The sales of the Xseve were just poor. Really poor. So far from being something to "drive the environment" they were just dragging down the profits.
Perhaps they will come up with something else in the meantime (the Mac Pro server and Mac Mini server are not ideal replacements for some situations, if you really do need rack mounting and redundant PSUs etc), but they recognised that other companies serve that market better than Apple does, so they withdrew. The beauty of OS X though, is that it fully plays nice with Linux-based servers, so you don't *need* an OS X server necessarily, when a Linux-based one that cost you less will do the job just as well, if not better (although that's not to downplay OS X server or the Xserve itself).
He already has. Tim Cook has been running Apple for a while, and was solely in charge during Steve's previous leave of absence. They have been working on what to do for some time, not just with Tim Cook, but with the whole top level team. Consider that they have known Steve's health condition for a lot longer than we have.
iOS is always going to face Android and eventually lose, since the latter is available on many different phones from many different manufacturers.
In terms of PC sales though, Apple is continuing to grow. In 2008 their share of new sales overall went from 9% to 14%. Steve Jobs mentioned in the 2010 keynote that the figure was now closer to 1 in 5. Essentially they are displacing Windows boxes (and not just in the home environment).
OS X is more open and flexible than Windows, and has more stuff that consumers want by default, marketed to them extremely effectively (iLife especially, is streets ahead of anything on Windows). I don't see them cutting into Linux marketshare *except* on the hardware side, for people that virtualise and need OS X also, or just like the design (eg, Mac Minis with XBMC on them).
Either way, they have certainly judged their market position well with many of their products (the original AppleTV was a bit of a bust, as was the Mighty Mouse with the tiny trackball on it) and will continue to do well in those areas.
Their only truly closed ecosystem is iOS. As soon as you move away from that onto OS X itself, you run into open formats, increased interoperability (OS X ships with Exchange support by default, which even Windows didn't (or still doesn't - is it in Win 7 retail?), as well as all the familiar Unix stuff underneath that make it play nice (mostly) with fully open systems. Their document formats are open, so much more like OOo's format than MS Office), they store mail in.mbox format, their calendar and address book systems are open source (and the two are being merged I think, or were). They ship with X ready to go (although not usually installed by default, it either grabs it off the disk or from Apple's servers if you need it) and Rosetta for your legacy PPC apps. Their developer tools are completely free (even for developing iOS apps - the $99 fee only applies if you want to sell on the store), and they feature a large complement of OSS stuff in them - GCC is their main complier.
I know that many people (Stallman I'm looking at you) won't be happy unless the entire OS and its apps are completely open source, but in this imperfect situation, it is the best marriage of OSS and proprietary software and hardware that I have seen, mainly through my experience with using it for more than 10 years. I am not surprised they are making money hand over fist. Their price premium for hardware reflects that; it's simply good business, since you charge what the market will bear, and this was confirmed as one of the few tech companies to grow during the recession.
I know some will now claim "we'll, you're locked in, you have no choice!" but that's only the case in a few small cases, depending on the software you use. All your music can be moved onto open systems (I know because I use my purchased iTunes stuff on Ubuntu), your documents can be converted easily into non-apple formats (all your iWork stuff), if you have MS Office formats you can move to Windows, your email is all in.mbox format.. it goes on. The only issues that most people will face if they want to move away from Mac completely (including iTunes on Windows) are movies and TV shows, since they still contain DRM (not at Apple's behest), or if they want to keep their iPhone but don't want to use iTunes - there are other OSS methods for working with iPods and so on without iTunes, but the iPhone is still iTunes only. Not bad overall I think.
Not to mention the man hours they put into OSS projects as a whole (that of course benefit them, but not all of the stuff they contribute to was OSS first, they have opened up several of their own projects).
Followed by a whitelist of vendors so you wouldn't have to confirm if you didn't want to. Use some hefty encryption to make spoofing a legit vendor (or specific terminal of a vendor) more trouble than it's worth. Have the whitelist also be optional.
Also have the NFP chip only power up if the phone is being held, in the same way the screen turns off due to the proximity sensor if it's by your head, set up a couple to detect when the phone is in your hand, vs just in your pocket. Saves power too, since the chip is not powered all the time. Also make this optional.
Attach a hard limit on spending per hour/day/week unless specifically overridden by the user. Make this optional.
I received a text message from someone I don't know that said "don't tell anyone with an iPhone, but there's another browser exploit in my Android phone!"
They may *want* convenience, but I want a gold plated toilet seat, but it's just not on the cards.
If it were left up to the American People, you'd all be driving around in V8 Suburbans and Navigators until you'd squandered every last drop of oil on the planet and you *still* wouldn't switch to diesel because "a manly car has a V8 petrol engine".
Sometimes you need top-down kick starts - the moon race, for example, was set into motion by the government and was one of the best things to ever happen to the US; an explosion of science, technological progress and economics that benefited everyone with the results of that process, not just the twenty odd guys who actually went up there.
Occasionally you have to make decisions that are focussed on the long term for the population as a whole, not just "how will this affect me personally over the next few weeks".
There is all this talk about "it's all bogus numbers" or "we don;t have the infrastructure" or "I need to tow my boat 102 miles once per year and these things only have a range of 100 miles!" and all sorts of "wah wah, they're not exactly like what I have now, why should I change?!" but sometimes you need to get the ball rolling.
TNT (a parcel delivery company) has fully electric trucks running here in the UK. These are 7.5T (mgw) rigid box trucks that spend all day driving around delivering goods and parcels. They seem to be doing just fine. For the vast majority of commuter needs an electric vehicle would be ideal, and as we have seen *in use today* large commercial vehicles like buses and trucks can also perform their daily jobs just fine as all-electric.
That's not a quote though, at least not one that has been attributed to him by the poster. You don't quote someone by saying "he was all like" and then throwing in a cheap bit of hyperbole unless that is exactly what he said. I can't find an actual quote via google right now, but I am willing to be corrected. This is how Apple "facts" get started on/. - someone posits something like that carmack 'quote' and it is accepted as fact from then onwards. The phrase is obviously BS, and it may or may not be an actual quote. I suspect it is not, and if Carmack did express surprise at the number of people buying from the Android Marketplace that he wouldn't have worded it as flippantly as that. I strongly suspect it has either been enormously distorted to try and justify the OP's assertion that he is an "apple fanboy", or just regular outright falsehood.
Wow, so merely liking a platform that is unpopular with slashdot makes you a fanboy now? Is it possible for him to genuinely find iOS compelling for what he is doing in his line of work without him being what you are equating with some brainwashed, blind worshipper. Of all people to accuse of being "hypnotised by marketing" John Carmack is pretty low down on the list of likely candidates.
So to be an apple fanboy you need to:
* work on the platform and express that you quite like it, producing some pretty good stuff. * ask a question that you don;t know the answer to, re: android and iOS app sales in a consumer demographic that he is interested in (people going to a con named after a game he created) * express surprise at the answer received, one that points to him possibly reevaluating how much energy to put into porting his new engine over, given that a loose poll at QuakeCon suggests that sales on Android are as high as they are on iOS among his target demographic.
* Profit?
I'm not seeing how you can twist this into "he's an Apple Fanboy" unless you really just mean "anyone who says anything positive about iOS is a fanboy" which is probably it.
Video8 was never a pro format! It was better than VHS-C, but barely. Both Video8 and Hi8 were much more consumer focussed, although there were some pro Hi8 cameras.
MiniDisc is also far from a flop - it is used extensively in the radio industry and in ENG applications and is still one of the best replacements for cassette tape as a re-recordable medium. It failed in the consumer space because the consumer-level decks had the stupid Serial Copy Management System that prevented you making digital copies more than one generation deep (even of your own stuff), which the pro-hardware didn't have. It also faced the rise of the mp3 player. It was also pretty successful in the UK market before mp3 came along, with several manufacturers selling portable and deck players and combined HiFi systems with MD built in. The pre-recorded market never took off - there was no benefit over CD at the time, but as a re-recordable format it was a huge hit.
While our fuel is sold in litres, all of our official fuel consumption figures are in miles per Imperial Gallon.
While we use metric for many things, we still buy pints of beer (but wine and spirits in millilitres) , have mph speed limits and mile posts, mpg for consumption (but fuel sold by the litre). We're completely hybrid on our unit systems here.
OOo could *not* do this the last time I used it, and googling for a solution turned up several discussions about how it was not possible.
Thus, I stopped using it and went back to Excel.
My suitability to comment remains unaffected. You seem to have failed to log in though. If you don't know how to perform this simple operation you really have no business commenting on this discussion.
Who knows? Ask the original starter of this thread who was making the distinction between who "owns" your phone in the android and iOS ecosystems. I was just commenting on his assertions.
The original complaint being "I want an iPhone, but I know ahead of time that the system is a walled garden, despite this I will moan and complain that it should be more like Android"?
There are pros and cons to both ecosystems - a negative on the iPhone side is an inability to install apps that are not in the app store without jailbreaking. This is irrelevant to a discussion about what apps are sold in the store however; if the potential inability to install apps not approved by Apple is a concern then why buy an iPhone in the first place? If you bought one anyway and then rooted it then you are in exactly the same position as an Android user is right now in this situation - can't get it through the main store, but can install it anyway if they really want.
The argument here is about whether Apple and Google are right to dictate what they can carry in their respective stores and the answer is "of course" - it's their store. The issues arising from what to do after that are part of the differences between the two systems, they don't somehow "justify" Google's decision but not Apple's. It's either both, or neither.
Some Android Handset Makers: "No! Buy a new phone!"
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Also note that rooting the phone to install 2.2 solves the problem, but so does rooting an iPhone to solve the "Apple' rules" problem.
Still, the level of hypocrisy seen in these comments is just hilarious. Google are taking the exact position that Apple have taken: deciding what will and won't be allowed in their online store, and yet the twisting and contorting by the Apple-bashing folk to justify this as somehow different from Apple is amusing. The last time this happened was when a serious bug appeared for Android (sending text messages to the wrong people), and there were a flurry of posts trying to downplay it as "not serious" or "this hasn't affected me so it's not an issue" and even "I haven't seen this bug so I doubt it's genuine".
Any criticism of the Android platform/ecosystem, no matter how deserved or accurate, is met with a volley of fury and justification from slashdot at the moment. There's a term that was coined for just such behaviour: fanboys. Of course, fanboys only exist in the Apple camp, right?
I'm not deciding one way or the other whether this is a good decision, but it is a decision made based on the rules of the store. Nor do I think that the inability to install non-App Store software on your iPhone without rooting it is necessarily a good thing either. It is interesting to watch the reactions of people on both sides though.
It doesn't say "Linux" it says "open source" and they are not the same thing, although it is something of a non sequitur to call this a "puzzling or bad" move (which seems to be the inference) - the project was forked because the community didn't like where it was going, which is one of the major benefits open source code has over closed.
You seem to have fallen into the trap that any perceived criticism of open source is an attack on Linux, though. I have plenty of open source software on my Mac, including Open Office. If this (and future) releases of LibreOffice [seriously, they need to change the name] can offer a strong alternative to MS Office, then I'm all for it.
My first question, can it do graphs on new sheets yet? That was my one annoyance with the spreadsheet app in OO.
I should probably mention that I use MS Office for Mac all the time for writing reports. Word itself I can take or leave - it's a pretty poor and idiosyncratic word processor that drives you mental with its attempts to be helpful. Excel, on the other hand, really excels (ha) at what it does and makes the cost of Office worth it for me (and not just for the graphs on new pages).
If you're talking about the Angry Birds issue, it's "easily cracked" if the developer ignores Apple's guidelines on how to set it up.
Otherwise, I think they are doing just fine with no DRM on the iTunes music store. If you make it convenient, and give people what they want at a reasonable price they will buy it. Of course there will always be some people who pirate, but playing chase with them for eternity at the expense of your paying customers is silly.
In terms of actual cash, I imagine they earn more interest on their cash reserves than the cost of eating $10,000 in iTunes store sales. They effectively bought $10,000 worth of PR.
It's been open for 18 days, so probably not quite 10 billion yet. You can hold your derision until it's been open for 2.5 years like the mobile App Store. I'm not sure it will hit 10 billion in that time frame though, since it is less focused on cheap and cheerful free apps (although there are a lot of those), but more on slightly more expensive apps and games.
Don't forget they not only did it once, but *twice* from 68k to PPC and then to Intel, and strongly supported the transitions each time, with a considerable tail off to enable backwards compatibility.
I have a scanner plugin written for OS9 that still works to this day in Photoshop CS on 10.6.6 - so that's a Classic plugin, running inside a PPC app, on top of an Intel-only version of the OS, and it all works fine (albeit slowly since Rosetta-translated Photoshop is slower than a native x86 app, but I cannot afford to upgrade the Creative Suite.
Slashdot Mirror
The sales of the Xseve were just poor. Really poor. So far from being something to "drive the environment" they were just dragging down the profits.
Perhaps they will come up with something else in the meantime (the Mac Pro server and Mac Mini server are not ideal replacements for some situations, if you really do need rack mounting and redundant PSUs etc), but they recognised that other companies serve that market better than Apple does, so they withdrew. The beauty of OS X though, is that it fully plays nice with Linux-based servers, so you don't *need* an OS X server necessarily, when a Linux-based one that cost you less will do the job just as well, if not better (although that's not to downplay OS X server or the Xserve itself).
Basically what you said, but the exact opposite.
Apple were growing during the recession, unlike almost every other tech company. Mainly due to iPhone sales.
Yeah, it's now OS X.
The hardware is gone, but the software lives on in a highly capable OS.
He already has. Tim Cook has been running Apple for a while, and was solely in charge during Steve's previous leave of absence. They have been working on what to do for some time, not just with Tim Cook, but with the whole top level team. Consider that they have known Steve's health condition for a lot longer than we have.
iOS is always going to face Android and eventually lose, since the latter is available on many different phones from many different manufacturers.
In terms of PC sales though, Apple is continuing to grow. In 2008 their share of new sales overall went from 9% to 14%. Steve Jobs mentioned in the 2010 keynote that the figure was now closer to 1 in 5. Essentially they are displacing Windows boxes (and not just in the home environment).
OS X is more open and flexible than Windows, and has more stuff that consumers want by default, marketed to them extremely effectively (iLife especially, is streets ahead of anything on Windows). I don't see them cutting into Linux marketshare *except* on the hardware side, for people that virtualise and need OS X also, or just like the design (eg, Mac Minis with XBMC on them).
Either way, they have certainly judged their market position well with many of their products (the original AppleTV was a bit of a bust, as was the Mighty Mouse with the tiny trackball on it) and will continue to do well in those areas.
Their only truly closed ecosystem is iOS. As soon as you move away from that onto OS X itself, you run into open formats, increased interoperability (OS X ships with Exchange support by default, which even Windows didn't (or still doesn't - is it in Win 7 retail?), as well as all the familiar Unix stuff underneath that make it play nice (mostly) with fully open systems. Their document formats are open, so much more like OOo's format than MS Office), they store mail in .mbox format, their calendar and address book systems are open source (and the two are being merged I think, or were). They ship with X ready to go (although not usually installed by default, it either grabs it off the disk or from Apple's servers if you need it) and Rosetta for your legacy PPC apps. Their developer tools are completely free (even for developing iOS apps - the $99 fee only applies if you want to sell on the store), and they feature a large complement of OSS stuff in them - GCC is their main complier.
I know that many people (Stallman I'm looking at you) won't be happy unless the entire OS and its apps are completely open source, but in this imperfect situation, it is the best marriage of OSS and proprietary software and hardware that I have seen, mainly through my experience with using it for more than 10 years. I am not surprised they are making money hand over fist. Their price premium for hardware reflects that; it's simply good business, since you charge what the market will bear, and this was confirmed as one of the few tech companies to grow during the recession.
I know some will now claim "we'll, you're locked in, you have no choice!" but that's only the case in a few small cases, depending on the software you use. All your music can be moved onto open systems (I know because I use my purchased iTunes stuff on Ubuntu), your documents can be converted easily into non-apple formats (all your iWork stuff), if you have MS Office formats you can move to Windows, your email is all in .mbox format.. it goes on. The only issues that most people will face if they want to move away from Mac completely (including iTunes on Windows) are movies and TV shows, since they still contain DRM (not at Apple's behest), or if they want to keep their iPhone but don't want to use iTunes - there are other OSS methods for working with iPods and so on without iTunes, but the iPhone is still iTunes only. Not bad overall I think.
Not to mention the man hours they put into OSS projects as a whole (that of course benefit them, but not all of the stuff they contribute to was OSS first, they have opened up several of their own projects).
So can Google. Both ecosystems have remote kill switches.
Google has used theirs too.
"Do you want to purchase this?"
[Purchase] [Do Not Purchase]
Followed by a whitelist of vendors so you wouldn't have to confirm if you didn't want to. Use some hefty encryption to make spoofing a legit vendor (or specific terminal of a vendor) more trouble than it's worth. Have the whitelist also be optional.
Also have the NFP chip only power up if the phone is being held, in the same way the screen turns off due to the proximity sensor if it's by your head, set up a couple to detect when the phone is in your hand, vs just in your pocket. Saves power too, since the chip is not powered all the time. Also make this optional.
Attach a hard limit on spending per hour/day/week unless specifically overridden by the user. Make this optional.
I received a text message from someone I don't know that said "don't tell anyone with an iPhone, but there's another browser exploit in my Android phone!"
I kid, I kid.
They may *want* convenience, but I want a gold plated toilet seat, but it's just not on the cards.
If it were left up to the American People, you'd all be driving around in V8 Suburbans and Navigators until you'd squandered every last drop of oil on the planet and you *still* wouldn't switch to diesel because "a manly car has a V8 petrol engine".
Sometimes you need top-down kick starts - the moon race, for example, was set into motion by the government and was one of the best things to ever happen to the US; an explosion of science, technological progress and economics that benefited everyone with the results of that process, not just the twenty odd guys who actually went up there.
Occasionally you have to make decisions that are focussed on the long term for the population as a whole, not just "how will this affect me personally over the next few weeks".
There is all this talk about "it's all bogus numbers" or "we don;t have the infrastructure" or "I need to tow my boat 102 miles once per year and these things only have a range of 100 miles!" and all sorts of "wah wah, they're not exactly like what I have now, why should I change?!" but sometimes you need to get the ball rolling.
TNT (a parcel delivery company) has fully electric trucks running here in the UK. These are 7.5T (mgw) rigid box trucks that spend all day driving around delivering goods and parcels. They seem to be doing just fine. For the vast majority of commuter needs an electric vehicle would be ideal, and as we have seen *in use today* large commercial vehicles like buses and trucks can also perform their daily jobs just fine as all-electric.
That's not a quote though, at least not one that has been attributed to him by the poster. You don't quote someone by saying "he was all like" and then throwing in a cheap bit of hyperbole unless that is exactly what he said. I can't find an actual quote via google right now, but I am willing to be corrected. This is how Apple "facts" get started on /. - someone posits something like that carmack 'quote' and it is accepted as fact from then onwards. The phrase is obviously BS, and it may or may not be an actual quote. I suspect it is not, and if Carmack did express surprise at the number of people buying from the Android Marketplace that he wouldn't have worded it as flippantly as that. I strongly suspect it has either been enormously distorted to try and justify the OP's assertion that he is an "apple fanboy", or just regular outright falsehood.
Wow, so merely liking a platform that is unpopular with slashdot makes you a fanboy now? Is it possible for him to genuinely find iOS compelling for what he is doing in his line of work without him being what you are equating with some brainwashed, blind worshipper. Of all people to accuse of being "hypnotised by marketing" John Carmack is pretty low down on the list of likely candidates.
So to be an apple fanboy you need to:
* work on the platform and express that you quite like it, producing some pretty good stuff.
* ask a question that you don;t know the answer to, re: android and iOS app sales in a consumer demographic that he is interested in (people going to a con named after a game he created)
* express surprise at the answer received, one that points to him possibly reevaluating how much energy to put into porting his new engine over, given that a loose poll at QuakeCon suggests that sales on Android are as high as they are on iOS among his target demographic.
* Profit?
I'm not seeing how you can twist this into "he's an Apple Fanboy" unless you really just mean "anyone who says anything positive about iOS is a fanboy" which is probably it.
Video8 was never a pro format! It was better than VHS-C, but barely. Both Video8 and Hi8 were much more consumer focussed, although there were some pro Hi8 cameras.
MiniDisc is also far from a flop - it is used extensively in the radio industry and in ENG applications and is still one of the best replacements for cassette tape as a re-recordable medium. It failed in the consumer space because the consumer-level decks had the stupid Serial Copy Management System that prevented you making digital copies more than one generation deep (even of your own stuff), which the pro-hardware didn't have. It also faced the rise of the mp3 player. It was also pretty successful in the UK market before mp3 came along, with several manufacturers selling portable and deck players and combined HiFi systems with MD built in. The pre-recorded market never took off - there was no benefit over CD at the time, but as a re-recordable format it was a huge hit.
While our fuel is sold in litres, all of our official fuel consumption figures are in miles per Imperial Gallon.
While we use metric for many things, we still buy pints of beer (but wine and spirits in millilitres) , have mph speed limits and mile posts, mpg for consumption (but fuel sold by the litre). We're completely hybrid on our unit systems here.
Rendering exactly as you state on Safari 5.0.3 on OS X. I think it just strips out the display of unicode characters, which is very strange.
é © å á
There are ten characters in the above line in the edit box. How many display in the preview and the final comment? (Edit: 4 it seems)
OOo could *not* do this the last time I used it, and googling for a solution turned up several discussions about how it was not possible.
Thus, I stopped using it and went back to Excel.
My suitability to comment remains unaffected. You seem to have failed to log in though. If you don't know how to perform this simple operation you really have no business commenting on this discussion.
Who knows? Ask the original starter of this thread who was making the distinction between who "owns" your phone in the android and iOS ecosystems. I was just commenting on his assertions.
Would have to be vi, since my keyboard only has about 6 meta keys - clearly not enough for emacs.
The original complaint being "I want an iPhone, but I know ahead of time that the system is a walled garden, despite this I will moan and complain that it should be more like Android"?
There are pros and cons to both ecosystems - a negative on the iPhone side is an inability to install apps that are not in the app store without jailbreaking. This is irrelevant to a discussion about what apps are sold in the store however; if the potential inability to install apps not approved by Apple is a concern then why buy an iPhone in the first place? If you bought one anyway and then rooted it then you are in exactly the same position as an Android user is right now in this situation - can't get it through the main store, but can install it anyway if they really want.
The argument here is about whether Apple and Google are right to dictate what they can carry in their respective stores and the answer is "of course" - it's their store. The issues arising from what to do after that are part of the differences between the two systems, they don't somehow "justify" Google's decision but not Apple's. It's either both, or neither.
Just like some Android manufacturers who have users who can't upgrade to Froyo without rooting....
Android Phone User: "Give me Froyo!"
Some Android Handset Makers: "No! Buy a new phone!"
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Also note that rooting the phone to install 2.2 solves the problem, but so does rooting an iPhone to solve the "Apple' rules" problem.
Still, the level of hypocrisy seen in these comments is just hilarious. Google are taking the exact position that Apple have taken: deciding what will and won't be allowed in their online store, and yet the twisting and contorting by the Apple-bashing folk to justify this as somehow different from Apple is amusing. The last time this happened was when a serious bug appeared for Android (sending text messages to the wrong people), and there were a flurry of posts trying to downplay it as "not serious" or "this hasn't affected me so it's not an issue" and even "I haven't seen this bug so I doubt it's genuine".
Any criticism of the Android platform/ecosystem, no matter how deserved or accurate, is met with a volley of fury and justification from slashdot at the moment. There's a term that was coined for just such behaviour: fanboys. Of course, fanboys only exist in the Apple camp, right?
I'm not deciding one way or the other whether this is a good decision, but it is a decision made based on the rules of the store. Nor do I think that the inability to install non-App Store software on your iPhone without rooting it is necessarily a good thing either. It is interesting to watch the reactions of people on both sides though.
It doesn't say "Linux" it says "open source" and they are not the same thing, although it is something of a non sequitur to call this a "puzzling or bad" move (which seems to be the inference) - the project was forked because the community didn't like where it was going, which is one of the major benefits open source code has over closed.
You seem to have fallen into the trap that any perceived criticism of open source is an attack on Linux, though. I have plenty of open source software on my Mac, including Open Office. If this (and future) releases of LibreOffice [seriously, they need to change the name] can offer a strong alternative to MS Office, then I'm all for it.
My first question, can it do graphs on new sheets yet? That was my one annoyance with the spreadsheet app in OO.
I should probably mention that I use MS Office for Mac all the time for writing reports. Word itself I can take or leave - it's a pretty poor and idiosyncratic word processor that drives you mental with its attempts to be helpful. Excel, on the other hand, really excels (ha) at what it does and makes the cost of Office worth it for me (and not just for the graphs on new pages).
If you're talking about the Angry Birds issue, it's "easily cracked" if the developer ignores Apple's guidelines on how to set it up.
Otherwise, I think they are doing just fine with no DRM on the iTunes music store. If you make it convenient, and give people what they want at a reasonable price they will buy it. Of course there will always be some people who pirate, but playing chase with them for eternity at the expense of your paying customers is silly.
In terms of actual cash, I imagine they earn more interest on their cash reserves than the cost of eating $10,000 in iTunes store sales. They effectively bought $10,000 worth of PR.
It's been open for 18 days, so probably not quite 10 billion yet. You can hold your derision until it's been open for 2.5 years like the mobile App Store. I'm not sure it will hit 10 billion in that time frame though, since it is less focused on cheap and cheerful free apps (although there are a lot of those), but more on slightly more expensive apps and games.
Don't forget they not only did it once, but *twice* from 68k to PPC and then to Intel, and strongly supported the transitions each time, with a considerable tail off to enable backwards compatibility.
I have a scanner plugin written for OS9 that still works to this day in Photoshop CS on 10.6.6 - so that's a Classic plugin, running inside a PPC app, on top of an Intel-only version of the OS, and it all works fine (albeit slowly since Rosetta-translated Photoshop is slower than a native x86 app, but I cannot afford to upgrade the Creative Suite.