Apple has a responsibility to its shareholders, its customers and its own developers well before it has any obligation to make the life of a KDE/Konqueror/KHTML developer easier.
If folks want things like a mandatory CVS repository or changelogs in addition to contributing back your changes to the source, those sorts of requirements should simply be a part of the license itself. If what you want is not required by the license you're releasing under, moaning and groaning because Apple is complying with your license - and no more than your license - is silly.
Propose changes to the GPL, if what you want isn't in there.
Really, there's an underutilized concept called target market that really does matter here.
If you're the sort of audiophile for whom spending $200 on good headphones matters, that's lovely for you, but there are other factors that contribute to the overall value of something like the iTunes Music Store. Most of those other factors really don't have a thing to do with what audiophile types consider acceptable sound quality.
Convenience is, of course, a big deal. That I can grab new music laying in bed with a cat and a latté and in my comfy PJs matters to me. A bunch. More than sound quality.
That I can download my purchases right away, painlessly, easily, and I can play them on my work Mac, my home Mac and an iPod matters. More than sound quality.
Of course, what matters to me doesn't have to matter to anybody else, but it's silly to proclaim iTMS a "rip-off" merely because the service isn't going out of its way to knock you out on the one value-metric you seem to care about: sound quality.
No, my iTMS tracks don't sound as good as the CD's in my collection. That matters very, very little to me; it seems to matter very little to the majority of folks buying millions and millions of tracks on the service.
It's okay that you find iTMS lacking in the one area you care about. You're not Apple's target market for the service. I am. You're utterly free to buy music from a service that more closely meets your preferences.
Hasn't the BYOPC (non) critique been put to bed a few thousand times already?
Want to build your own? The Mac isn't for you. It hasn't ever been for you, and it probably won't ever BE for you.
Neither are hardware offerings from Dell, Gateway, HP or any of dozens of other computer manufacturers who make piles of money selling boxes to the non-geeky, non-BYOPC, non-Slashdot trolling crowd.
The ability to build your own isn't a compelling advantage for ANY platform, regardless of hardware, or the OS or the apps you run on it. The availability of cheap components with which to build your own for "half the cost of a mini" isn't something the vast overwhelming majority of users care about (or will EVER care about). It's all sorts of lovely that it exists as an option for you, but you're a part of a teeny tiny minority of computer users out there and it doesn't make any sense for Apple to waste time and money trying to capture you as a customer. It probably never will.
The Mac mini is for the casual internet user who spends most of her time on her computer using a web browser, email and instant messaging. Maybe she got an iPod as a gift last year and adores it. She's not a hardcore gamer, and doesn't care a whit about the hardware specs of her current Windows box. Ideally, she's already got a USB keyboard and mouse that will travel with her to the Mac. If not, these are cheap and plentiful and will work well with her new Mac. Presumably, she's already using a VGA display that will migrate to the Mac as well.
If that doesn't remotely describe you or your needs, that's okay. But it's not a damming failure of the mini, no matter how often you'll troll the point around here.
Um, player sales? iTunes is free. QuickTime Player is free. Apple is using ITMS to drive *iPod* sales. If you don't *want* an iPod, there are eight zillion other devices (inferior, IMO, but you're welcome to them) you can choose from.
The point is that an alliance with Real offered them the chance to piggyback on Apple's brand, and offered Apple nothing in return. It wasn't a good deal.
You can disagree with THAT, but "binding the music and the player together to drive player sales" is irrelevant in this context. Apple isn't selling its AAC player/encoder software - they're giving it away.
a. You didn't make your purchasing decision based solely on the presence of multiple buttons. If you did, you're silly.
b. If the majority of Mac users wanted multibutton mice or trackpads, Apple would produce them. We don't give a damn. You may, but we don't. Get over it. The repeated insistence that this is the Mac's kiss of death is idiotic.
The 2.4 Mac users out there who need multibutton mice go and buy them. The rest of us control-click. It's not the end of the world.
Why exactly does it matter that AAC is nonstandard in non-MacOS platforms (for the moment, at least)? Apple has a compelling business interest in making stuff that works easily and well for Mac users.
Further, somebody will correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't AAC itself part of the larger MPEG specification? It's not as if it's a proprietary codec that Linux or Windows developers would be prevented from implementing.
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If folks want things like a mandatory CVS repository or changelogs in addition to contributing back your changes to the source, those sorts of requirements should simply be a part of the license itself. If what you want is not required by the license you're releasing under, moaning and groaning because Apple is complying with your license - and no more than your license - is silly.
Propose changes to the GPL, if what you want isn't in there.
Really, there's an underutilized concept called target market that really does matter here.
If you're the sort of audiophile for whom spending $200 on good headphones matters, that's lovely for you, but there are other factors that contribute to the overall value of something like the iTunes Music Store. Most of those other factors really don't have a thing to do with what audiophile types consider acceptable sound quality.
Convenience is, of course, a big deal. That I can grab new music laying in bed with a cat and a latté and in my comfy PJs matters to me. A bunch. More than sound quality.
That I can download my purchases right away, painlessly, easily, and I can play them on my work Mac, my home Mac and an iPod matters. More than sound quality.
Of course, what matters to me doesn't have to matter to anybody else, but it's silly to proclaim iTMS a "rip-off" merely because the service isn't going out of its way to knock you out on the one value-metric you seem to care about: sound quality.
No, my iTMS tracks don't sound as good as the CD's in my collection. That matters very, very little to me; it seems to matter very little to the majority of folks buying millions and millions of tracks on the service.
It's okay that you find iTMS lacking in the one area you care about. You're not Apple's target market for the service. I am. You're utterly free to buy music from a service that more closely meets your preferences.
Sigh.
Hasn't the BYOPC (non) critique been put to bed a few thousand times already?
Want to build your own? The Mac isn't for you. It hasn't ever been for you, and it probably won't ever BE for you.
Neither are hardware offerings from Dell, Gateway, HP or any of dozens of other computer manufacturers who make piles of money selling boxes to the non-geeky, non-BYOPC, non-Slashdot trolling crowd.
The ability to build your own isn't a compelling advantage for ANY platform, regardless of hardware, or the OS or the apps you run on it. The availability of cheap components with which to build your own for "half the cost of a mini" isn't something the vast overwhelming majority of users care about (or will EVER care about). It's all sorts of lovely that it exists as an option for you, but you're a part of a teeny tiny minority of computer users out there and it doesn't make any sense for Apple to waste time and money trying to capture you as a customer. It probably never will.
The Mac mini is for the casual internet user who spends most of her time on her computer using a web browser, email and instant messaging. Maybe she got an iPod as a gift last year and adores it. She's not a hardcore gamer, and doesn't care a whit about the hardware specs of her current Windows box. Ideally, she's already got a USB keyboard and mouse that will travel with her to the Mac. If not, these are cheap and plentiful and will work well with her new Mac. Presumably, she's already using a VGA display that will migrate to the Mac as well.
If that doesn't remotely describe you or your needs, that's okay. But it's not a damming failure of the mini, no matter how often you'll troll the point around here.
Um, player sales? iTunes is free. QuickTime Player is free. Apple is using ITMS to drive *iPod* sales. If you don't *want* an iPod, there are eight zillion other devices (inferior, IMO, but you're welcome to them) you can choose from. The point is that an alliance with Real offered them the chance to piggyback on Apple's brand, and offered Apple nothing in return. It wasn't a good deal. You can disagree with THAT, but "binding the music and the player together to drive player sales" is irrelevant in this context. Apple isn't selling its AAC player/encoder software - they're giving it away.
Oh, jeebus. This trivial silliness again?
a. You didn't make your purchasing decision based solely on the presence of multiple buttons. If you did, you're silly.
b. If the majority of Mac users wanted multibutton mice or trackpads, Apple would produce them. We don't give a damn. You may, but we don't. Get over it. The repeated insistence that this is the Mac's kiss of death is idiotic.
The 2.4 Mac users out there who need multibutton mice go and buy them. The rest of us control-click. It's not the end of the world.
Well, hmm.
Why exactly does it matter that AAC is nonstandard in non-MacOS platforms (for the moment, at least)? Apple has a compelling business interest in making stuff that works easily and well for Mac users.
Further, somebody will correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't AAC itself part of the larger MPEG specification? It's not as if it's a proprietary codec that Linux or Windows developers would be prevented from implementing.