'I don't know why but I think I laughed for a few minutes when I read "The production has struggled recently with issues with Unions, and a fire." Is that so wrong?'
The Union should look really check where Brother Ulfang was at the time of the fire. I mean, you just can't trust that guy, they should never have let him join:
'You're making it sound like Apple took their iPhone and dumbed it down.'
Yes, I think that's exactly what happened. Take the SIM card out of an activated iPhone and which other Apple device does it most closely resemble? Answers on a postcard, etc.
'You call that a lack of innovation - I call it brilliant! And let me remind you, I don't even like iPhone, but I can appreciate the brilliance of the strategy.'
Apple (like many other companies) has been using this brilliant, fully synergized marketing strategy of 'product differentiation' for several decades now:
...and within the iPhone 4 line, going from 16Gb to 32Gb will set you back £100 (I suspect the flagship iPhone has a higher markup than any of their other pocket devices). I guess it's all about charging what the market will bear.
'There are two different markets, ergo two different products.'
More like overlapping (and rapidly converging) markets currently artificially divided by pricing of the hardware and/or phone contracts. How many people would really prefer to do without the ability to make calls or use the net outside wifi range on a phone-sized device, for reasons other than cost? If a basic unlocked, modestly priced iPhone were available in the US, just how popular would the Touch be? Why do you suppose there are so many Android phones competing with the iPhone (with a brace of tablets in development to compete with the iPad), and lots of small mp3 players competing with the Nano/Shuffle, but very few phone-sized wifi-enabled app-running media players competing directly with the Touch? Could it be because a device of this type really only makes sense if you have Apple's user base and brand image, and want to sell devices, apps and tunes to the masses without endangering your very comfortable margins on an 'aspirationally priced' market-leading smartphone?
'If Apple didn't already have the iPod before they had the iPhone, your rant might actually sound clever.'
Certainly there was a device called an 'iPod' before the iPhone was launched, but the Touch has very little in common with any earlier iPod apart from the branding and iTunes compatibility. The Touch does, however, closely resemble the iPhone, for obvious reasons. If you'd like a bit of history, here's Apple fan site iLounge on the original Touch back in 2007 (most of this is true of the current version):
'Feels less like a flagship iPod than an intentionally stripped down iPhone, with diminished cosmetics, interface and features...Unfortunately, by the past standards of a company that has proudly released products disruptive enough to threaten cannibalization or premature discontinuation of their recent predecessors, the iPod touch is not a truly great new device. In fact, iPod touch feels as if it was designed quite specifically not to threaten Apple's recent cell phone initiative, putting the future of the 110-million-selling iPod family at the mercy of the 1-million-selling iPhone...iPod touch is a stripped-down iPhone, with a similar (but not identical) display and icon-heavy touchscreen interface, one wireless antenna, and some of iPhone's applications.'
It's certainly true that the current generation of smartphones is very battery hungry. But a lot of this comes down to additional capabailities that even the combination of a wifi media player and a conventional phone won't give you. The things that really seem to drain my battery are 3G net access and GPS; if I just leave the phone switched on to receive calls and only use non-networked apps like an epub reader I can go a couple of days between charges (with normal usage, I charge once a day). And, of course, I only have to worry about a single charger (or just a cable where I have access to USB, like at work). But with your usage pattern a smartphone may have fewer advantages - 3G and GPS tend not to work well on the subway!
The cheapest PAYG Android phone in the UK is about £80, less than half the price of the cheapest Touch. Step up to a better model and add an 8Gb card to equalise the storage and it's about £115, £74 less than the basic Touch. Another payment of £20 will buy you 6 months worth of 3G net access on T-mobile (though with adequate rather than great coverage where I live). Cheap PAYG phones are common in much of the rest of Europe, though less so in some other countries including Apple's core US market.
It's actually a £350 difference for the 32Gb models (my mistake, see above), and I'd say that GPS and compass at least are now 'cheap phone components' even if the Apple Peel doesn't come with them - an £80 PAYG Android phone on sale in the UK has both.
'I recall something that was called "PDA" which seems to qualify quite well as a "smartphone without a phone", and quite a few companies like Palm, HP has been quite successfully selling those before smartphone became popular.'
I think the key phrase here is 'before smartphones became popular'. Now that the additional phone components are so cheap, PDAs have essentially vanished and the Touch pretty much has its niche to itself. I can't imagine any similar device without Apple's brand image and iTunes/App store compatibility doing well, at least in countries like the UK where several PAYG Android phones are available for substantially less than the cheapest Touch.
'In the UK you can buy products that don't exist? Like a 64 GB iPhone 4?..'
Oops! The correct comparison is of course between the £599 32Gb iPhone 4 and the £249 32Gb iPod Touch. Of course this just makes the iPhone look even more expensive relative to the Touch.
Or to put it another way, it replaces the cheap phone components that Apple left out of the Touch so that it could cash in on the low end of the market without threatening the status of its expensive flagship product. Although the true cost is often buried in a contract, in the UK you can buy an unlocked 64Gb iPhone 4 for £599. The equivalent iPod Touch is £329. Obviously the iPhone 4 is more expensive to produce, but not £270 more. The cost of this device (not to mention the cost of a complete PAYG Android phone, about £100 over here) shows that Apple could produce a much cheaper device if they chose to. But rather than owning the whole smartphone market (as they already own the mp3 player market all the way down to the Shuffle), they've decided to focus entirely on the high end. Whether this will turn out to be a wise decision in the long term remains to be seen, but it's obviously highly profitable right now! In the meantime it leaves us with the oddity of the iPod Touch, a device designed by bean counters, which has no real competition in the market because only Apple can get away with selling a 'smartphone without a phone'.
Some record companies have already responded to the evil threat of USB turntables by introducing technology that effectively eliminates ripping of their vinyl albums!:
'So you would have to go back to the vinyl. If you had access to the original tracks, you could do a better job cleaning and re-mixing, but good luck getting your hands on those. That's where posession is 9 tenths of the law - the tracks could be public domain but the owners would never lend them out since they can keep the copyright alive by remastering them. A dirty trick, but if you had a piles of piles of money you could maybe buy the tracks.'
Oddly enough, the guys doing restoration work from shellac or vinyl sources have often improved on the results of the original labels who presumably have access to the master discs (where they still exist) - e.g. various independent reissues of Schnabel's Beethoven Sonatas transferred from the 78s are more highly regarded than than the official EMI CD set. But perhaps this just comes down to the amount of care taken by (and the talent of) the restoration engineer - see for example my link to the Mark Obert-Thorn page on the Naxos site, above. I'm wondering if the recent Beatles re-masters were partly motivated by the 50 year rule. Perhaps EMI's lawyers have advised they have some chance of defending the copyright of the new 'definitive' versions, though the situation doesn't seem to be clear cut either in the UK or the US. It would certainly be an interesting test case!
This actually raises an interesting point. Obviously the out of copyright material on modern reissues has been digitally remastered for CD from analogue sources. Sometimes (especially for older recordings) extensive audio restoration is also required, a process that can involve a great deal of skill and musical judgment (i.e., you don't just hook up your turntable to Audacity and hit 'record'). Is this sufficient to create a new copyright for the digital version? Perhaps not, but the legal situation is apparently not entirely clear:
So in a couple of years when the Beatles' recordings will start to come out of copyright if EU law remains the same, would it be OK to rip the recent remasters and put them up on your website, or would you have to go back to the vinyl and do a 'needledrop' transfer..?
That's nothing. I no longer even bother playing Quake III, I prefer to scan the source code in a zen-like state. You lesser mortals may get your kicks from firing the BFG10k, but I just marvel at the elegant use of the 0x5f3759df constant.
'Unfortunately they were not licensed under any form of CC or public domain, they were simply limited free-as-in-beer downloads so once they shut down the source, no one could legally distribute them.'
It's arguably even sadder that such a limited experiment like this provoked such howls of indignation about 'unfair competition'. Never mind that 1.4 million downloads, probably many of them by people who wouldn't normally listen to this stuff, might in the long term bring in new customers to the music industry (after all, who can be satisfied with just_one_ interpretation of Beethoven?). Imagine if they'd done something really radical like waiving copyright and encouraging torrents! Maybe they were afraid that, rather than being consumed by properly trained middle-aged men listening to the Third Programme on their bakelite wirelesses, Ludwig Van might end up in the hands of Alex and his droogs and encourage them to commit ultraviolence. Or something.
'Yep, who needs an MP3 player, just cart around a 3 ring binder full of sheet music. Fun for the whole family!'
Don't be silly, you just download http://imslp.org/ to your iPad and sit on the train, nodding thoughtfully to yourself while humming the viola part. This also ensures that the seat next to you will be free, giving you more space to stretch out.
'How in blazes does a *retroactive* copyright extension encourage the creation of the work? Has everybody in power forgotten the whole frapping point of copyright??'
It'll even discourage the creation of better versions of the original work. Right now, companies like Naxos are doing audio restoration jobs on out of copyright recordings that often shame the original label's CD release (if it's even available):
The BBC tried this in the UK with a set of free-as-in-beer Beethoven symphonies. The music industry whined about it and the typically gutless response of the BBC Trust was to promise never to do it again:
Great effort in a noble cause. However, they note in the original article that:
'Right now, if you were to buy a CD of Beethoven's 9th symphony, you would not be legally allowed to do anything but listen to it. You wouldn't be able to share it, upload it, or use it as a soundtrack to your indie film- yet Beethoven has been dead for 183 years and his music is no longer copyrighted. There is a lifetime of music out there, legally in the public domain, but it has yet to be recorded and released to the public.'
Here in the UK, the copyright term on recorded music is currently only 50 years. This means that most of the core classical repertoire is already available in this form, often as very high quality recordings (they knew what they were doing by the 50s!) of great performances. Now that the cash cows of the 60s are about to fall into the public domain, the record industry has lobbied for an extension, and draft EU legislation aims to push back the term to 70 years:
There are still some great performances of that Beethoven symphony from the 1930s, of course, but the 60s recordings in near-modern sound will be off limits for another couple of decades.
There are other cheap PAYG Android phones over here too - O2 has the LG Optimus for 120 GBP, Three has something called the 'ZTE Racer' for around 100 GBP, etc. We even do pretty well on net tariffs - 20 GBP will buy you 6 months worth of net access on T-mobile (not the best network, but adequate where I live). Of course, we pay more for pretty much everything else...
'The article, as I understand it, is about the general lack of something that could be described as "Android pod touch"'
That would be a pretty pointless product, at least where I live. In the UK, you can buy an unlockable and Android 2.1-compatible PAYG phone for 100 GBP (plus 15 GBP for an 8Gb micro SD). The 8Gb iPod Touch is 189 GBP. The iPod Touch was designed by accountants to widen the user base while preserving the much larger profits that Apple makes on the iPhone, either through lucrative deals with their network partners or high retail prices. An unlocked 32Gb iPhone 4 is 600 GBP, but the equivalent Touch is 250 GBP. I'm sure the iPhone costs a bit more to make, but 350 GBP more..? Google quite reasonably assumed that their hardware partners wouldn't see much of a market for a 'smartphone without a phone', which you can only get away with selling if you're Apple, and the official version of Android (with Market, etc.) was intended purely as a phone OS. The success of the iPad has changed things, of course, and nobody will be surprised to see a tablet-optimised Android 3.
Slashdot Mirror
'I don't know why but I think I laughed for a few minutes when I read "The production has struggled recently with issues with Unions, and a fire." Is that so wrong?'
The Union should look really check where Brother Ulfang was at the time of the fire. I mean, you just can't trust that guy, they should never have let him join:
http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Union_of_Maedhros
'You're making it sound like Apple took their iPhone and dumbed it down.'
Yes, I think that's exactly what happened. Take the SIM card out of an activated iPhone and which other Apple device does it most closely resemble? Answers on a postcard, etc.
'You call that a lack of innovation - I call it brilliant! And let me remind you, I don't even like iPhone, but I can appreciate the brilliance of the strategy.'
Apple (like many other companies) has been using this brilliant, fully synergized marketing strategy of 'product differentiation' for several decades now:
http://lowendmac.com/roadapples/lc.shtml
...and within the iPhone 4 line, going from 16Gb to 32Gb will set you back £100 (I suspect the flagship iPhone has a higher markup than any of their other pocket devices). I guess it's all about charging what the market will bear.
'They just haven't gotten around to installing the Sterling motors and generators yet.'
However, other applications of the technology can already be tested in this technically accurate simulation:
http://www.bossmonster.com/games/antcity.html
The article they probably got this story from is a bit more informative - complete with diagram!:
http://www.lvrj.com/news/vdara-visitor---death-ray--scorched-hair-103777559.html
'There are two different markets, ergo two different products.'
More like overlapping (and rapidly converging) markets currently artificially divided by pricing of the hardware and/or phone contracts. How many people would really prefer to do without the ability to make calls or use the net outside wifi range on a phone-sized device, for reasons other than cost? If a basic unlocked, modestly priced iPhone were available in the US, just how popular would the Touch be? Why do you suppose there are so many Android phones competing with the iPhone (with a brace of tablets in development to compete with the iPad), and lots of small mp3 players competing with the Nano/Shuffle, but very few phone-sized wifi-enabled app-running media players competing directly with the Touch? Could it be because a device of this type really only makes sense if you have Apple's user base and brand image, and want to sell devices, apps and tunes to the masses without endangering your very comfortable margins on an 'aspirationally priced' market-leading smartphone?
'If Apple didn't already have the iPod before they had the iPhone, your rant might actually sound clever.'
Certainly there was a device called an 'iPod' before the iPhone was launched, but the Touch has very little in common with any earlier iPod apart from the branding and iTunes compatibility. The Touch does, however, closely resemble the iPhone, for obvious reasons. If you'd like a bit of history, here's Apple fan site iLounge on the original Touch back in 2007 (most of this is true of the current version):
'Feels less like a flagship iPod than an intentionally stripped down iPhone, with diminished cosmetics, interface and features...Unfortunately, by the past standards of a company that has proudly released products disruptive enough to threaten cannibalization or premature discontinuation of their recent predecessors, the iPod touch is not a truly great new device. In fact, iPod touch feels as if it was designed quite specifically not to threaten Apple's recent cell phone initiative, putting the future of the 110-million-selling iPod family at the mercy of the 1-million-selling iPhone...iPod touch is a stripped-down iPhone, with a similar (but not identical) display and icon-heavy touchscreen interface, one wireless antenna, and some of iPhone's applications.'
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/reviews/entry/apple-ipod-touch-8gb-16gb/
It's certainly true that the current generation of smartphones is very battery hungry. But a lot of this comes down to additional capabailities that even the combination of a wifi media player and a conventional phone won't give you. The things that really seem to drain my battery are 3G net access and GPS; if I just leave the phone switched on to receive calls and only use non-networked apps like an epub reader I can go a couple of days between charges (with normal usage, I charge once a day). And, of course, I only have to worry about a single charger (or just a cable where I have access to USB, like at work). But with your usage pattern a smartphone may have fewer advantages - 3G and GPS tend not to work well on the subway!
T-mobile Pulse Mini from Argos. But you only get a resistive screen (the regular Pulse for £20 more has a very decent capacitative screen).
The cheapest PAYG Android phone in the UK is about £80, less than half the price of the cheapest Touch. Step up to a better model and add an 8Gb card to equalise the storage and it's about £115, £74 less than the basic Touch. Another payment of £20 will buy you 6 months worth of 3G net access on T-mobile (though with adequate rather than great coverage where I live). Cheap PAYG phones are common in much of the rest of Europe, though less so in some other countries including Apple's core US market.
It's actually a £350 difference for the 32Gb models (my mistake, see above), and I'd say that GPS and compass at least are now 'cheap phone components' even if the Apple Peel doesn't come with them - an £80 PAYG Android phone on sale in the UK has both.
'I recall something that was called "PDA" which seems to qualify quite well as a "smartphone without a phone", and quite a few companies like Palm, HP has been quite successfully selling those before smartphone became popular.'
I think the key phrase here is 'before smartphones became popular'. Now that the additional phone components are so cheap, PDAs have essentially vanished and the Touch pretty much has its niche to itself. I can't imagine any similar device without Apple's brand image and iTunes/App store compatibility doing well, at least in countries like the UK where several PAYG Android phones are available for substantially less than the cheapest Touch.
'In the UK you can buy products that don't exist? Like a 64 GB iPhone 4?..'
Oops! The correct comparison is of course between the £599 32Gb iPhone 4 and the £249 32Gb iPod Touch. Of course this just makes the iPhone look even more expensive relative to the Touch.
'It juts uses the iPod as its UI.'
Or to put it another way, it replaces the cheap phone components that Apple left out of the Touch so that it could cash in on the low end of the market without threatening the status of its expensive flagship product. Although the true cost is often buried in a contract, in the UK you can buy an unlocked 64Gb iPhone 4 for £599. The equivalent iPod Touch is £329. Obviously the iPhone 4 is more expensive to produce, but not £270 more. The cost of this device (not to mention the cost of a complete PAYG Android phone, about £100 over here) shows that Apple could produce a much cheaper device if they chose to. But rather than owning the whole smartphone market (as they already own the mp3 player market all the way down to the Shuffle), they've decided to focus entirely on the high end. Whether this will turn out to be a wise decision in the long term remains to be seen, but it's obviously highly profitable right now! In the meantime it leaves us with the oddity of the iPod Touch, a device designed by bean counters, which has no real competition in the market because only Apple can get away with selling a 'smartphone without a phone'.
Some record companies have already responded to the evil threat of USB turntables by introducing technology that effectively eliminates ripping of their vinyl albums!:
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2007/05/digiwax
Field trials have already begun:
http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/3998323
However, it is not expected to replace a related device in certain specialised applications:
http://fusedfilm.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/ghostbusters-girl-both.jpg
'So you would have to go back to the vinyl. If you had access to the original tracks, you could do a better job cleaning and re-mixing, but good luck getting your hands on those. That's where posession is 9 tenths of the law - the tracks could be public domain but the owners would never lend them out since they can keep the copyright alive by remastering them. A dirty trick, but if you had a piles of piles of money you could maybe buy the tracks.'
Oddly enough, the guys doing restoration work from shellac or vinyl sources have often improved on the results of the original labels who presumably have access to the master discs (where they still exist) - e.g. various independent reissues of Schnabel's Beethoven Sonatas transferred from the 78s are more highly regarded than than the official EMI CD set. But perhaps this just comes down to the amount of care taken by (and the talent of) the restoration engineer - see for example my link to the Mark Obert-Thorn page on the Naxos site, above. I'm wondering if the recent Beatles re-masters were partly motivated by the 50 year rule. Perhaps EMI's lawyers have advised they have some chance of defending the copyright of the new 'definitive' versions, though the situation doesn't seem to be clear cut either in the UK or the US. It would certainly be an interesting test case!
'Where can I buy a 50 year old CD?'
This actually raises an interesting point. Obviously the out of copyright material on modern reissues has been digitally remastered for CD from analogue sources. Sometimes (especially for older recordings) extensive audio restoration is also required, a process that can involve a great deal of skill and musical judgment (i.e., you don't just hook up your turntable to Audacity and hit 'record'). Is this sufficient to create a new copyright for the digital version? Perhaps not, but the legal situation is apparently not entirely clear:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9lTosTfacJYJ:www.tknet.co.uk/soundrec.htm
http://www.freeculture.org.uk/copyright/faq#Doyougetanewcopyrightfordigitalremastering.3F
So in a couple of years when the Beatles' recordings will start to come out of copyright if EU law remains the same, would it be OK to rip the recent remasters and put them up on your website, or would you have to go back to the vinyl and do a 'needledrop' transfer..?
'Recordings are crutches.'
That's nothing. I no longer even bother playing Quake III, I prefer to scan the source code in a zen-like state. You lesser mortals may get your kicks from firing the BFG10k, but I just marvel at the elegant use of the 0x5f3759df constant.
'Unfortunately they were not licensed under any form of CC or public domain, they were simply limited free-as-in-beer downloads so once they shut down the source, no one could legally distribute them.'
It's arguably even sadder that such a limited experiment like this provoked such howls of indignation about 'unfair competition'. Never mind that 1.4 million downloads, probably many of them by people who wouldn't normally listen to this stuff, might in the long term bring in new customers to the music industry (after all, who can be satisfied with just_one_ interpretation of Beethoven?). Imagine if they'd done something really radical like waiving copyright and encouraging torrents! Maybe they were afraid that, rather than being consumed by properly trained middle-aged men listening to the Third Programme on their bakelite wirelesses, Ludwig Van might end up in the hands of Alex and his droogs and encourage them to commit ultraviolence. Or something.
'Yep, who needs an MP3 player, just cart around a 3 ring binder full of sheet music. Fun for the whole family!'
Don't be silly, you just download http://imslp.org/ to your iPad and sit on the train, nodding thoughtfully to yourself while humming the viola part. This also ensures that the seat next to you will be free, giving you more space to stretch out.
'How in blazes does a *retroactive* copyright extension encourage the creation of the work? Has everybody in power forgotten the whole frapping point of copyright??'
It'll even discourage the creation of better versions of the original work. Right now, companies like Naxos are doing audio restoration jobs on out of copyright recordings that often shame the original label's CD release (if it's even available):
http://www.naxos.com/historical/engineer_thorn.htm
The BBC tried this in the UK with a set of free-as-in-beer Beethoven symphonies. The music industry whined about it and the typically gutless response of the BBC Trust was to promise never to do it again:
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23652107-end-this-downloads-ban.do
http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/070207-NL-downloads.html
Great effort in a noble cause. However, they note in the original article that:
'Right now, if you were to buy a CD of Beethoven's 9th symphony, you would not be legally allowed to do anything but listen to it. You wouldn't be able to share it, upload it, or use it as a soundtrack to your indie film- yet Beethoven has been dead for 183 years and his music is no longer copyrighted. There is a lifetime of music out there, legally in the public domain, but it has yet to be recorded and released to the public.'
Here in the UK, the copyright term on recorded music is currently only 50 years. This means that most of the core classical repertoire is already available in this form, often as very high quality recordings (they knew what they were doing by the 50s!) of great performances. Now that the cash cows of the 60s are about to fall into the public domain, the record industry has lobbied for an extension, and draft EU legislation aims to push back the term to 70 years:
http://www.euractiv.com/en/innovation/music-copyright-divisive-despite-meps-backing/article-181703
There are still some great performances of that Beethoven symphony from the 1930s, of course, but the 60s recordings in near-modern sound will be off limits for another couple of decades.
I was thinking of the T-mobile Pulse (Huawei U8220):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-Mobile_Pulse
http://wiki.modaco.com/index.php/Huawei_U8220
http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/shop/pay-as-you-go/t-mobile-pulse-payg/
Unfortunately, a quick look at ebay suggests you'd pay about $100 USD more over there (the reverse of the usual situation!).
There's also a Pulse Mini (U8110), with a smaller (& resistive) touchscreen for 80 GBP:
http://www.t-mobile.co.uk/shop/pay-as-you-go/t-mobile-pulse-mini/
There are other cheap PAYG Android phones over here too - O2 has the LG Optimus for 120 GBP, Three has something called the 'ZTE Racer' for around 100 GBP, etc. We even do pretty well on net tariffs - 20 GBP will buy you 6 months worth of net access on T-mobile (not the best network, but adequate where I live). Of course, we pay more for pretty much everything else...
'The article, as I understand it, is about the general lack of something that could be described as "Android pod touch"'
That would be a pretty pointless product, at least where I live. In the UK, you can buy an unlockable and Android 2.1-compatible PAYG phone for 100 GBP (plus 15 GBP for an 8Gb micro SD). The 8Gb iPod Touch is 189 GBP. The iPod Touch was designed by accountants to widen the user base while preserving the much larger profits that Apple makes on the iPhone, either through lucrative deals with their network partners or high retail prices. An unlocked 32Gb iPhone 4 is 600 GBP, but the equivalent Touch is 250 GBP. I'm sure the iPhone costs a bit more to make, but 350 GBP more..? Google quite reasonably assumed that their hardware partners wouldn't see much of a market for a 'smartphone without a phone', which you can only get away with selling if you're Apple, and the official version of Android (with Market, etc.) was intended purely as a phone OS. The success of the iPad has changed things, of course, and nobody will be surprised to see a tablet-optimised Android 3.