the passenger compartment.
There is a real system based on this. It is called Inductrak. It was developed at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The article I linked to was kind of old, so I don't know if they've made any progress lately.
They had Pepsi execs talk about it when Apple introduced the iTMS for Windows. The campaign will start at the SuperBowl and go for two or three months. Definitely not a rumor.
Methinks Pudge was being sarcastic. Still, Apple continues the provide the advertised functionality (and more) for 1G and 2G iPods. The few added features in firmware 2.0 are all pretty minor anyway IMHO.
I keep wondering about this myself. I'm going to pose this question here for the/. community, not for Bruce.
Apple picked KHTML and KJS for Safari seven months ago and contributed a bunch of changes back. My question is: Have Konq users noticed a change in the speed/quality of Konquoror development? Has Konq improved noticeably, or has Apple not proven to be much help? The KDE developer community seemed grateful at the time, has that optimism been retained?
The cheapest CD Printer on the market is around $350.
Actually, the cheapest CD Printer on the market is the Epson Stylus Photo 900. It will print onto printable CDs and DVDs. At $199, it is well within the price range of the starving artist. Heck if you buy a 30 pack of printable CD-Rs ($15) at the same time, you get a $30 rebate.
IIRC, Apple gives the record label (or CDBaby, in this case) 65 cents per 99 cent track. CDBaby will then take a 9% cut of that 65 cents, leaving the artist with about 59 cents from each track sold. NOT BAD!
So if you managed to sell a little over a million tracks, you'd pocket a cool $600,000 dollars or so.
Part of the reason he is doing this it to avoid doing all the publicity BS that he would have to do if he released an album. He is also able to release the EPs outside his recording contract.
Huh? Apple fixed that one years ago. The current Apple time implementation goes to the year 29,940. Apple claims to be hard at work on the Y30K problem, though.
The meeting was supposed to have been confidential. Someone at CDBaby didn't realize that and posted details. Fortunately, someone at slasdot reposted the text. To wit:
Full albums are recommended to be $9.99 or lower.......Apple strongly recommends going even lower than $9.99. They'd like to see that price drop to make the full-album purchase even more desirable.
No, 64-bit integer units make for a 64 bit processor. The G4 can use 36 bit pointers, but it severely complicates memory access because the pointer cannot be contained in one integer register. Further, IIRC, no single process can use more than 4GB by itself. The P4 and Xeon processors can do the same trick, but it slows memory access down considerably.
What difference does bus width matter if it can transfer data faster than memory? The bus could be serial as far as it matters.
The way you talk, you'd think CDs were perfect reconstructions of the original music.
What if I prefer to get the original master tapes?
What if I prefer to create my own mixes of every song?
What if I prefer surround sound?
Every audio format out there has limitations, even CDs. For the price, you can't complain too much. Personally, I'd like to see Apple keep the singles price at 99 cents and drop the typical album price to $4.99. Given the info that leaked about Apple's meeting with the indie music labels, I think that is what Apple would like too. At that price point, it would be hard to complain too much about the audio quality unless you are really psycho.
The frontside bus is two 32-bit wide unidirectional busses. They run at 500MHz DDR (equivelant to 1GHz). That gives you 4GB/s in each direction, per processor. The memory is 200MHz DDR (400MHz effective) and 128 bits wide (2 64bit banks), yielding total bandwith of 6.4GB/s (3.2GB/s per bank).
The width of the FSB is really irrelevant here. The most important thing is how fast you can get data into and out of the processor. The thing that makes it a "64 bit processor" is that it can handle 64-bit memory pointers.
I mean, heck. The G4 had a 64-bit FSB running at 167MHz, but that doesn't give it much bandwidth and it doesn't make it a 64-bit processor.
You forget that Apple's thermal managment software is constantly monitoring things and if the temperature goes to high, the machine goes to sleep. In fact, the G4 Cube would sleep if you set something on top of it and blocked its ventilation. It didn't even have a fan.
In fact, the 9 fans give you some amount of redundancy. Under normal operation, they turn at a low fraction (10%, IIRC) of their top speed to stay quiet (just 35dBA), so if one fails, the others can take up the slack with no problem. The fans should also last longer that way. They can probably put the "wind tunnel" macs to shame if they ever all get going at the same time.
The failsafe on the software control is that if the software control is not present, the fans all go to full speed!
Re:I just think it's pointless until
on
Yet Another G5 Roundup
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Actually, that isn't really true. Because of the way the PPC ISA is set up, there isn't much advantage to switching the whole OS to pure 64 bit. The main boost you are going to see here is the ability to use more than 4GB memory, and you can implement that on the G5 with just a recompile.
Individual apps can be switched to 64-bit and operate in 64-bit mode if needed, even if the OS doesn't use 64-bit mode itself, so long as the OS supports 64-bit addressing
Unless you need to do 64bit integer math, your app will see no benefit from switching to pure 64-bit. In fact, your app may slow down and waste memory. But an app can still take advantage of the main benefit of more addressible memory whilest staying (essentially) a 32-bit app. This is thanks to the fact that PPC is a 64-bit architecture with a 32-bit subset.
There are still optimizations that need to be done to improve the compilers for the G5, but very few of those optimizations have anything to do with being able to do 64-bit integer math.
I think the tech documents say that if the OS does not provide thermal management, the fans will run at full speed. So it will be interesting to see if the thermal management will be provided under Linux.
Terrasoft (makers of Yellow Dog Linux) has said that they will support Linux on the G5, but it remains to be seen if they will be able to provide thermal management that won't void the warrenty. Terrasoft is an offical Apple Value Added Reseller, and they sell dual boot MacOS X/Linux systems that carry the full Apple warranty, so Apple may provide them with the info they need or else a binary driver that they can use.
It may also be that Apple will make the thermal management code open source as part of Darwin. If that is the case, then it can probably be converted into a kernel module without violating either the GPL or APSL.
Yes, but in materials, we refer to an alloy by its main component. When you have 97%Al and 3%Sc, it is an aluminum alloy. Calling it "Scandium" is marketing BS. Al-Sc alloys have impressive enough properties, I know people who've studied them, but this sort of thing annoys me because in the end, it confuses people. Heck, the alloy probably has more Mg than Sc. Why not call it magnesium?
Similarly, one of the most common titanium alloys is "6-4" titanium, which is 6%Al, 4%V, and 90%Ti. So you can legtitimatly call it "titanium".
Scandium? Uh..... I've never heard of that and I'm a materials scientist. I think you mean aluminum-scandium alloys, but those only have about 3%Sc. Scandium is excellent at strengthening aluminum, though.
There are a lot of ethical questions involved here. Improving materials in sports have lead to big improvements in some sports. Take polevaulting. If you plot the polevault world record versus year for the 20th century, you will see significant jumps as the athletes switched from hardwood to bamboo to fiberglass to carbon fiber. Concequently, you can't compare records from different eras.
Golf in another sport where this has become a problem. The advances in golf clubs have made it difficult for the courses to keep up. The USGA has finally had to set limits on the properties of golf clubs for official play because the alternative (making the courses longer) is very difficult and expensive.
College baseball is another one. They have had to slap limits on the properties of aluminum baseball bats because they were starting to affect the game too much. There are now rules governing how much rebound is allowed from a bat. Note that major league baseball doesn't have this problem because they still use wooden bats.
I am a materials scientist, and I'm always amazed how every new material immediately gets made into golf clubs. Titanium, Beryllium-Copper, Cermets, Amorphous metals. Each has been made into golf clubs.
I think the thing that most people on/. seem to keep missing is this: MacOS X and Linux both use GCC as their primary compiler. The Linux kernel is compiled with GCC, as is Darwin. Most software for each platform is compiled with GCC.
Now, with all these Linux-heads around here insisting that Linux is faster than Windows on x86, you'd think GCC for x86 might be a good compiler. Certainly the SPEC tests Apple (and Veritest) did with GCC on the G5 with OS X and the dual Xeon Dell with Red Hat had to have been a valid comparison between those two situations.
I also keep seeing all these comparisons to Dell computers without full specs of the Dell. The base configurations for the PowerMac G5 is positively loaded. How many $500 Dells come with Gigabit Ethernet? How many have the same level of engineering into the thermal managment?
Only time will tell for sure. In the mean time, remember that IBM will be producing blade systems with the 970. We'll get a chance to compare those as well eventually.
Slashdot Mirror
So for now, iTMS is essentially break-even. It might be running a small loss, but it is probably close to a rounding error. On the other hand, Apple is selling gobs of iPods, and they make big profit margins on them.
However, it doesn't take a genius to see that the iPod is going to become a commodity piece of hardware in a few short years. Unless Apple can keep extending the iPod platform to keep it a "must have", it is likely that iPods and iPod-like devices will drop below $100 and have very low margins in 5-10 years. So at that point, Apple will no longer have the iPod to subsidize the iTMS
However, I think Apple hopes to have a large chunk of the music download market by then. It is not difficult to think that they could have $1billion revenue from iTMS and $100 million profit annually. That is not a huge profit margin, but it with that kind of volume, it is a good and reliable source of income. You would also be relatively safe from competing startups, because they would need to get up to very large volumes to be profitable.
I think Apple made a very shrewd move by negotiating their cut of the 99c download to be so low. I think they get 34c for each 99c, and they have to pay credit card costs and their own hardware and bandwidth and software costs from that. Nobody else is going to be able to go to the labels and say "We'll sell your music for 99c and give you 50c".
So for now, Apple is using iPod sales as an excuse to lose a little money on the iTMS. Eventually, that will reverse, and Apple will end up selling iPods at close to cost to encourage people to use their real cash cow, the iTMS.
Remember that area goes as the square of the diamater, so this new hard drive is only 72% of the area of a 1 inch drive. They don't mention the thickness, but if it is thinner than the 1 inch drives, then there is better than 30% savings on volume. That is nothing to sneeze at.
One thing to remember is that the smaller the radius of the hard disk platter, the less sensitive it will be to vibrations anyway. That is why iPods are relatively robust (that and good caching, so the hard drive is rarely moving anyway).One alternative I've seen to this is a passive maglev system which uses passive copper coils on the track and "hallbach" magnets on the train. The hallbach magnets create a sinusoidal magnetic field, and as the train moves over the passive coils, the coils produce a repulsive field. As long as the train is moving fast enough, it will rise up off the tracks. If the propulsion fails, the train will just slow down until it lands back on the tracks. No complex control system needed. Also, the hallbach magnets have the unusual property that the magnetic field is only on one side of the magnet, so you need less shielding for the passenger compartment.
There is a real system based on this. It is called Inductrak. It was developed at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. The article I linked to was kind of old, so I don't know if they've made any progress lately.
They had Pepsi execs talk about it when Apple introduced the iTMS for Windows. The campaign will start at the SuperBowl and go for two or three months. Definitely not a rumor.
Sorry to be pedantic, but Pepsi is going to give away 100 Million songs, which will probably kickstart things quite a bit more than 1 million will.
Good luck finding one, since they haven't actually shipped yet. Not even demo units.
Methinks Pudge was being sarcastic. Still, Apple continues the provide the advertised functionality (and more) for 1G and 2G iPods. The few added features in firmware 2.0 are all pretty minor anyway IMHO.
I keep wondering about this myself. I'm going to pose this question here for the /. community, not for Bruce.
Apple picked KHTML and KJS for Safari seven months ago and contributed a bunch of changes back. My question is: Have Konq users noticed a change in the speed/quality of Konquoror development? Has Konq improved noticeably, or has Apple not proven to be much help? The KDE developer community seemed grateful at the time, has that optimism been retained?
Ummm.... Hello?
He included Linux and the BSDs, niether of which is considered to be an official UNIX(TM) by the Open Group.
Apple claims that MacOS X is UNIX-based, which is a perfectly valid claim. So why this guy left MacOS X off his list is a legitamate question.
Actually, the cheapest CD Printer on the market is the Epson Stylus Photo 900. It will print onto printable CDs and DVDs. At $199, it is well within the price range of the starving artist. Heck if you buy a 30 pack of printable CD-Rs ($15) at the same time, you get a $30 rebate.
IIRC, Apple gives the record label (or CDBaby, in this case) 65 cents per 99 cent track. CDBaby will then take a 9% cut of that 65 cents, leaving the artist with about 59 cents from each track sold. NOT BAD!
So if you managed to sell a little over a million tracks, you'd pocket a cool $600,000 dollars or so.
Actually, Ben Folds is offering three EPs this year that will be available:
- At concerts
- On Vinyl
- From Ben Folds' website
- The iTunes Music store
Part of the reason he is doing this it to avoid doing all the publicity BS that he would have to do if he released an album. He is also able to release the EPs outside his recording contract.Huh? Apple fixed that one years ago. The current Apple time implementation goes to the year 29,940. Apple claims to be hard at work on the Y30K problem, though.
The meeting was supposed to have been confidential. Someone at CDBaby didn't realize that and posted details. Fortunately, someone at slasdot reposted the text. To wit:
I did, however, just make up the $4.99 number
No, 64-bit integer units make for a 64 bit processor. The G4 can use 36 bit pointers, but it severely complicates memory access because the pointer cannot be contained in one integer register. Further, IIRC, no single process can use more than 4GB by itself. The P4 and Xeon processors can do the same trick, but it slows memory access down considerably.
What difference does bus width matter if it can transfer data faster than memory? The bus could be serial as far as it matters.
The way you talk, you'd think CDs were perfect reconstructions of the original music.
What if I prefer to get the original master tapes?
What if I prefer to create my own mixes of every song?
What if I prefer surround sound?
Every audio format out there has limitations, even CDs. For the price, you can't complain too much. Personally, I'd like to see Apple keep the singles price at 99 cents and drop the typical album price to $4.99. Given the info that leaked about Apple's meeting with the indie music labels, I think that is what Apple would like too. At that price point, it would be hard to complain too much about the audio quality unless you are really psycho.
The frontside bus is two 32-bit wide unidirectional busses. They run at 500MHz DDR (equivelant to 1GHz). That gives you 4GB/s in each direction, per processor. The memory is 200MHz DDR (400MHz effective) and 128 bits wide (2 64bit banks), yielding total bandwith of 6.4GB/s (3.2GB/s per bank).
The width of the FSB is really irrelevant here. The most important thing is how fast you can get data into and out of the processor. The thing that makes it a "64 bit processor" is that it can handle 64-bit memory pointers.
I mean, heck. The G4 had a 64-bit FSB running at 167MHz, but that doesn't give it much bandwidth and it doesn't make it a 64-bit processor.
You forget that Apple's thermal managment software is constantly monitoring things and if the temperature goes to high, the machine goes to sleep. In fact, the G4 Cube would sleep if you set something on top of it and blocked its ventilation. It didn't even have a fan.
In fact, the 9 fans give you some amount of redundancy. Under normal operation, they turn at a low fraction (10%, IIRC) of their top speed to stay quiet (just 35dBA), so if one fails, the others can take up the slack with no problem. The fans should also last longer that way. They can probably put the "wind tunnel" macs to shame if they ever all get going at the same time.
The failsafe on the software control is that if the software control is not present, the fans all go to full speed!
Actually, that isn't really true. Because of the way the PPC ISA is set up, there isn't much advantage to switching the whole OS to pure 64 bit. The main boost you are going to see here is the ability to use more than 4GB memory, and you can implement that on the G5 with just a recompile.
Individual apps can be switched to 64-bit and operate in 64-bit mode if needed, even if the OS doesn't use 64-bit mode itself, so long as the OS supports 64-bit addressing
Unless you need to do 64bit integer math, your app will see no benefit from switching to pure 64-bit. In fact, your app may slow down and waste memory. But an app can still take advantage of the main benefit of more addressible memory whilest staying (essentially) a 32-bit app. This is thanks to the fact that PPC is a 64-bit architecture with a 32-bit subset.
There are still optimizations that need to be done to improve the compilers for the G5, but very few of those optimizations have anything to do with being able to do 64-bit integer math.
Final Cut Express: $299
iMovie: Free
I think the tech documents say that if the OS does not provide thermal management, the fans will run at full speed. So it will be interesting to see if the thermal management will be provided under Linux.
Terrasoft (makers of Yellow Dog Linux) has said that they will support Linux on the G5, but it remains to be seen if they will be able to provide thermal management that won't void the warrenty. Terrasoft is an offical Apple Value Added Reseller, and they sell dual boot MacOS X/Linux systems that carry the full Apple warranty, so Apple may provide them with the info they need or else a binary driver that they can use.
It may also be that Apple will make the thermal management code open source as part of Darwin. If that is the case, then it can probably be converted into a kernel module without violating either the GPL or APSL.
Yes, but in materials, we refer to an alloy by its main component. When you have 97%Al and 3%Sc, it is an aluminum alloy. Calling it "Scandium" is marketing BS. Al-Sc alloys have impressive enough properties, I know people who've studied them, but this sort of thing annoys me because in the end, it confuses people. Heck, the alloy probably has more Mg than Sc. Why not call it magnesium?
Similarly, one of the most common titanium alloys is "6-4" titanium, which is 6%Al, 4%V, and 90%Ti. So you can legtitimatly call it "titanium".
Scandium? Uh..... I've never heard of that and I'm a materials scientist. I think you mean aluminum-scandium alloys, but those only have about 3%Sc. Scandium is excellent at strengthening aluminum, though.
There are a lot of ethical questions involved here. Improving materials in sports have lead to big improvements in some sports. Take polevaulting. If you plot the polevault world record versus year for the 20th century, you will see significant jumps as the athletes switched from hardwood to bamboo to fiberglass to carbon fiber. Concequently, you can't compare records from different eras.
Golf in another sport where this has become a problem. The advances in golf clubs have made it difficult for the courses to keep up. The USGA has finally had to set limits on the properties of golf clubs for official play because the alternative (making the courses longer) is very difficult and expensive.
College baseball is another one. They have had to slap limits on the properties of aluminum baseball bats because they were starting to affect the game too much. There are now rules governing how much rebound is allowed from a bat. Note that major league baseball doesn't have this problem because they still use wooden bats.
I am a materials scientist, and I'm always amazed how every new material immediately gets made into golf clubs. Titanium, Beryllium-Copper, Cermets, Amorphous metals. Each has been made into golf clubs.
I think the thing that most people on /. seem to keep missing is this: MacOS X and Linux both use GCC as their primary compiler. The Linux kernel is compiled with GCC, as is Darwin. Most software for each platform is compiled with GCC.
Now, with all these Linux-heads around here insisting that Linux is faster than Windows on x86, you'd think GCC for x86 might be a good compiler. Certainly the SPEC tests Apple (and Veritest) did with GCC on the G5 with OS X and the dual Xeon Dell with Red Hat had to have been a valid comparison between those two situations.
I also keep seeing all these comparisons to Dell computers without full specs of the Dell. The base configurations for the PowerMac G5 is positively loaded. How many $500 Dells come with Gigabit Ethernet? How many have the same level of engineering into the thermal managment?
Only time will tell for sure. In the mean time, remember that IBM will be producing blade systems with the 970. We'll get a chance to compare those as well eventually.