Yeah, I've been questioning the whole "netbook" classification lately. What set netbooks apart form notebooks was that they sacrificed a lot of functionality to make the cheapest, lightest, smallest thing capable of browsing the Internet (on a screen big enough that you didn't have to zoom in/out the way cell phones do). Now they're generally cheap ultraportable laptops.
Which is fine. Whatever. But "netbook" just seems like a marketing term now. They're small laptops made as cheaply as possible, but you can't call them tiny cheap laptops.
Ok, I tried that. I'm not sure I could tell the difference except the little menu bar at the bottom of the home screen changed. Is that all Sense is? Am I missing something?
You're saying that Apple takes in at least $240 million from selling apps, Apple claims that the App store isn't very profitable. If both are true, then Apple is spending about $240 million on building/running the app store.
So let's say they don't take any cut from anyone. That means they need to take $240 million from their iPhone/iPod/iPad profits and dump it into a money-losing venture, which also probably means they'd be increasing the price of every iPhone/iPod/iPad sold.
Now the truth is, developers are generally benefiting from having a good storefront to sell their applications on. There are problems with the store, sure, but overall it's beneficial for someone to be hosting a marketplace. Apple's share is... what, 20%? That's not unusual. I think RIM charges a percentage for distribution. I believe the Android market takes a 30% cut of all sales. When you buy a ringtone from your cell phone carrier, the carrier takes a slice too (I think something like 50%). The point is, they're providing a service to the developer, so they're going to charge some kind of fee.
Now if you want to complain about Apple *forcing* developers to go through the iTunes store, I'd probably agree with you. That fact aside, however, there isn't anything particularly wrong with how Apple runs the iTunes store.
By "decent" I mean a store that was easy to use, easy to find what you're looking for, has all the major labels on board, and once the music was purchased, had an easy method of keeping the music organized and transferring it to a mobile device.
Yeah, there were a couple online stores around back then. They were terrible and/or had a terrible selection of music available.
it's a straw argument to not provide the APIs to let Flash use the GPU, and then complain that it doesn't use the GPU. That's the problem... Not that Flash is programmed bad
Sorry, but I don't think the issue of APIs is sufficient to explain why Flash crashes constantly. If the whole thing were merely an issue of Flash lacking H264 hardware acceleration support, then you might have a point here, but Flash has been crashing browsers for years and years and Adobe has never really fixed it.
Adobe never even pretended that they were going to fix it until Apple refused to support Flash on the iPhone, at which point they started pointing their fingers at Apple's APIs. One of their major complaints was, "We've been using Apple's legacy API and never bothered to move to the new API, and the old API isn't as well maintained as the new one." First, it's not really Apple's fault that Adobe stuck with Carbon for all these years. Second, using Carbon still doesn't quite explain why Flash hangs and crashes all the time.
Apple sells digital music because an easy source of high-quality music that requires little thought to access leads to more sales of music which leads to more sales of music players, which Apple manufactures and gets a high margin on.
It's also worth noting that when Apple opened the iTunes store, there weren't really other decent online stores out there. This meant that you had to go to the store, buy a CD, and then rip it into iTunes. Or pirate. And my point isn't, "Look at how Apple pioneered a new market," (though they did) but rather that they needed an online store to market their product decently. If the record labels had gotten off their asses and done a good job of it themselves, Apple might have simply built iTunes to use one of the existing stores. If Amazon's MP3 store had existed back then, I think it's possible that Apple wouldn't have bothered setting up their own store. However, Amazon's MP3 store was only allowed to exist because Apple set up shop first.
I think Apple must have learned something from that experience: if you want high-quality content delivered to your content-consumption devices, and you want the experience of delivering that content to be good, then you should just do it yourself.
Apple still needs to run the app store. That requires a datacenter for the servers and a lot of bandwidth. It requires an IT staff to maintain those servers, and designers and software engineers to maintain the store itself. It requires customer service reps to answer complaints, another team to analyze and approve apps and service developers, and a legal team to analyze all the legal implications of all of those things. Then it requires some management time to keep all of those people working together.
You're asking why Apple doesn't just do all that for free? Hmmm.... let me think.
I think part of the problem is that Adobe *still* treats Apple like a second class platform. Flash stinks on OSX. It crashes *constantly*. Adobe's CS is a slow bloated behemoth that never bothered (until CS5) to use Apple's native OSX APIs (Cocoa) but instead stuck with their old legacy/compatibility APIs (Carbon). Even when Adobe finally started working on improving Flash, they tried to blame the whole thing on Apple.
I think you're right to point out that there seems to be bad blood between these companies, but I think it's because of ongoing fights between the companies.
Yeah, that was the first red flag. Second was the repeated use of the term "iTechnology". Is he trying to coin a term? Third, it's long. Too long. Not that I'm opposed to long articles, but his arguments are unfocused and padded with silly things like this:
If apple was so perfect, how come they cannot stop the jail breakers. How come they send out security patches on a regular basis.
Yeah, I have to say, I've been playing with Office 2010, and I like it. I'm not a Microsoft fan. My response to Windows Vista and even Windows 7 and Office 2007 has been, "So what?" Yes, they're all prettier than previous versions and have a couple nice improvements here and there, but mostly.... meh.
But I don't know what it is with Office 2010, somehow it feels much more pleasant to use. It's like they smoothed over a bunch of rough edges, and though I can't give a very long list of what's different from Office 2007, it feels much more pleasant to use somehow.
Now... if only they'd get rid of the goddamn "activation", I might buy a copy. I know all the Microsoft defenders here will say, "Oh, it doesn't matter. I never have problems with WGA/WAT, and if you do have a problem, all you have to do is call Microsoft." Sorry, no. I have had a handful of problems with WGA/WAT as well as activation schemes from other companies, and I've learned my lesson. I won't buy software that requires activation, not for home and not for work. I don't need some random company checking up on me, trying to assess whether they like how I'm using the product that I bought from them, and sabotaging that product if they decide they don't like how I'm using it.
At least they've supported IPv6 for a long while now, unlike some other OS companies.
Yeah, I was surprised when I read the summary. It made it sound like Apple was refusing the implement IPv6, or worse: maybe they were doing something crazy to black IPv6?
I was surprised because I kept seeing IPv6 settings in Apple products for several years now. I remember being surprised the first time I saw IPv6 settings in OSX; I don't remember when it was, but it was a while ago. I thought, "Huh, neat that they have that. Too bad I can't do anything with it." Apple has even had IPv6 support in their home routers for years, so it's weird that they'd be blocking progress.
From reading other comments here, it sounds more like there might some kind of a bug in Apple's implementation that hasn't been found up until now because nobody is actually using IPv6. The bug causes timeouts in some situations.
IPv6 isn't being blocked or slowed by Apple. Apple was an early adopter.
That it became self-aware does not mean that it wasn't designed to be intelligent. It was designed to be intelligent. It was designed to make decisions and think for itself.
There are other problems: their #1 problem is "Left long enough, a computer becomes intelligent", citing Terminator and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
However, the computers weren't just "left long enough" in either movie. In Terminator, SkyNet was an AI designed by the military to have intelligence. The surprise wasn't that it became intelligent, but that it decided to kill everyone. In Star Trek, Voyager was discovered by an alien race of intelligent robots (or something like that) who repaired and upgraded Voyager.
Well the article does talk about the relationship between speech recognition an AI, but it basically claims that good speech recognition requires far more sophisticated AI than previously expected. Various people had tried simple statistical analyses based on the context of each word in a sentence, but the result still wasn't good enough. Some people have begun to think that a computer would need to develop a real understanding of what you're saying in order to give human-quality speech recognition, and that's some serious AI.
My own thoughts on the subject is that getting an AI to "understand what you're talking about" is going to be even more difficult that most people suspect. Human understanding isn't merely guided by passive observance and interpretation. Empathy plays a big role. Human animal behaviors and instincts come into play. We also draw a *lot* from our own personal experiences. I'm not sure if you can get an AI to really understand unless it's out in the world itself, in a body, having "human" experiences of its own.
Honestly, I don't know why I'd want to either. I also don't know why i wouldn't want to. This is my first android phone, so i have no idea what the difference is between Sense and stock Android. It'd be nice if i could try the stock Android settings without doing anything irreversible to my phone so I could try it out and decide which I liked better.
Out of curiosity, how? I have an Incredible, and if there was a way that I could turn the whole thing into a vanilla install of Android, I'd be interested to try it out.
Just to repeat, the 99% statistic wasn't meant to be accurate. The reason I put 99% instead of something like 97.4%. In common vernacular, people sometimes use the statistic 99% to mean something like "almost all", and it's often an exaggeration.
But basically, I don't think your personal experience in publishing your book can be taken to mean much, at least not without some more information. Your publisher allows your books to be published without DRM, but are you a big seller? If you're not their cash cow, then maybe they just aren't worried about you. You claim your publisher doesn't want DRM, but is that true? Does your publisher disallow DRM completely? Do they allow *all* of their books to be sold without DRM, or just some? Even if they leave the option to their authors, do any of their authors want DRM? If they leave the choice to their authors and even a portion of their authors want DRM, your publisher is going to want DRM to be supported on any online bookstore that they deal with.
Besides all of that, you mentioned that your publisher deals with technical and educational books. Go to Apple's iBook store and look around. Look at their featured books and their top sellers. What do you see? I'll tell you what you don't see: technical and educational books.
Often when engineering/designing/building things, it's easier to limit your use cases. Supporting one codec is easier than supporting 3. Supporting 3 is easier than supporting 20. Not only is it easier to build, but it usually makes the resulting product simpler, less likely to confuse users, less likely to break, and easier to fix.
It's one of the arguments behind the idea of "standards". If there's a single HTML standard that everyone is following, it's easier for people to develop browsers and easier for people to develop websites. If the company with the largest browser market share decides to run off and do their own whacky interpretation of HTML, then it causes problems for everyone.
I'd like to keep the two issues distinct, because I think supporting H264 is probably the right move. Like it or not, it's the new standard. As for supporting *only* H264, Microsoft has this to say:
To be clear, users can install other codecs for use in Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center. For web browsers, developers can continue to offer plug-ins (using NPAPI or ActiveX; they are effectively equivalent in this scenario) so that webpages can play video using these codecs on Windows.
Not that it resolves the issue or is going to make everyone happy, but they didn't completely ignore the issue. Apple also doesn't really prevent the "video" tag from using Theora on the Mac. AFAIK, Safari uses Quicktime to play the video tag in such a way that it will permit any codec that Quicktime can play. If you install the Theora codec, then Safari will play Theora videos in the "video" tag.
However, if IE is going to support H264, then that leaves Mozilla as the odd man out. I expect Mozilla will get H264 support somehow (via a plugin or some other means), and that's the codec everyone will use. Maybe it will be supplanted in a couple of years by VP8, but Google hasn't officially announced any plans AFAIK.
It wasn't meant to be an accurate statistic. It was only meant to make a point. Apple is aiming to please the big publishers so that they can get a big catalog available on their store.
Apple likes uniformity. If all the major book publishers want DRM and it accounts for 99% of their sales, they don't want to engineer another system for the 1% and risk confusing people.
In other words, if your publisher is happy to drop DRM, then no, your publisher is not to blame. But other publishers are.
That's my hope. The question here is, why did Apple buy Lala?
There are a couple possible reasons one company buys another. One is to take out the competition, but that seems unlikely here. The next is to dismantle it and sell off the pieces-- not something Apple really does. Third possible reason: intellectual property; does Lala have any important IP that Apple would want? Fourth: contracts; did Lala have any agreements with anyone that Apple wasn't able to get for themselves?
The next couple of possible reasons for the acquisition seem much more likely. You might buy a company as a way of scooping up their employees. Did Lala have a bunch of talented employees that Apple would want to hire? If so, then that might mean that Apple will use those employees to churn out a good service similar to Lala.
Finally, there's the product itself. It may be that Apple bought Lala specifically because it saw the service they were providing and thought it would make a good addition to their iTunes offerings. The acquisition would give Apple a ready-made service that would allow them to offer iTunes through a web interface in addition to the iTunes store. This last possibility is probably the one most people here will hope for. It that's the case, Apple would still want to shut Lala down, at least long enough to migrate them to Apple datacenters and rebrand the service under the iTunes moniker, perhaps providing links into the existing iTunes store where appropriate.
I'll let you in on a secret about Apple's pricing: They don't like to change it.
Apple basically chooses prices based on marketing concerns and then builds the hardware to meet the price. The cheapest Apple laptop today is $1000, which has been roughly the price point for their cheapest laptop for *years*. It may have been $1200 or something, but they haven't dropped the price much. For the last several years, the most expensive iPods have been right around $400. Now a $400 iPod today has a lot more storage and features than a $400 iPod from 5 years ago, and they've introduce new lines to the series, but someone in Apple's marketing department decided that MP3 players should cost a maximum of $400, and so Apple keeps packing more features and storage into them and selling them at the same price.
This is a good example of what "marketing" really is. People talk about marketing like it's "the art of bullshitting someone to think your product is better than it is," but marketing has a lot to do with product development. There is a market for $400 iPods, but there is not much of a market for $7,000 iPods. Someone has to decide the price points and feature set, and those are dependent on each other.
When Apple announced the iPad, Jobs made a big point of the $500 price point, which leads me to think that's the price their marketing people (or Jobs himself) settled on as the target price. I'd bet that in a few years, $500 may be the high-end price of the iPad, but the cost will remain around that point ($300-$500). I'm not looking forward to the $99 iPad shuffle.
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Yeah, I've been questioning the whole "netbook" classification lately. What set netbooks apart form notebooks was that they sacrificed a lot of functionality to make the cheapest, lightest, smallest thing capable of browsing the Internet (on a screen big enough that you didn't have to zoom in/out the way cell phones do). Now they're generally cheap ultraportable laptops.
Which is fine. Whatever. But "netbook" just seems like a marketing term now. They're small laptops made as cheaply as possible, but you can't call them tiny cheap laptops.
Ok, I tried that. I'm not sure I could tell the difference except the little menu bar at the bottom of the home screen changed. Is that all Sense is? Am I missing something?
Because they still want to make a profit.
You're saying that Apple takes in at least $240 million from selling apps, Apple claims that the App store isn't very profitable. If both are true, then Apple is spending about $240 million on building/running the app store.
So let's say they don't take any cut from anyone. That means they need to take $240 million from their iPhone/iPod/iPad profits and dump it into a money-losing venture, which also probably means they'd be increasing the price of every iPhone/iPod/iPad sold.
Now the truth is, developers are generally benefiting from having a good storefront to sell their applications on. There are problems with the store, sure, but overall it's beneficial for someone to be hosting a marketplace. Apple's share is... what, 20%? That's not unusual. I think RIM charges a percentage for distribution. I believe the Android market takes a 30% cut of all sales. When you buy a ringtone from your cell phone carrier, the carrier takes a slice too (I think something like 50%). The point is, they're providing a service to the developer, so they're going to charge some kind of fee.
Now if you want to complain about Apple *forcing* developers to go through the iTunes store, I'd probably agree with you. That fact aside, however, there isn't anything particularly wrong with how Apple runs the iTunes store.
By "decent" I mean a store that was easy to use, easy to find what you're looking for, has all the major labels on board, and once the music was purchased, had an easy method of keeping the music organized and transferring it to a mobile device.
Yeah, there were a couple online stores around back then. They were terrible and/or had a terrible selection of music available.
it's a straw argument to not provide the APIs to let Flash use the GPU, and then complain that it doesn't use the GPU. That's the problem... Not that Flash is programmed bad
Sorry, but I don't think the issue of APIs is sufficient to explain why Flash crashes constantly. If the whole thing were merely an issue of Flash lacking H264 hardware acceleration support, then you might have a point here, but Flash has been crashing browsers for years and years and Adobe has never really fixed it.
Adobe never even pretended that they were going to fix it until Apple refused to support Flash on the iPhone, at which point they started pointing their fingers at Apple's APIs. One of their major complaints was, "We've been using Apple's legacy API and never bothered to move to the new API, and the old API isn't as well maintained as the new one." First, it's not really Apple's fault that Adobe stuck with Carbon for all these years. Second, using Carbon still doesn't quite explain why Flash hangs and crashes all the time.
Apple sells digital music because an easy source of high-quality music that requires little thought to access leads to more sales of music which leads to more sales of music players, which Apple manufactures and gets a high margin on.
It's also worth noting that when Apple opened the iTunes store, there weren't really other decent online stores out there. This meant that you had to go to the store, buy a CD, and then rip it into iTunes. Or pirate. And my point isn't, "Look at how Apple pioneered a new market," (though they did) but rather that they needed an online store to market their product decently. If the record labels had gotten off their asses and done a good job of it themselves, Apple might have simply built iTunes to use one of the existing stores. If Amazon's MP3 store had existed back then, I think it's possible that Apple wouldn't have bothered setting up their own store. However, Amazon's MP3 store was only allowed to exist because Apple set up shop first.
I think Apple must have learned something from that experience: if you want high-quality content delivered to your content-consumption devices, and you want the experience of delivering that content to be good, then you should just do it yourself.
Apple still needs to run the app store. That requires a datacenter for the servers and a lot of bandwidth. It requires an IT staff to maintain those servers, and designers and software engineers to maintain the store itself. It requires customer service reps to answer complaints, another team to analyze and approve apps and service developers, and a legal team to analyze all the legal implications of all of those things. Then it requires some management time to keep all of those people working together.
You're asking why Apple doesn't just do all that for free? Hmmm.... let me think.
I think part of the problem is that Adobe *still* treats Apple like a second class platform. Flash stinks on OSX. It crashes *constantly*. Adobe's CS is a slow bloated behemoth that never bothered (until CS5) to use Apple's native OSX APIs (Cocoa) but instead stuck with their old legacy/compatibility APIs (Carbon). Even when Adobe finally started working on improving Flash, they tried to blame the whole thing on Apple.
I think you're right to point out that there seems to be bad blood between these companies, but I think it's because of ongoing fights between the companies.
Yeah, that was the first red flag. Second was the repeated use of the term "iTechnology". Is he trying to coin a term? Third, it's long. Too long. Not that I'm opposed to long articles, but his arguments are unfocused and padded with silly things like this:
If apple was so perfect, how come they cannot stop the jail breakers. How come they send out security patches on a regular basis.
Yeah, I have to say, I've been playing with Office 2010, and I like it. I'm not a Microsoft fan. My response to Windows Vista and even Windows 7 and Office 2007 has been, "So what?" Yes, they're all prettier than previous versions and have a couple nice improvements here and there, but mostly.... meh.
But I don't know what it is with Office 2010, somehow it feels much more pleasant to use. It's like they smoothed over a bunch of rough edges, and though I can't give a very long list of what's different from Office 2007, it feels much more pleasant to use somehow.
Now... if only they'd get rid of the goddamn "activation", I might buy a copy. I know all the Microsoft defenders here will say, "Oh, it doesn't matter. I never have problems with WGA/WAT, and if you do have a problem, all you have to do is call Microsoft." Sorry, no. I have had a handful of problems with WGA/WAT as well as activation schemes from other companies, and I've learned my lesson. I won't buy software that requires activation, not for home and not for work. I don't need some random company checking up on me, trying to assess whether they like how I'm using the product that I bought from them, and sabotaging that product if they decide they don't like how I'm using it.
At least they've supported IPv6 for a long while now, unlike some other OS companies.
Yeah, I was surprised when I read the summary. It made it sound like Apple was refusing the implement IPv6, or worse: maybe they were doing something crazy to black IPv6?
I was surprised because I kept seeing IPv6 settings in Apple products for several years now. I remember being surprised the first time I saw IPv6 settings in OSX; I don't remember when it was, but it was a while ago. I thought, "Huh, neat that they have that. Too bad I can't do anything with it." Apple has even had IPv6 support in their home routers for years, so it's weird that they'd be blocking progress.
From reading other comments here, it sounds more like there might some kind of a bug in Apple's implementation that hasn't been found up until now because nobody is actually using IPv6. The bug causes timeouts in some situations.
IPv6 isn't being blocked or slowed by Apple. Apple was an early adopter.
That it became self-aware does not mean that it wasn't designed to be intelligent. It was designed to be intelligent. It was designed to make decisions and think for itself.
There are other problems: their #1 problem is "Left long enough, a computer becomes intelligent", citing Terminator and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
However, the computers weren't just "left long enough" in either movie. In Terminator, SkyNet was an AI designed by the military to have intelligence. The surprise wasn't that it became intelligent, but that it decided to kill everyone. In Star Trek, Voyager was discovered by an alien race of intelligent robots (or something like that) who repaired and upgraded Voyager.
Well I bet you could do your sysadmin duties without all that, but would you want to?
Well the article does talk about the relationship between speech recognition an AI, but it basically claims that good speech recognition requires far more sophisticated AI than previously expected. Various people had tried simple statistical analyses based on the context of each word in a sentence, but the result still wasn't good enough. Some people have begun to think that a computer would need to develop a real understanding of what you're saying in order to give human-quality speech recognition, and that's some serious AI.
My own thoughts on the subject is that getting an AI to "understand what you're talking about" is going to be even more difficult that most people suspect. Human understanding isn't merely guided by passive observance and interpretation. Empathy plays a big role. Human animal behaviors and instincts come into play. We also draw a *lot* from our own personal experiences. I'm not sure if you can get an AI to really understand unless it's out in the world itself, in a body, having "human" experiences of its own.
Honestly, I don't know why I'd want to either. I also don't know why i wouldn't want to. This is my first android phone, so i have no idea what the difference is between Sense and stock Android. It'd be nice if i could try the stock Android settings without doing anything irreversible to my phone so I could try it out and decide which I liked better.
I don't think that worked.
Out of curiosity, how? I have an Incredible, and if there was a way that I could turn the whole thing into a vanilla install of Android, I'd be interested to try it out.
You're being rude. Still, I'll respond.
Just to repeat, the 99% statistic wasn't meant to be accurate. The reason I put 99% instead of something like 97.4%. In common vernacular, people sometimes use the statistic 99% to mean something like "almost all", and it's often an exaggeration.
But basically, I don't think your personal experience in publishing your book can be taken to mean much, at least not without some more information. Your publisher allows your books to be published without DRM, but are you a big seller? If you're not their cash cow, then maybe they just aren't worried about you. You claim your publisher doesn't want DRM, but is that true? Does your publisher disallow DRM completely? Do they allow *all* of their books to be sold without DRM, or just some? Even if they leave the option to their authors, do any of their authors want DRM? If they leave the choice to their authors and even a portion of their authors want DRM, your publisher is going to want DRM to be supported on any online bookstore that they deal with.
Besides all of that, you mentioned that your publisher deals with technical and educational books. Go to Apple's iBook store and look around. Look at their featured books and their top sellers. What do you see? I'll tell you what you don't see: technical and educational books.
Often when engineering/designing/building things, it's easier to limit your use cases. Supporting one codec is easier than supporting 3. Supporting 3 is easier than supporting 20. Not only is it easier to build, but it usually makes the resulting product simpler, less likely to confuse users, less likely to break, and easier to fix.
It's one of the arguments behind the idea of "standards". If there's a single HTML standard that everyone is following, it's easier for people to develop browsers and easier for people to develop websites. If the company with the largest browser market share decides to run off and do their own whacky interpretation of HTML, then it causes problems for everyone.
Well I think there are really 2 different issues:
I'd like to keep the two issues distinct, because I think supporting H264 is probably the right move. Like it or not, it's the new standard. As for supporting *only* H264, Microsoft has this to say:
To be clear, users can install other codecs for use in Windows Media Player and Windows Media Center. For web browsers, developers can continue to offer plug-ins (using NPAPI or ActiveX; they are effectively equivalent in this scenario) so that webpages can play video using these codecs on Windows.
Not that it resolves the issue or is going to make everyone happy, but they didn't completely ignore the issue. Apple also doesn't really prevent the "video" tag from using Theora on the Mac. AFAIK, Safari uses Quicktime to play the video tag in such a way that it will permit any codec that Quicktime can play. If you install the Theora codec, then Safari will play Theora videos in the "video" tag.
However, if IE is going to support H264, then that leaves Mozilla as the odd man out. I expect Mozilla will get H264 support somehow (via a plugin or some other means), and that's the codec everyone will use. Maybe it will be supplanted in a couple of years by VP8, but Google hasn't officially announced any plans AFAIK.
It wasn't meant to be an accurate statistic. It was only meant to make a point. Apple is aiming to please the big publishers so that they can get a big catalog available on their store.
Apple likes uniformity. If all the major book publishers want DRM and it accounts for 99% of their sales, they don't want to engineer another system for the 1% and risk confusing people.
In other words, if your publisher is happy to drop DRM, then no, your publisher is not to blame. But other publishers are.
That's my hope. The question here is, why did Apple buy Lala?
There are a couple possible reasons one company buys another. One is to take out the competition, but that seems unlikely here. The next is to dismantle it and sell off the pieces-- not something Apple really does. Third possible reason: intellectual property; does Lala have any important IP that Apple would want? Fourth: contracts; did Lala have any agreements with anyone that Apple wasn't able to get for themselves?
The next couple of possible reasons for the acquisition seem much more likely. You might buy a company as a way of scooping up their employees. Did Lala have a bunch of talented employees that Apple would want to hire? If so, then that might mean that Apple will use those employees to churn out a good service similar to Lala.
Finally, there's the product itself. It may be that Apple bought Lala specifically because it saw the service they were providing and thought it would make a good addition to their iTunes offerings. The acquisition would give Apple a ready-made service that would allow them to offer iTunes through a web interface in addition to the iTunes store. This last possibility is probably the one most people here will hope for. It that's the case, Apple would still want to shut Lala down, at least long enough to migrate them to Apple datacenters and rebrand the service under the iTunes moniker, perhaps providing links into the existing iTunes store where appropriate.
I'll let you in on a secret about Apple's pricing: They don't like to change it.
Apple basically chooses prices based on marketing concerns and then builds the hardware to meet the price. The cheapest Apple laptop today is $1000, which has been roughly the price point for their cheapest laptop for *years*. It may have been $1200 or something, but they haven't dropped the price much. For the last several years, the most expensive iPods have been right around $400. Now a $400 iPod today has a lot more storage and features than a $400 iPod from 5 years ago, and they've introduce new lines to the series, but someone in Apple's marketing department decided that MP3 players should cost a maximum of $400, and so Apple keeps packing more features and storage into them and selling them at the same price.
This is a good example of what "marketing" really is. People talk about marketing like it's "the art of bullshitting someone to think your product is better than it is," but marketing has a lot to do with product development. There is a market for $400 iPods, but there is not much of a market for $7,000 iPods. Someone has to decide the price points and feature set, and those are dependent on each other.
When Apple announced the iPad, Jobs made a big point of the $500 price point, which leads me to think that's the price their marketing people (or Jobs himself) settled on as the target price. I'd bet that in a few years, $500 may be the high-end price of the iPad, but the cost will remain around that point ($300-$500). I'm not looking forward to the $99 iPad shuffle.