For that price they should be sampling my DNA through a different means entirely. Different. Entirely. "Please insert your *#*&$ into the vaccuum tube..."
if you get stuff in AAC and transcode it to something else at the same bitrate, you will usually lose quality relative to having encoded the audio in the other format in the first place.
So if you have, say, an MP3 and you want to convert it to another compressed format you lose nothing right?
The point is: there is no point to AAC for users
Here's one point you missed: the only music downloading service that is a) legal, b) involves terms that don't treat you like an outright criminal, and c) has top-shelf popular music uses AAC exclusively.
Besides which, AAC itself isn't synonymous with DRM. I can encode my own AAC files without any restrictions. Many say the quality is better than MP3 so I can get away with a smaller file size. If true, why would I use MP3 (for example)?
It converts to AIFF just fine with no loss of quality. Like when you burn your unlimited number of CDs. Ripping said CD into a lossy compression after that gets you some, well, loss. But you knew that.
And that only applies to the DRM-enabled variety of AAC one gets from Apple's iTMS, not AAC stuff you rip yourself. Those can be converted to MP3 directly. But you knew that, too.
Is there really any reason for them not to?...By selling a proper product they can start drawing customers away from P2P.
It's not an all-or-nothing deal. They don't have to sell completely unrestricted content in order to woo customers away from illegal services. They just have to sell content with restrictions that people are willing to live with. That approach has the added benefit of actually deterring some folks from turning around and illegally redistributing it. Bonus!
If there were real competition look at what would happen if one of them did sell uncrippled files - they would capture the entire download market
You'd better pick up the phone and call the RIAA immediately. They'll be shocked and amazed at your astute analysis and immediately change all their business plans. Surely you realize that if this were really a viable way to go one of the big lables would have done it hoping to get the jump on the others. No, they all realize it's much more complicated than that. There's the nagging fact that - given the popularity of p2p networks - your legally sold content would be redistributed at about a 100% rate, every legal download being cloned hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. Again, why take this approach when they can nab virtually the same number of legit customers by offering a slightly restricted file and seeing the redistribution rate cut in half? The downside is?
even worse the MPAA, RIAA, and broadcasters are floating legislation...
Yep, they're evil. No argument. What they're doing in our capital right now is reprehensible. I myself have written several scathing emails to my elected officials about the matter. But that doens't make it any more likely - or sensible! - for them to start selling unrestricted downloads next week. I reiterate - it ain't gonna happen. Largely because they won't need to.
I really doubt many people want uncompressed music
So do I, but believe it or not, it was an oft-repeated criticism here in these very forums. In many a sub-thread about the merits of Ogg Vorbis, AAC and MP3, there was always one or two yahoos who proudly proclaimed that they wouldn't ever pay for anything but uncompressed audio. I don't share that opinion and neither do most others I'm sure.
We all hate and fear the RIAA and the MPAA...and with good reason. But to sit there and suggest that they should basically sell totally unrestricted digital music in the midst of the entire p2p phenomenon strains credulity to the breaking point. It just ain't gonna happen. Ever.
I'm not suggesting $0.04, but their current prices are wildly inflated.
Compared to what? The CD at Best Buy? Napster in its heyday? I don't think it's bargain-basement by any means, but the Bjork CD I bought for $9.95 beat the hell out of Best Buy ($17.99) and even the low price juggernaut Walmart ($14.99). I think given the fact that I have to provide my own CD-R balances it out nicely.
they are struggling against the huge P2P phenomenon that exploded exactly because they refused to serve the online market
First sensible thing you've said. I couldn't agree more. But life goes on. What happens now? We wait a decade or two until the entire recording industry crumbles and is reborn from its own ashes? Meanwhile we all suck tunes down from each other on the latest p2p network? Count me out. I'm suggesting that the RIAA took a timid step in the right direction, thanks to the mesmerizing salesmanship of one Mr. Steve Jobs. They started offering digital download sales with terms that people by and large would not find too onerous. That deserves to be supported.
I think your problem is that you don't understand the difference between "draconian, treat-your-customers-like-criminals" DRM and fairly sensible, "hey-we-gotta-stay-in-business" DRM. Apple uses the latter. Pressplay, the former. From what I've seen of buymusic.com, they fall in the middle. If you don't understand the differences between the services, go read up on them.
And, by the way, you can "hate DRM" all you want, but someone had to toss a bone to the RIAA for some music to get sold, man. If the Apple iTMS is innovative at all (and it is) then it is innovative solely because of the fairly decent customer rights that accompany the downloads. If you're holding out for the totally unrestricted, uncompressed downloads for $0.04 per song, like some folks here seem to be doing, I think you'll be hearing a lot of silence. Or using illegal services. The copyright holders for popular music (the big 5 labels, the RIAA, etc.) will never, never, go with a service who's restrictions on illegal redistribution amount to nothing more than "the honor system."
Finally, I'm getting tired of the very vocal minority here at slashdot who insist, thread after thread, that Apple gets some sort of special privelaged treatment in these forums. Thier reputation here has risen above the likes of Microsoft in recent years, it's true, but they still take quite a few lumps around here. Some of them are even deserved! So if you say Apple is the slashdot darling, then I say "bullshit." It's rare enough that they get credited for what they do get right.
I don't recall ever saying that Republicans are for small government...
You didn't say it and I don't mean to suggest you did. The Republicans themselves say it. Bush says it. That's my point. There's the irony. It's a knock against Bush and the GOP not against you.
When a government doesn't have time to listen to the people it's supposed to govern, you know that it's grown too large.
I think it's a tad ironic that a complaint about the conservative, Republican Bush administration's white house ends up being a rallying cry against Big Government. These guys are supposed to be all about small government! (Could it be that it's all just a rhetorical smoke screen used by conservatives to prevent discussion of real issues?)
Or have we forgotten the lesson we learned from being a colony of Britain?
I think we should pay a little more attention to the large corps and other big money interests that are running the country rather than hearkening back to the revolutionary war. Even if that runs counter to the "unrestricted, unregulated captialism is the answer / government is evil" sentiments so popular among pseudo-Libertarian slashdotters.
Actually I was a big Camino/Chimera fan until I downloaded Safari. There's a perception out there that just because Apple makes the OS they have some magical ability to make a better user experience with their application, in this case Safari.
It also started allowing me to launch iDVD on my PB 867 even though it doesn't have a superdrive. This way I could still use the app for demo purposes, or even author a DVD and then transfer the project to a DVD-burning station via Firewire target disk mode or something. Very cool, though.
IE was the best browser on the Mac probably since 4.5, and certainly since 5.0. There's no question about that. Was it the best browser period? I think it was, crashes notwithstanding. It lost what was left of it's lustre, though, when it came to OS X.
Mozilla is slow and ugly. Safari is clearly it's equal or it's better and six months time will see it clearly surpass all competitiors on the Mac.
The real question is, will there be anything as good on Windows? There are serveral contenders, but which will be the best? IE won't, it's too old. Mozilla? Could be, I guess. Opera? I'm doubting it myself, but anything could happen.
My guess is that it won't matter a bit which browser is "better." People will continue to use IE 6 for as long as it takes for 7 to appear in a future release of Windows. Web content will be developed for IE 6 with all it's crappy incompatibilities and quirks and when "better" browsers like Safari or Mozilla (or whoever takes the title on Windows) choke on sites developed explicitly for IE 6 people will say "damn, this browser sucks!" with little or no understanding of what's really going on.
Again, complete failure to understand this company.
You seem to have mastered the arguments for why Apple's vertical integration is bad (and in many ways it is). But you still seem to be curiously blind to any validity there might be to the arguments for why it is good, both for them as a business and also for it's customers.
In fact, I doubt seriously whether you could articulate such arguments even if you disagreed with them. And, put simply, anyone who doubts seriously the idea that Apple is among the top innovators in the personal computing industry hasn't been paying attention.
It's one thing to understand Apple's place in the market but to identify yourself as the type of consumer who isn't interested. It's quite another to sit there and blindly suggest that a company who sells a hell of a lot of computers (in spite of the momentum of the wintel world!), makes piles and piles of money (even in a time of recession), and who's productcs are invariably followed by immitations in the PC world...that they are just flat-out doing their business wrong.
And you can always, always tell a knee-jerk mac basher when they trot out the old saw that Apple "stole" something from Xerox. They didn't. Apple entered into technology-sharing agreements with Xerox. Nothing was "stolen." Microsoft's later "acquisition" of similar technologies is somewhat more questionable, though even I would hesitate to call it outright theft.
I could buy or build more computer than I'd ever want for approximately...
You are correct: you aren't in Apple's target market. You're not in anybox maker's target market.
I thought it was very cool that Apple was finally opening up its hardware. But even the clones were pricey, and lo and behold Apple squashed them so fast that it didn't even matter.
Congratulations. You are the fifthy-three-thousand, three hundred-twenty-second person on slasdot this week to completely misunderstand Apple's business.
You see, Apple is unqiue. They aren't Dell. Although they make their money selling hardware, what makes them able to distinguish thier product in the marketplace is a little thing called "vertical integration." They, as Steve says, "make the whole widget." Without that, they would lose the advantage they have in innovation.
Because they make the hardware and the OS and several key apps, they can A) change things on a dime (like eliminating old Mac serial ports in favor of USB-only boxes), and B) they can provide with a truly seamless and trouble-free solution with regard to things like digital video: they invented firewire, put int on all their boxes, bundled imovie, bundled dvd burners and iDVD and it all works beautifully together all of the time.
Yes, yes - everyone knows that the lack of clones is also the worst part about the platform. It is precisely this which keeps their prices high and marketshare low. But without it they'd turn into another indistinguishable product...and at that point they would have lost the ability to distinguish themselves. They'd either become a bland company competing on price alone without major innovations or they'd simply be driven out of business by other bland companies competing on price alone.
So you don't have to buy a Mac, that's fine. But at least acknowledge the debt of gratitude that you and everyone else who uses a personal computer owes to the last great innovator.
Most people want...[snip]...yet no companies seem to be interested in this option.
I don't know if I buy that. I mean, companies are all about providing what people want. If they weren't... well, their competitors would do it and they'd be sunk. I think it's rather like the discussions of software reliability versus software features: we all say we want reliability, but it's the feature list that makes us open our wallets. That's why developers make feature-bloated, unreliable software.
Besides, there's plenty of low cost computing to be had out there. I'd be surprised if the average personal computer sold today is over $800. It's just that these boxes don't represent technology innovations/improvements. The high-end systems occupy that role, almost by definition. So you don't hear about some new whiz-bang, revolutionary computer that costs $599... because there's nothing to report: it's a computer, it does what computers did last year but a little faster and a little cheaper. No, what you hear about is the $2000 machine that truly represents a New Thing.
That all sounds very reasonable, but it's not what happened when the Apple clones were actually on the market. They were a bitch to support because you couldn't just pop in an Apple OS CD and blow the thing away because it suddenly woulnd't have the right video driver or ethernet driver or god-knows-what. Then one day you go to install a new version of the Mac os and you realize that it and the 3rd party software to make the hardware work doesn't make nice with one another...blah, blah, blah. It wasn't pretty and it was very, very UN-Maclike.
Clones in general are bad because while they mean cheaper prices and an initial proliferation of the platform (under the best of circumstances), it also means that Apple doesn't have control over the hardware anymore.
Can I name anything that it would cause a problem with (especially since Apple in this case still makes the mobo)? well consider that one of the reasons Apple's operating system works so well is because they have to make it work with a more limited set of hardware. Once you are making a clone you then have clone makers competing mainly on price. They start taking bids on who can provide the cheapest hd / controller, video card, etc, so they can undercut the competition. Pretty soon you have an operating system that might or might not work with all that shit. You have Windows.
I do understand your position as a consumer. You clearly do not want a Mac. But I think it's equally clear that you misunderstand Apple's position in the marketplace. Clones will kill them, just as sure as I'm typing this.
(I wish I could save myself the time and trouble of formulating and typing out this argument every time it comes up. In fact last time I recall I just linked to my previous comment from another discussion - it had been modded up to 5 with comments like "that's the best explanation I've ever heard for that!" Alas, you get something less than that today because I can't find it and I'm too lazy to look further.)
It's like this. Apple has one single strength. They have one single reason for being. They have one asset that earns them a place in the market among all the PC makers selling comodity parts with a warantee on it. What is it? It's the fact that they are vertically integrated. They make the hardware, the OS and a few key apps.
This means they can make them all work together seamlessly in ways that Microsoft and Dell never can. They can provide a higher-quality, more unified experience to their customers. They can also turn the company on a freakin' dime when they decide to because they don't have to get 4 other companies to agree on the new direction. (USB anyone?)
Its also true that it is this very "asset" which keeps their prices higher than your average Micron or eMachines box. Clones would definetly mean lower prices through competition. But in the end Apple would lose thier reason for being. They would no longer be able to provide that user experience and they would no longer be able to be that innovative powerhouse that the rest of the industry sponges off of. They would become mediocre. They would end up being no different from any other company that makes software or hardware (not both). Eventually they would go under, having no way to distinguish themselves in the market.
Or something like that. Like I said, you don't have to buy one. It's not for everyone. But that is thier business, man. They can't go for the model of Microsoft or Dell. (And neither MS or Dell go for thiers!) But a healthy Apple (read: no clones) is good for everyone. Their innovations fuel the rest of the industry, whether you buy their products directly or not.
Nobody will read this far down in the discussion but I just want to put this bit of truth out into the ether:
1. Apple isn't evil because of "going after" this parts supplier. The supplier is in obvious breech of contract. Duh. There's plenty to criticise in the Apple company and in the Mac platform; pick a reason, just make it a valid one, okay?
2. Clones are bad for the Macintosh platform. Bad, bad, bad. Any strategy which erodes their ability to leverage OS/iApps/Hardware into a seamless, second-to-none user experience will be death to the platform. It is not good. It is bad. It will kill the one, single unique thing about this company and they will be swallowed up into the sea of mediocrity that is the rest of the PC industry. Nobody should want that, as even PC users benefit from Apple's R&D....eventually.
they clearly think (correctly) that Linux is going to be a force in the long run on the desktop.
I'm worried that what you're saying here won't prove true. Think about it. Every Linux user who is also a gamer is already dual-booting Windows. With me so far? So a game developer has to choose:
1. Don't spend the time/money to make a Linux version and sell 1 million units. To windows users. Including the Linux guys who'll just reboot to play.
2. Spend the time/money to make a LInux version and sell...1 million units. To Windows users and Linux users who will now not have to reboot.
Contrast this with the reasoning behind Macintosh versions:
1. Don't spend the time to make a Mac version. Sell 1 million units to Windows users.
2. Spend the time/money to make a Mac version. Sell 1.2 million units*. To Windows users and Mac users.
(*Who knows. The idea here is that it's a higher number. In the Linux scenario, it's not.)
Since Linux runs on the exact same hardware as Windows, I don't see how this situation will ever be remedied.
I think it's cheap to bring up a "Mac users waited a lot longer than PC gamers for that hot game" scenario in the case of Quark and OS X. I mean other than the "long time" part, what does it have to do with anything? Did PC users get QuarkXPress 6 a while back and nobody notice it?
And FYI, Quark probably makes half their money off us Mac users. Half. Some folks here appear to not know this.
People would rather have pretty features on a flaky system, than a solid system.
This is not necessarily true
It's absolutely true. "Most people you work with in the IT industry" do not in any way constitute a meaningful sample of the group "people who buy software." It is of this latter group which I speak when I say they are after the New Shiny Thing and do not care about stability one iota. The software industry has shown one thing very, very clearly: features sell the product. You can't market "stability" to consumers and consumers make up the majority of software buyers (as opposed to your IT professionals.)
The truth of this is so self-evident, in fact, that I'm inclined to liken it to American politicians: People bitch about politicians - they're dishonest, stupid, crooked, whatever. We might be inclined to say that they are forced on an unhappy populace because there just aren't any better candiadates to be found. When the truth of the matter is simply this: if we truly wanted different politicians we would have them. We - get this - elect politicians. If we wanted ones that were honest we would elect them. If we wanted ones that spoke to us more intelligently than the average sound byte allowed, we would have them.
And if we wanted stable software we would have it.
Re:Entertainment vs. economy
on
RIAA vs The Economy
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· Score: 2, Informative
I keep hoping that some well-run online song-for-song "rights buying" project comes up...I personally would pay a moderate amount for downloadable music, especially on a song-by-song basis.
Slashdot Mirror
For that price they should be sampling my DNA through a different means entirely. Different. Entirely. "Please insert your *#*&$ into the vaccuum tube..."
if you get stuff in AAC and transcode it to something else at the same bitrate, you will usually lose quality relative to having encoded the audio in the other format in the first place.
So if you have, say, an MP3 and you want to convert it to another compressed format you lose nothing right?
The point is: there is no point to AAC for users
Here's one point you missed: the only music downloading service that is a) legal, b) involves terms that don't treat you like an outright criminal, and c) has top-shelf popular music uses AAC exclusively.
Besides which, AAC itself isn't synonymous with DRM. I can encode my own AAC files without any restrictions. Many say the quality is better than MP3 so I can get away with a smaller file size. If true, why would I use MP3 (for example)?
It converts to AIFF just fine with no loss of quality. Like when you burn your unlimited number of CDs. Ripping said CD into a lossy compression after that gets you some, well, loss. But you knew that.
And that only applies to the DRM-enabled variety of AAC one gets from Apple's iTMS, not AAC stuff you rip yourself. Those can be converted to MP3 directly. But you knew that, too.
Is there really any reason for them not to?...By selling a proper product they can start drawing customers away from P2P.
It's not an all-or-nothing deal. They don't have to sell completely unrestricted content in order to woo customers away from illegal services. They just have to sell content with restrictions that people are willing to live with. That approach has the added benefit of actually deterring some folks from turning around and illegally redistributing it. Bonus!
If there were real competition look at what would happen if one of them did sell uncrippled files - they would capture the entire download market
You'd better pick up the phone and call the RIAA immediately. They'll be shocked and amazed at your astute analysis and immediately change all their business plans. Surely you realize that if this were really a viable way to go one of the big lables would have done it hoping to get the jump on the others. No, they all realize it's much more complicated than that. There's the nagging fact that - given the popularity of p2p networks - your legally sold content would be redistributed at about a 100% rate, every legal download being cloned hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. Again, why take this approach when they can nab virtually the same number of legit customers by offering a slightly restricted file and seeing the redistribution rate cut in half? The downside is?
even worse the MPAA, RIAA, and broadcasters are floating legislation...
Yep, they're evil. No argument. What they're doing in our capital right now is reprehensible. I myself have written several scathing emails to my elected officials about the matter. But that doens't make it any more likely - or sensible! - for them to start selling unrestricted downloads next week. I reiterate - it ain't gonna happen. Largely because they won't need to.
I really doubt many people want uncompressed music
So do I, but believe it or not, it was an oft-repeated criticism here in these very forums. In many a sub-thread about the merits of Ogg Vorbis, AAC and MP3, there was always one or two yahoos who proudly proclaimed that they wouldn't ever pay for anything but uncompressed audio. I don't share that opinion and neither do most others I'm sure.
We all hate and fear the RIAA and the MPAA...and with good reason. But to sit there and suggest that they should basically sell totally unrestricted digital music in the midst of the entire p2p phenomenon strains credulity to the breaking point. It just ain't gonna happen. Ever.
I'm not suggesting $0.04, but their current prices are wildly inflated.
Compared to what? The CD at Best Buy? Napster in its heyday? I don't think it's bargain-basement by any means, but the Bjork CD I bought for $9.95 beat the hell out of Best Buy ($17.99) and even the low price juggernaut Walmart ($14.99). I think given the fact that I have to provide my own CD-R balances it out nicely.
they are struggling against the huge P2P phenomenon that exploded exactly because they refused to serve the online market
First sensible thing you've said. I couldn't agree more. But life goes on. What happens now? We wait a decade or two until the entire recording industry crumbles and is reborn from its own ashes? Meanwhile we all suck tunes down from each other on the latest p2p network? Count me out. I'm suggesting that the RIAA took a timid step in the right direction, thanks to the mesmerizing salesmanship of one Mr. Steve Jobs. They started offering digital download sales with terms that people by and large would not find too onerous. That deserves to be supported.
I think your problem is that you don't understand the difference between "draconian, treat-your-customers-like-criminals" DRM and fairly sensible, "hey-we-gotta-stay-in-business" DRM. Apple uses the latter. Pressplay, the former. From what I've seen of buymusic.com, they fall in the middle. If you don't understand the differences between the services, go read up on them.
And, by the way, you can "hate DRM" all you want, but someone had to toss a bone to the RIAA for some music to get sold, man. If the Apple iTMS is innovative at all (and it is) then it is innovative solely because of the fairly decent customer rights that accompany the downloads. If you're holding out for the totally unrestricted, uncompressed downloads for $0.04 per song, like some folks here seem to be doing, I think you'll be hearing a lot of silence. Or using illegal services. The copyright holders for popular music (the big 5 labels, the RIAA, etc.) will never, never, go with a service who's restrictions on illegal redistribution amount to nothing more than "the honor system."
Finally, I'm getting tired of the very vocal minority here at slashdot who insist, thread after thread, that Apple gets some sort of special privelaged treatment in these forums. Thier reputation here has risen above the likes of Microsoft in recent years, it's true, but they still take quite a few lumps around here. Some of them are even deserved! So if you say Apple is the slashdot darling, then I say "bullshit." It's rare enough that they get credited for what they do get right.
I don't recall ever saying that Republicans are for small government...
You didn't say it and I don't mean to suggest you did. The Republicans themselves say it. Bush says it. That's my point. There's the irony. It's a knock against Bush and the GOP not against you.
When a government doesn't have time to listen to the people it's supposed to govern, you know that it's grown too large.
I think it's a tad ironic that a complaint about the conservative, Republican Bush administration's white house ends up being a rallying cry against Big Government. These guys are supposed to be all about small government! (Could it be that it's all just a rhetorical smoke screen used by conservatives to prevent discussion of real issues?)
Or have we forgotten the lesson we learned from being a colony of Britain?
I think we should pay a little more attention to the large corps and other big money interests that are running the country rather than hearkening back to the revolutionary war. Even if that runs counter to the "unrestricted, unregulated captialism is the answer / government is evil" sentiments so popular among pseudo-Libertarian slashdotters.
Actually I was a big Camino/Chimera fan until I downloaded Safari. There's a perception out there that just because Apple makes the OS they have some magical ability to make a better user experience with their application, in this case Safari.
And that perception is absolutely true.
It also started allowing me to launch iDVD on my PB 867 even though it doesn't have a superdrive. This way I could still use the app for demo purposes, or even author a DVD and then transfer the project to a DVD-burning station via Firewire target disk mode or something. Very cool, though.
It's Mac not "MAC."
:)
It's Safari not "Saffari."
It's the not "teh."
Kidding
IE was the best browser on the Mac probably since 4.5, and certainly since 5.0. There's no question about that. Was it the best browser period? I think it was, crashes notwithstanding. It lost what was left of it's lustre, though, when it came to OS X.
Mozilla is slow and ugly. Safari is clearly it's equal or it's better and six months time will see it clearly surpass all competitiors on the Mac.
The real question is, will there be anything as good on Windows? There are serveral contenders, but which will be the best? IE won't, it's too old. Mozilla? Could be, I guess. Opera? I'm doubting it myself, but anything could happen.
My guess is that it won't matter a bit which browser is "better." People will continue to use IE 6 for as long as it takes for 7 to appear in a future release of Windows. Web content will be developed for IE 6 with all it's crappy incompatibilities and quirks and when "better" browsers like Safari or Mozilla (or whoever takes the title on Windows) choke on sites developed explicitly for IE 6 people will say "damn, this browser sucks!" with little or no understanding of what's really going on.
I wrote this commment a few weeks ago. See if that clarifies.
Again, complete failure to understand this company.
You seem to have mastered the arguments for why Apple's vertical integration is bad (and in many ways it is). But you still seem to be curiously blind to any validity there might be to the arguments for why it is good, both for them as a business and also for it's customers.
In fact, I doubt seriously whether you could articulate such arguments even if you disagreed with them. And, put simply, anyone who doubts seriously the idea that Apple is among the top innovators in the personal computing industry hasn't been paying attention.
It's one thing to understand Apple's place in the market but to identify yourself as the type of consumer who isn't interested. It's quite another to sit there and blindly suggest that a company who sells a hell of a lot of computers (in spite of the momentum of the wintel world!), makes piles and piles of money (even in a time of recession), and who's productcs are invariably followed by immitations in the PC world...that they are just flat-out doing their business wrong.
And you can always, always tell a knee-jerk mac basher when they trot out the old saw that Apple "stole" something from Xerox. They didn't. Apple entered into technology-sharing agreements with Xerox. Nothing was "stolen." Microsoft's later "acquisition" of similar technologies is somewhat more questionable, though even I would hesitate to call it outright theft.
I could buy or build more computer than I'd ever want for approximately...
You are correct: you aren't in Apple's target market. You're not in anybox maker's target market.
I thought it was very cool that Apple was finally opening up its hardware. But even the clones were pricey, and lo and behold Apple squashed them so fast that it didn't even matter.
Congratulations. You are the fifthy-three-thousand, three hundred-twenty-second person on slasdot this week to completely misunderstand Apple's business.
You see, Apple is unqiue. They aren't Dell. Although they make their money selling hardware, what makes them able to distinguish thier product in the marketplace is a little thing called "vertical integration." They, as Steve says, "make the whole widget." Without that, they would lose the advantage they have in innovation.
Because they make the hardware and the OS and several key apps, they can A) change things on a dime (like eliminating old Mac serial ports in favor of USB-only boxes), and B) they can provide with a truly seamless and trouble-free solution with regard to things like digital video: they invented firewire, put int on all their boxes, bundled imovie, bundled dvd burners and iDVD and it all works beautifully together all of the time.
Yes, yes - everyone knows that the lack of clones is also the worst part about the platform. It is precisely this which keeps their prices high and marketshare low. But without it they'd turn into another indistinguishable product...and at that point they would have lost the ability to distinguish themselves. They'd either become a bland company competing on price alone without major innovations or they'd simply be driven out of business by other bland companies competing on price alone.
So you don't have to buy a Mac, that's fine. But at least acknowledge the debt of gratitude that you and everyone else who uses a personal computer owes to the last great innovator.
Most people want ...[snip]...yet no companies seem to be interested in this option.
I don't know if I buy that. I mean, companies are all about providing what people want. If they weren't... well, their competitors would do it and they'd be sunk. I think it's rather like the discussions of software reliability versus software features: we all say we want reliability, but it's the feature list that makes us open our wallets. That's why developers make feature-bloated, unreliable software.
Besides, there's plenty of low cost computing to be had out there. I'd be surprised if the average personal computer sold today is over $800. It's just that these boxes don't represent technology innovations/improvements. The high-end systems occupy that role, almost by definition. So you don't hear about some new whiz-bang, revolutionary computer that costs $599... because there's nothing to report: it's a computer, it does what computers did last year but a little faster and a little cheaper. No, what you hear about is the $2000 machine that truly represents a New Thing.
iTerm also allows for tabbed terminal windows. Tried it once for a few minutes, so I don't know much more about it. YMMV.
That all sounds very reasonable, but it's not what happened when the Apple clones were actually on the market. They were a bitch to support because you couldn't just pop in an Apple OS CD and blow the thing away because it suddenly woulnd't have the right video driver or ethernet driver or god-knows-what. Then one day you go to install a new version of the Mac os and you realize that it and the 3rd party software to make the hardware work doesn't make nice with one another...blah, blah, blah. It wasn't pretty and it was very, very UN-Maclike.
Clones in general are bad because while they mean cheaper prices and an initial proliferation of the platform (under the best of circumstances), it also means that Apple doesn't have control over the hardware anymore.
Can I name anything that it would cause a problem with (especially since Apple in this case still makes the mobo)? well consider that one of the reasons Apple's operating system works so well is because they have to make it work with a more limited set of hardware. Once you are making a clone you then have clone makers competing mainly on price. They start taking bids on who can provide the cheapest hd / controller, video card, etc, so they can undercut the competition. Pretty soon you have an operating system that might or might not work with all that shit. You have Windows.
I do understand your position as a consumer. You clearly do not want a Mac. But I think it's equally clear that you misunderstand Apple's position in the marketplace. Clones will kill them, just as sure as I'm typing this.
(I wish I could save myself the time and trouble of formulating and typing out this argument every time it comes up. In fact last time I recall I just linked to my previous comment from another discussion - it had been modded up to 5 with comments like "that's the best explanation I've ever heard for that!" Alas, you get something less than that today because I can't find it and I'm too lazy to look further.)
It's like this. Apple has one single strength. They have one single reason for being. They have one asset that earns them a place in the market among all the PC makers selling comodity parts with a warantee on it. What is it? It's the fact that they are vertically integrated. They make the hardware, the OS and a few key apps.
This means they can make them all work together seamlessly in ways that Microsoft and Dell never can. They can provide a higher-quality, more unified experience to their customers. They can also turn the company on a freakin' dime when they decide to because they don't have to get 4 other companies to agree on the new direction. (USB anyone?)
Its also true that it is this very "asset" which keeps their prices higher than your average Micron or eMachines box. Clones would definetly mean lower prices through competition. But in the end Apple would lose thier reason for being. They would no longer be able to provide that user experience and they would no longer be able to be that innovative powerhouse that the rest of the industry sponges off of. They would become mediocre. They would end up being no different from any other company that makes software or hardware (not both). Eventually they would go under, having no way to distinguish themselves in the market.
Or something like that. Like I said, you don't have to buy one. It's not for everyone. But that is thier business, man. They can't go for the model of Microsoft or Dell. (And neither MS or Dell go for thiers!) But a healthy Apple (read: no clones) is good for everyone. Their innovations fuel the rest of the industry, whether you buy their products directly or not.
Nobody will read this far down in the discussion but I just want to put this bit of truth out into the ether:
...eventually.
1. Apple isn't evil because of "going after" this parts supplier. The supplier is in obvious breech of contract. Duh. There's plenty to criticise in the Apple company and in the Mac platform; pick a reason, just make it a valid one, okay?
2. Clones are bad for the Macintosh platform. Bad, bad, bad. Any strategy which erodes their ability to leverage OS/iApps/Hardware into a seamless, second-to-none user experience will be death to the platform. It is not good. It is bad. It will kill the one, single unique thing about this company and they will be swallowed up into the sea of mediocrity that is the rest of the PC industry. Nobody should want that, as even PC users benefit from Apple's R&D.
they clearly think (correctly) that Linux is going to be a force in the long run on the desktop.
I'm worried that what you're saying here won't prove true. Think about it. Every Linux user who is also a gamer is already dual-booting Windows. With me so far? So a game developer has to choose:
1. Don't spend the time/money to make a Linux version and sell 1 million units. To windows users. Including the Linux guys who'll just reboot to play.
2. Spend the time/money to make a LInux version and sell...1 million units. To Windows users and Linux users who will now not have to reboot.
Contrast this with the reasoning behind Macintosh versions:
1. Don't spend the time to make a Mac version. Sell 1 million units to Windows users.
2. Spend the time/money to make a Mac version. Sell 1.2 million units*. To Windows users and Mac users.
(*Who knows. The idea here is that it's a higher number. In the Linux scenario, it's not.)
Since Linux runs on the exact same hardware as Windows, I don't see how this situation will ever be remedied.
I think it's cheap to bring up a "Mac users waited a lot longer than PC gamers for that hot game" scenario in the case of Quark and OS X. I mean other than the "long time" part, what does it have to do with anything? Did PC users get QuarkXPress 6 a while back and nobody notice it?
And FYI, Quark probably makes half their money off us Mac users. Half. Some folks here appear to not know this.
Cheap shot, editors. Very cheap.
The main problem with caller ID is that it often works like this:
1. Phone company charges you for a great new service allowing you to see who's calling, thus eliminating the need to speak with telemarketers.
2. Phone company charges telemarketers for the ability to mask their number from the caller ID units.
3. Phone company charges you for a new ANTI-anti-missle....
and so on.
People would rather have pretty features on a flaky system, than a solid system.
This is not necessarily true
It's absolutely true. "Most people you work with in the IT industry" do not in any way constitute a meaningful sample of the group "people who buy software." It is of this latter group which I speak when I say they are after the New Shiny Thing and do not care about stability one iota. The software industry has shown one thing very, very clearly: features sell the product. You can't market "stability" to consumers and consumers make up the majority of software buyers (as opposed to your IT professionals.)
The truth of this is so self-evident, in fact, that I'm inclined to liken it to American politicians: People bitch about politicians - they're dishonest, stupid, crooked, whatever. We might be inclined to say that they are forced on an unhappy populace because there just aren't any better candiadates to be found. When the truth of the matter is simply this: if we truly wanted different politicians we would have them. We - get this - elect politicians. If we wanted ones that were honest we would elect them. If we wanted ones that spoke to us more intelligently than the average sound byte allowed, we would have them.
And if we wanted stable software we would have it.
I keep hoping that some well-run online song-for-song "rights buying" project comes up...I personally would pay a moderate amount for downloadable music, especially on a song-by-song basis.
Jesus, nobody told you? The Windows version will be out by year's end. And Roxio is planning a clone under a familiar name. Probably others will follow. It's a race to Windows with this model.