Yes, see, I feel the same way about older tech: it works just fine. My point, which I didn't express very well, was that something other than efficiency goals has driven PC development - and that is gaming.
If you can show me any statistic demonstrating that even a bare majority of PCs users use Doom3 (or any equivalent) then my point still stands.
I believe you meant "unless," not "if," right?:-) I'll give you something better than a mere statistic. Here's Apple making the case for me on the iMac page itself:
That's a 1.6 or 1.8GHz G5 processor, 533 or 600MHz frontside bus, 256MB DDR SDRAM running at 400MHz and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra with 64MB graphics memory. So you'll be able to play World of Warcraft, Doom III and other fantastic entertainment.
As you see, Apple knows better than to smirk at Doom 3. But while I think the new iMac has many nice qualities, one of them is not going to be watching a Doom 3 slideshow at 15-20 frames per second on a third-rate video card.:-)
Con:
Weak, outdated, non-replaceable GPU (sigh)
Loss of telescoping arm
Style:
The last iMac was inspired by a sunflower. And this one, by what? Hanging file folders?
Generally I like spare, modernist industrial design. But from Apple we had come to expect a humanizing influence on the form factor: you know, wit, imagination. Dessicated and stringy, the new iMac looks like a supermodel captured by a taxidermist. Did they really have to drain the last ounce of whismy from the design?
I'd say this thing has potential beyond even the original colored iMacs if they stress the key components: comparable performance and superior graphics with a smaller footprint, better service and few virus and spyware worries.
Agreed on all but the most obvious point: "superior graphics." Superior to what, and in what context? The video subsystem (FX5200) is a bargain basement part selling for ~$50 retail. This won't matter to soccer moms or email/surf/digital photo types, of course, but anybody wishing to play games (a huge segment of the market) will avoid this.
Incidentally, Sony did the whole slim-LCD-PC thing a while back and sold it for about $400 more. It was a cool unit, but WAY bigger than this in both width and depth.
Unfortunately for Apple, Sony has just revamped it as a complete media center with built-in TV and Tivo-style recording. We'll soon see what the marketplace prefers: an AIO that can grab and record TV for you, or one whose chief selling point is that it looks like an iPod turned sideways.;-)
the vast majority of the PC using populus could not care less about playing Doom3, or the hardcore game du jour.
You, perhaps, but not the "vast majority." Gaming, which has eclipsed Hollywood in revenues, has become the decisive force leading consumer PC hardware development. If your metric were true, we could all go back a couple of generations in hardware and still "get stuff done efficiently."
Good surmise. We know that heat problems were a devil to solve in the new iMac, and that's probably not only why it's using a slow-moving, underpowered bargain card--but one that you can't replace, either. Put something hotter in there, and you've really got a pizza box.
That just underscores why the new iMac's dangling laptop design, while eye-catching for some people, is a case of form over function. Soon enough we'll see if the marketplace has been waiting for this; but it's a little hard to imagine the marketplace has been waiting for a $1300 computer that's castrated in the games dept.
So they come out with this model which will play games pretty well, especially the ones currently available for the Mac and even future games like Doom 3.
Now, playing Doom 3 well is hardly the entire measure of a computer, so I don't want to bash the new iMac. It has its charms. I might be recommending it to a 65 year-old who I know needs new a machine for digital photography, but we'll have to see first if it is sufficiently adjustable and comfortable for viewing; he might be better served, actually, by the last generation iMac.
But Doom 3? Please. The FX5200 is a value card, sold for ~$50 retail. That's a shocking choice for a $1300 luxury computer--you'd expect to find it in, say, a $600 generic box. It simply does not have sufficient pixel pipelines nor video RAM (Apple has seen fit to use the "cheap seats" version with only 64 mb).
On a P4 3ghz, the underachieving FX5200 gets a whopping 20 fps in Doom 3 at the lowest possible quality settings (640x480, all effects turned off). TweakPC, in Germany, has a useful chart showing where the card falls in comparison to modern video cards: 25th place..
An interesting post. I can't figure out if it's insightful but short-sighted or a subtle troll.
To paraphrase Disraeli, you'll have to cope with your perplexity by yourself, good fellow.
The "savage" inequality in America seems relatively benign compared to the inequality during the 1800's. Admittedly the gap does seem to be widening again, but why is that "wrought by the right wing" when both wings are corporate puppets? Since you mention outsourcing, you do realize that Hillary Clinton is a major supporter of Tata and outsourcing New York jobs, don't you? She's hardly "right wing".
The 1800s? With that long a metric, many social comparisons can be made to seem "benign" (even, apparently, for you, poverty). The more relevant period is the past forty years, over which we may track the demise of the highest point of income parity achieved in US history. That period coincides with the decline of liberalism and its gradual replacement by Reaganism, the ideology which has produced our present savagery.
I am not exonerating Democrats; there are plenty of right wing Dems, from Zell Miller to John Breaux, who are as much to blame for our predicament as any Gingrich or Delay. Whether historically in the Democratic-led Congress' repeated support for Reagan's policies or even in the Democrats' past three years of rolling over for Bush, we can find ample evidence of collusion. Hitchens' memorable phrase is useful here: "Two cozily-fused buttocks of the same giant derriere."
You lecture me on Hillary without need--I have no use for her. She styles herself a centrist, but her repugnant support for outsourcing and the Iraq adventure certainly puts her closer to the right than to the left. Hope for American politics lies outside these colossal wrecks.
New Yorkers get this money. This is a direct benefit for New York and is "paying for" the convention.
Allow me to correct your Enron-style accounting.
It's a reductionist fallacy to argue that fees paid to private businesses "benefit New York," other than in the manner of greasing the palms of some business owners. The few are not the many.
Unfortunately, the many must pay for the few. The ordinary citizens of New York who aren't in line for GOP convention revenues still must subsidize police and infrastructure costs for this herd of millionaires.
That is to say nothing of the brutal intangible costs--namely, those to the civil liberties of speech and assembly--which are being sacrificed so that our overlords may cavort.
The only problem is when you say the wrong thing to the wrong person and as you are walking away he shoots you in the spine with a 9mm and puts you in a wheelchair for the rest of your life. It happens.
Perfect rebuttal.
And this marks the end of a certain social compact that, more or less, used to be a part of 20th century American society. I mean, of course, passionate public dispute. Look at the fiction and movies of the post-war era. They're full of it, equally celebrating and laughing at the great outspoken loudmouth--and being sure he got his comeuppance with something other than a 9mm.
Verbal duels are really only possible in a society where there's enough equality to provide for people to walk away with a measure of respect. The savage inequality in America, wrought by the right wing and deepening since the 1980s, doesn't permit that. Enter the 9mm, and the vocabulary of a violent, perverse assertion of equality: "You dissin' me?"
As we outsource our way into a post-middle class future, look for more interesting wrinkles on violence as a substitute for discourse.
I cannot express how arrogant and self centered this sounds to me. Pay for your own damned protest.
Ok. And you pay for your own damned convention, instead of passing the bill for police and civil infrastructure off to the taxpayers. While you're at it, pay for and serve in your own damned wars.
Then you're either quite dumb or quite young. I doubt you're both as you at least manage to post a message to slashdot. (...) If you really were as intelligent and evolved as you think, you'd realize that talking down on people just makes you a dick.
I'm sorry, sir, but your Get Out of Jail Free card has expired.
Yes, millions of Americans are sick of this ignorant term and of those who would turn our nation into a world-crushing police state.
There are terrorists in the world, of course. Very, very few.
In the example of your suburban know-nothings, we see one of the worst byproducts of fear-mongering: self-flattery. While these adult babies ignore the terror that their own government is sowing abroad, they flatter themselves to think that every time the stoplights don't work it's because of the terrorists. As you will have heard, the terrorists hate us because our traffic lights have three different colors.
This is a feedback loop, government/media-induced fear begetting preposterous self-importance and that leading to tacit acquiescence in military aggression. The mantra of the true believer today is: exterminate as many poor Iraqi women and children as you must, just don't let the terrorists get me! Provided our society survives this poisoning hysteria, a lot of work will have to be done when the adults are back in power.
I've used it for fun and profit. I have sold countless bumperstickers calling different activities "terrorist" activities.The funny part is that I did it as a joke, making light of the "terorist" craze, by making a few and putting them on my cars. I have been stopped so many times by people asking where to get the various bumperstickers that I had some made (and some that are slower sellers on cafepress) and sold them out at $5.00 each making me almost $1000.00 in a month from a joke.
For an encore, you should run for office. You're a shoe-in: just use your unsold stock as campaign literature.
Somewhere out there is a brainstorm that could revolutionize the FPS game. This isn't it--it's not trying to be--but it might be pointing in the right direction.
One idea would be a kind of virtual mouse-and-keyboard: control by way of tiny finger movements tracked by laser.
Another: helium filled globes on which your hands rest, exerting vertical and horizontal pressure. The rotation, elevation, orientation would translate as movement, firing, etc. Basketball players would have a natural advantage.;-)
Ah, if we were only going off to kill giant bugs! Then what fun it would be training for more war!
Unfortunately, US foreign policy in the era of preemptive invasions calls for attacking resource-rich nations that pose no threat to us. That's a different thing, morally, from blasting bugs. It's wrong, as 90% of the planet knows.
The mental candy of video games can help to sweeten this awful task. If you look even casually at the top-selling shooters, they're nearly all war games that put the white American soldier-player in the heroic role of killing black, brown and yellow-skinned peoples to "stop terrorism," or "fight for freedom," or any of the other popular cant that our drooling politicians preach. These games are rehearsal chambers for more than killing technique: they incubate a poisonous right wing sensibility, the stuff of America Uber Alles that has plunged us into a senseless and unwinnable war in Iraq.
From the White House to FOX TV to your X-Box: that is the new slipstream of fascism. Because there's money in it. Because it's fun--until, of course, the Wal-Mart job isn't cutting it and, with all the skills you've honed playing America's Army, you sign up for the National Guard gig to make ends meet, and sooner or later find yourself shooting women and children in a real desert.
Mommas (and daddies), don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
Boyle's use of razor blades isn't an "example." It's an analogy. He's showing how absurd it is for a razor manufacturer to say to a generic razor blade supplier, "Your blades rip off my razor because you figured out how the razor works!" Boyle expects you to substitute Apple and Real for the respective parties; it isn't asking much.
And you kind of need to do that to understand the issue here, my friend. This isn't about "Apple wanting the iPod to work." That banality can be said about any manufacturer and its product. Obviously it's the burden of any third-party supplier to ensure compatibility. To make it harder, proprietary means are often used to lock others out, but only recently have we seen the malicious use of the DMCA to stop competition.
No, the issue here is the foolish extraneous restraints on trade that are foisted on the marketplace by the DMCA, which might allow Apple to sue Real. Those restraints pretend that there's extra legal protection owed to makers of mp3 players, printers, and other tech that razor makers don't deserve. But that's plainly nuts: it's a perversion of the free market, which depends on interoperability. And it's allowing Apple to wield the DMCA like a club.
That's a metaphorical club. But you knew that. The smart money on this one--for consumers, for society--is to stop backing the bullies with clubs.
It's nice to read commentary about this issue that doesn't take place on the level of sentimental corporate worship.
Besides demolishing Apple's case against Harmony, Boyle touches on the larger regulatory mischief that gives Apple any legal ground at all to stand on. Without the DMCA, Apple's complaining would be moot.
The DMCA, remember, exists not because our lawmakers are Solons but because they are, less grandly, colons: they pass off as law the grunting byproduct of giant wealth. Usually, big business clamors for greater deregulation. But when its piles are threatened, it is never above demanding that the government do something. Can't have the free market becoming too free, you know.
Many of these "iPod killers" seem beholden to half-century old ideas, weirdly locating switches on the side and top. It's as if their designers were working from the paradigm of 50's-era transistor pocket radios. Sony's placement of tiny directional controls on the front seems like a begrudging afterthought. Why are they dinky? Is that some misguided aesthetic choice, or were they designing for Japanese fingers?
It's due to the genius of Ives that his iPod design becomes simpler in every iteration. This is the cluestick that his competition should start beating themselves with: simple, simpler, simplest. Problem is, Ives has already pared everything down to its essentials...
If it really is only about "moolah" then Apple should be glad over what Real did.
That doesn't follow. Apple sees Harmony as a barnacle on the hull of its ship of profit, hitching a free ride on its technology. Just because iTunes is described today as a mechanism for driving iPod sales doesn't mean Apple never intends to make money from it.
Unfortunately for consumers in the present squabble, it is about the moolah--Apple's wish to have all the moolah.
Carefully read Mac owners posts and you will see that Apple is just an MS without the money but a "cooler" image.
Not all Apple owners have bought into that silly worship. You're describing the fundamentalists among us--the Apple Taliban. You know: There is no God but Apple, and Steve is his prophet!
Now, as an iBook and iMac owner, I love using OS X. I find myself telling friends to buy Macs, particularly when I see them frustrated by their PCs.
But I'm hardly going to wallow in love for a freaking corporation, and especially not one that is wielding the DMCA like the sword of Damocles. Apple's belligerence this week is costing it credibility; the corporate pot-belly is coming into view under the lean, mean black turtleneck. For anyone who owns or might own an iPod the sensible position here is consumer choice first, corporate interests second. Therefore I support any effort--ironically, even that of a slimy, DMCA-loving company like Real--to fight control of what we do with the hardware we buy. Go, Real; pull your head out, Steve.
This effort by Real undermines this process and will only serve to make record labels more unwilling to participate in electronic delivery and dissemination of media.
I'm afraid this isn't at all "about the music."
Online music delivery is in its infancy. Many labels and artists are still wary about it (though for different reasons). What will change their minds? Success in the marketplace. What will help increase online sales? Flexibility for consumers. How do we get that? By tearing down arrogant proprietary technology that puts consumers second and corporations first.
Apple has put a chastity belt on the iPod. Its tactics reveal that Apple is much less "about the music" than it is about tying iTunes and iPod revenue together, while going to silly lengths to frustrate natural consumer desires. Behind Apple's jealous back, the music labels are sure to be looking at other suitors.
Meanwhile, it's neither in the interests of the music biz (which wants to maximize sales) nor of consumers (who want to maximize choice, savings through competition, and compatibility across music stores and players) for Apple to act so petulantly.
Slate wants to be a younger, hipper version of the New York Times--the old Gray Lady tricked out with a Blackberry and an iPod. But consensus thought is still consensus thought, no matter how you slather on the attitude. Nobody turns to the Times to be challenged, surprised or enlightened by a fresh idea: we go to it to find out what our overlords are planning next. Slate tiresomely peddles the same predictable gospel. Inside the Skechers of its writers are wingtips dying to get out.
Case in point: the current lead piece, "Lay Off the Bush Girls." It's a rundown of the resumes of the wastrel First Kids that concludes they're finally due some good press because being high-profile fuck-ups inevitably causes a surplus of bad press. You plow through it feeling that author Michael Crowley would really be much happier going harumph about the capital gains tax; like much of Slate's cultural material, it's indistinguishable from the political stuff. The piece is awkward, overlong, pedantic, and frankly a let-down after reading the teaser on the index page ("They drink. They party with P. Diddy"), which seemed to promise more than a dullish reminder of kids-will-be-kids. The most interesting thing about it is a self-admiring correction appended afterward: "The article originally claimed that both girls were wearing Calvin Klein gowns." Now, that's fact-checking.
There's nothing wrong with Slate if all you want from journalism is to be poured a nice big steaming mug of complacency. (Complacency never hurt business at Microsoft.) But there's the New York Times and a zillion other places for that. Slate could vanish tomorrow, and consensus thought would be just as loudly trumpeted by all the other pet publications of billionaires. I'd rather read Harper's Magazine, The Baffler, The Utne Reader, and Counterpunch, publications and sites that proceed from the idea that journalism is an act of independence.
Normally I use my iPod without really looking at it: while driving (car or bicycle) or without getting it out of my coat pocket (to avoid getting too much attention of thugs).
By having separate buttons and wheel there is almost no clicky-where-no-clicky-was-intended.
The thugs don't need to see the iPod. They're on the prowl for convoluted cute-talk, too, and if any hear your little treatise on clicky-clicky, pal, the jig will be up.
Steve's customary self-satisfied guru act is one thing. We can handle that. But what's up with this new look--jaw set, brow knit, eyes flaring wildly, carefully untended stubble shadowing a creepy sidelong glance?
It looks like a public service announcement: "Kids, don't get into the car with a stranger who offers you an iPod."
Slashdot Mirror
If you can show me any statistic demonstrating that even a bare majority of PCs users use Doom3 (or any equivalent) then my point still stands.
I believe you meant "unless," not "if," right? :-) I'll give you something better than a mere statistic. Here's Apple making the case for me on the iMac page itself:
As you see, Apple knows better than to smirk at Doom 3. But while I think the new iMac has many nice qualities, one of them is not going to be watching a Doom 3 slideshow at 15-20 frames per second on a third-rate video card. :-)
OS X
G5
Size
Con:
Weak, outdated, non-replaceable GPU (sigh)
Loss of telescoping arm
Style:
The last iMac was inspired by a sunflower. And this one, by what? Hanging file folders?
Generally I like spare, modernist industrial design. But from Apple we had come to expect a humanizing influence on the form factor: you know, wit, imagination. Dessicated and stringy, the new iMac looks like a supermodel captured by a taxidermist. Did they really have to drain the last ounce of whismy from the design?
Agreed on all but the most obvious point: "superior graphics." Superior to what, and in what context? The video subsystem (FX5200) is a bargain basement part selling for ~$50 retail. This won't matter to soccer moms or email/surf/digital photo types, of course, but anybody wishing to play games (a huge segment of the market) will avoid this.
Incidentally, Sony did the whole slim-LCD-PC thing a while back and sold it for about $400 more. It was a cool unit, but WAY bigger than this in both width and depth.
Unfortunately for Apple, Sony has just revamped it as a complete media center with built-in TV and Tivo-style recording. We'll soon see what the marketplace prefers: an AIO that can grab and record TV for you, or one whose chief selling point is that it looks like an iPod turned sideways. ;-)
You, perhaps, but not the "vast majority." Gaming, which has eclipsed Hollywood in revenues, has become the decisive force leading consumer PC hardware development. If your metric were true, we could all go back a couple of generations in hardware and still "get stuff done efficiently."
That just underscores why the new iMac's dangling laptop design, while eye-catching for some people, is a case of form over function. Soon enough we'll see if the marketplace has been waiting for this; but it's a little hard to imagine the marketplace has been waiting for a $1300 computer that's castrated in the games dept.
Now, playing Doom 3 well is hardly the entire measure of a computer, so I don't want to bash the new iMac. It has its charms. I might be recommending it to a 65 year-old who I know needs new a machine for digital photography, but we'll have to see first if it is sufficiently adjustable and comfortable for viewing; he might be better served, actually, by the last generation iMac.
But Doom 3? Please. The FX5200 is a value card, sold for ~$50 retail. That's a shocking choice for a $1300 luxury computer--you'd expect to find it in, say, a $600 generic box. It simply does not have sufficient pixel pipelines nor video RAM (Apple has seen fit to use the "cheap seats" version with only 64 mb).
On a P4 3ghz, the underachieving FX5200 gets a whopping 20 fps in Doom 3 at the lowest possible quality settings (640x480, all effects turned off). TweakPC, in Germany, has a useful chart showing where the card falls in comparison to modern video cards: 25th place..
To paraphrase Disraeli, you'll have to cope with your perplexity by yourself, good fellow.
The "savage" inequality in America seems relatively benign compared to the inequality during the 1800's. Admittedly the gap does seem to be widening again, but why is that "wrought by the right wing" when both wings are corporate puppets? Since you mention outsourcing, you do realize that Hillary Clinton is a major supporter of Tata and outsourcing New York jobs, don't you? She's hardly "right wing".
The 1800s? With that long a metric, many social comparisons can be made to seem "benign" (even, apparently, for you, poverty). The more relevant period is the past forty years, over which we may track the demise of the highest point of income parity achieved in US history. That period coincides with the decline of liberalism and its gradual replacement by Reaganism, the ideology which has produced our present savagery.
I am not exonerating Democrats; there are plenty of right wing Dems, from Zell Miller to John Breaux, who are as much to blame for our predicament as any Gingrich or Delay. Whether historically in the Democratic-led Congress' repeated support for Reagan's policies or even in the Democrats' past three years of rolling over for Bush, we can find ample evidence of collusion. Hitchens' memorable phrase is useful here: "Two cozily-fused buttocks of the same giant derriere."
You lecture me on Hillary without need--I have no use for her. She styles herself a centrist, but her repugnant support for outsourcing and the Iraq adventure certainly puts her closer to the right than to the left. Hope for American politics lies outside these colossal wrecks.
Flamebait? That's a hilarious post, you tone-deaf fundamentalist!
Allow me to correct your Enron-style accounting.
It's a reductionist fallacy to argue that fees paid to private businesses "benefit New York," other than in the manner of greasing the palms of some business owners. The few are not the many.
Unfortunately, the many must pay for the few. The ordinary citizens of New York who aren't in line for GOP convention revenues still must subsidize police and infrastructure costs for this herd of millionaires.
That is to say nothing of the brutal intangible costs--namely, those to the civil liberties of speech and assembly--which are being sacrificed so that our overlords may cavort.
Perfect rebuttal.
And this marks the end of a certain social compact that, more or less, used to be a part of 20th century American society. I mean, of course, passionate public dispute. Look at the fiction and movies of the post-war era. They're full of it, equally celebrating and laughing at the great outspoken loudmouth--and being sure he got his comeuppance with something other than a 9mm.
Verbal duels are really only possible in a society where there's enough equality to provide for people to walk away with a measure of respect. The savage inequality in America, wrought by the right wing and deepening since the 1980s, doesn't permit that. Enter the 9mm, and the vocabulary of a violent, perverse assertion of equality: "You dissin' me?"
As we outsource our way into a post-middle class future, look for more interesting wrinkles on violence as a substitute for discourse.
Ok. And you pay for your own damned convention, instead of passing the bill for police and civil infrastructure off to the taxpayers. While you're at it, pay for and serve in your own damned wars.
Laissez faire in name only, eh?
I'm sorry, sir, but your Get Out of Jail Free card has expired.
There are terrorists in the world, of course. Very, very few.
In the example of your suburban know-nothings, we see one of the worst byproducts of fear-mongering: self-flattery. While these adult babies ignore the terror that their own government is sowing abroad, they flatter themselves to think that every time the stoplights don't work it's because of the terrorists. As you will have heard, the terrorists hate us because our traffic lights have three different colors.
This is a feedback loop, government/media-induced fear begetting preposterous self-importance and that leading to tacit acquiescence in military aggression. The mantra of the true believer today is: exterminate as many poor Iraqi women and children as you must, just don't let the terrorists get me! Provided our society survives this poisoning hysteria, a lot of work will have to be done when the adults are back in power.
For an encore, you should run for office. You're a shoe-in: just use your unsold stock as campaign literature.
One idea would be a kind of virtual mouse-and-keyboard: control by way of tiny finger movements tracked by laser.
Another: helium filled globes on which your hands rest, exerting vertical and horizontal pressure. The rotation, elevation, orientation would translate as movement, firing, etc. Basketball players would have a natural advantage. ;-)
Unfortunately, US foreign policy in the era of preemptive invasions calls for attacking resource-rich nations that pose no threat to us. That's a different thing, morally, from blasting bugs. It's wrong, as 90% of the planet knows.
The mental candy of video games can help to sweeten this awful task. If you look even casually at the top-selling shooters, they're nearly all war games that put the white American soldier-player in the heroic role of killing black, brown and yellow-skinned peoples to "stop terrorism," or "fight for freedom," or any of the other popular cant that our drooling politicians preach. These games are rehearsal chambers for more than killing technique: they incubate a poisonous right wing sensibility, the stuff of America Uber Alles that has plunged us into a senseless and unwinnable war in Iraq.
From the White House to FOX TV to your X-Box: that is the new slipstream of fascism. Because there's money in it. Because it's fun--until, of course, the Wal-Mart job isn't cutting it and, with all the skills you've honed playing America's Army, you sign up for the National Guard gig to make ends meet, and sooner or later find yourself shooting women and children in a real desert.
Mommas (and daddies), don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.
Boyle's use of razor blades isn't an "example." It's an analogy. He's showing how absurd it is for a razor manufacturer to say to a generic razor blade supplier, "Your blades rip off my razor because you figured out how the razor works!" Boyle expects you to substitute Apple and Real for the respective parties; it isn't asking much.
And you kind of need to do that to understand the issue here, my friend. This isn't about "Apple wanting the iPod to work." That banality can be said about any manufacturer and its product. Obviously it's the burden of any third-party supplier to ensure compatibility. To make it harder, proprietary means are often used to lock others out, but only recently have we seen the malicious use of the DMCA to stop competition.
No, the issue here is the foolish extraneous restraints on trade that are foisted on the marketplace by the DMCA, which might allow Apple to sue Real. Those restraints pretend that there's extra legal protection owed to makers of mp3 players, printers, and other tech that razor makers don't deserve. But that's plainly nuts: it's a perversion of the free market, which depends on interoperability. And it's allowing Apple to wield the DMCA like a club.
That's a metaphorical club. But you knew that. The smart money on this one--for consumers, for society--is to stop backing the bullies with clubs.
Besides demolishing Apple's case against Harmony, Boyle touches on the larger regulatory mischief that gives Apple any legal ground at all to stand on. Without the DMCA, Apple's complaining would be moot.
The DMCA, remember, exists not because our lawmakers are Solons but because they are, less grandly, colons: they pass off as law the grunting byproduct of giant wealth. Usually, big business clamors for greater deregulation. But when its piles are threatened, it is never above demanding that the government do something. Can't have the free market becoming too free, you know.
It's due to the genius of Ives that his iPod design becomes simpler in every iteration. This is the cluestick that his competition should start beating themselves with: simple, simpler, simplest. Problem is, Ives has already pared everything down to its essentials...
That doesn't follow. Apple sees Harmony as a barnacle on the hull of its ship of profit, hitching a free ride on its technology. Just because iTunes is described today as a mechanism for driving iPod sales doesn't mean Apple never intends to make money from it.
Unfortunately for consumers in the present squabble, it is about the moolah--Apple's wish to have all the moolah.
Not all Apple owners have bought into that silly worship. You're describing the fundamentalists among us--the Apple Taliban. You know: There is no God but Apple, and Steve is his prophet!
Now, as an iBook and iMac owner, I love using OS X. I find myself telling friends to buy Macs, particularly when I see them frustrated by their PCs.
But I'm hardly going to wallow in love for a freaking corporation, and especially not one that is wielding the DMCA like the sword of Damocles. Apple's belligerence this week is costing it credibility; the corporate pot-belly is coming into view under the lean, mean black turtleneck. For anyone who owns or might own an iPod the sensible position here is consumer choice first, corporate interests second. Therefore I support any effort--ironically, even that of a slimy, DMCA-loving company like Real--to fight control of what we do with the hardware we buy. Go, Real; pull your head out, Steve.
I'm afraid this isn't at all "about the music."
Online music delivery is in its infancy. Many labels and artists are still wary about it (though for different reasons). What will change their minds? Success in the marketplace. What will help increase online sales? Flexibility for consumers. How do we get that? By tearing down arrogant proprietary technology that puts consumers second and corporations first.
Apple has put a chastity belt on the iPod. Its tactics reveal that Apple is much less "about the music" than it is about tying iTunes and iPod revenue together, while going to silly lengths to frustrate natural consumer desires. Behind Apple's jealous back, the music labels are sure to be looking at other suitors.
Meanwhile, it's neither in the interests of the music biz (which wants to maximize sales) nor of consumers (who want to maximize choice, savings through competition, and compatibility across music stores and players) for Apple to act so petulantly.
Case in point: the current lead piece, "Lay Off the Bush Girls." It's a rundown of the resumes of the wastrel First Kids that concludes they're finally due some good press because being high-profile fuck-ups inevitably causes a surplus of bad press. You plow through it feeling that author Michael Crowley would really be much happier going harumph about the capital gains tax; like much of Slate's cultural material, it's indistinguishable from the political stuff. The piece is awkward, overlong, pedantic, and frankly a let-down after reading the teaser on the index page ("They drink. They party with P. Diddy"), which seemed to promise more than a dullish reminder of kids-will-be-kids. The most interesting thing about it is a self-admiring correction appended afterward: "The article originally claimed that both girls were wearing Calvin Klein gowns." Now, that's fact-checking.
There's nothing wrong with Slate if all you want from journalism is to be poured a nice big steaming mug of complacency. (Complacency never hurt business at Microsoft.) But there's the New York Times and a zillion other places for that. Slate could vanish tomorrow, and consensus thought would be just as loudly trumpeted by all the other pet publications of billionaires. I'd rather read Harper's Magazine, The Baffler, The Utne Reader, and Counterpunch, publications and sites that proceed from the idea that journalism is an act of independence.
By having separate buttons and wheel there is almost no clicky-where-no-clicky-was-intended.
The thugs don't need to see the iPod. They're on the prowl for convoluted cute-talk, too, and if any hear your little treatise on clicky-clicky, pal, the jig will be up.
It looks like a public service announcement: "Kids, don't get into the car with a stranger who offers you an iPod."