I don't know if it's intentional, but wouldn't it be ironic if this move ends up having the effect of creating the perception in consumers' minds that: "DRM equals inferior quality"?
Ironic? I'm not sure. Sounds like justice to me. DRM does mean "inferior quality", just not inferior sound quality. Ultimately, if consumers don't understand the difference, it's probably just as well that they have a vague notion that "DRM=inferior".
I feel like it's one of those situations where someone has to have some measure of control, yet whenever someone suggests a person or organization to control it, it always seems like a bad idea. Every body, whether individual, private, or governmental, will have an agenda that could damage the situation. It's really a problem of people. I don't trust people. They make too many bad decisions. But what's the alternative??
Technically, no one was able to show how allofmp3.com was illegal, so instead they used political pressure to get the Russians to shut it down. Allofmp3.com won all their lawsuits that I ever read about.
Well again, IANAL, but I read an article a while back written by someone claiming to be a lawyer specializing in IP issues. The author claimed that the law was a bit hazy, but that technically allofmp3.com was probably legal. The key question, he claimed, was whether the transaction was said to take place in Russia or the US. If it was sold in the US, the sale was contrary to US copyright laws and therefore illegal.
However, they copying was done in Russia and in accordance with Russian copyright, and therefore legal. If the sale is said to have taken place in Russia, then the sale was legal. Then the question becomes whether it's legal for US citizens to import the product for their own personal use-- so if you bought a CD while on vacation in Russia, would it be legal to stick the CD in your suitcase and bring it home. The author said it was legal. Therefore, according to this guy (random guy claiming to be a lawyer, but who knows), US citizens would probably not be committing a crime to buy songs from allofmp3.com.
If iTunes France wants to charge half the German price, that's fine, but they are not allowed to stop people with German issued credit cards logging on and buying tracks. The EU garuntees free movement of goods, services and people between its member states. Shutting out consumers based on where their cards are issued may well be in violation of this.
IANAL, so I feel like I have to ask-- when you purchase something online, legally, where does the transaction take place? Like if I'm sitting in NYC and I buy a music track from a French store, is that purchase subject to French laws or American laws?
It seems only tangentially related, but I wonder if this is the real issue here. Let's imagine Apple is licensed to sell a song in Germany but isn't licensed to sell that track in France, not under any price. Now, someone in France buys that track in the German store. If that transaction is said to take place in France, then Apple is guilty of copyright infringement.
The reason I ask is that this problem keeps popping up again and again. This was the question about allofmp3.com: if the sale is legal according to Russian law but illegal according to American law, is it legal for Americans in America to buy the music from a Russian store in Russia.
Are these legal issues even worked out and solidified yet?
I'd also guess that Serenity might have gotten extra votes because people wouldn't think others would vote for it. Polls are funny like that. Sometimes people get in a bandwagon mentality and vote for what they think other people will vote for. Sometimes everyone tries to vote for the underdog, and end up making that "underdog" the winner in spite of no one really thinking it should win.
In other words, don't trust polls to get real answers to the questions being asked.
Yes. The DRMed music is at 128kbps and the nonDRMed is 256kbps. Some people might care about that difference in quality, but yes, it will sound better.
What I'm saying is, yes, they could've offered MP3s, risk confusing customers, paid additional patent royalties for every song sold, and given the customer a lower-quality product for a higher price. The only reason to do this is because MP3 support is more widespread, but then the purpose of the iTunes Music Store is specifically to service devices that support AAC. It simply doesn't make sense.
I do somewhat wish that they'd offer encoding quality between 128 and 256 (maybe 160, 192?). However, I'm not sure why Apple would do that, either. Most consumers are happy enough with 128, and those who aren't probably want something that is lossless or near-lossless. It's pretty hard to discern the difference between a 256kbps AAC and a lossless file, but choosing 256 saves considerably on bandwidth and hard drive space.
Also, most people probably don't realize that Apple doesn't always receive lossless files from the content-owner. I don't know if they ever receive the lossless files, but I know many record labels encode the music into AAC themselves and send the AACs to Apple. Increasing the number of encodings would increase the complexity of the operation more than you might think.
The logic is that the record labels want to offer an economic incentive to purchase whole albums. It's no secret that the record industry usually wants you to buy albums rather than buying individual songs. This is a decision on the label's end, not Apple's end.
I can think of a reason that will sound absolutely stupid to most people here: Apple might be concerned about confusing customers. They might be trying to distinguish these new DRM-free tracks as being "Premium" so that consumers don't get confused about what the difference is between DRMed and non-DRMed music. If they're offering some portion of their library without DRM and some portion with DRM, many customers might not understand the difference but might still note that things are inconsistent. If you track the way Apple does thing, they don't want their customers to face inconsistent value and changes with no apparent reason.
So that would be one theory. Another might be that EMI simply wouldn't agree to those $0.99 tracks being sold without DRM.
It might be a function of negotiations between Apple and EMI. Apple wants to drop DRM. EMI wants to increase prices. Apple wants increased bitrates. Done deal.
There are other reasons why Apple would stick with AAC beyond lock-in. First, AAC was designed to provide better sound quality at the same bitrate-- whether it delivers on this seems to depend on a few things, particularly the encoders you're comparing, but AAC is an MPEG standard developed to be better than MP3. Also, MP3 has additional legal (patent) issues which might be important for someone running an online store. According to the Wikipedia article, AAC doesn't require royalty payments for distribution. In other words, using MP3 would force Apple to pay royalties on their music sales, and AAC doesn't.
Beyond that, Apple can't prevent anyone from making AAC encoders/decoders, so there really is no lock-in to complain of.
I'm suspicious of your post. When were you working in NYC? I ask because, well, first, anyone who's afraid of going into Williamsburg these days must fear trendy college kids. Second, because I'm wondering when they moved Williamsburg to be near the Brooklyn Bridge-- last I checked, Williamsburg was near the Williamsburg Bridge.
The truth is, it's not horribly slow once you get it going, but it can take 20 seconds to load up on even a high-end machine. It's not enough to make it unusable, but it's annoying when you're trying to do something quickly.
That's not really how most lasrge businesses these days work. Firstly, they don't buy equipment, they lease it.
Sometimes. It's not so cut-and-dry. It's not as though there aren't companies still buying equipment.
typically these days, if there is a problem with a leased system, the whole thing just gets swapped out, whether the monitor is separate or not.
Leased or not, nobody is going to bother to swap the working components when they could just swap the broken one. When I'm dealing with a bad computer, I'll leave the cables, keyboard, mouse, monitor, and whatever else is hooked up and swap the computer. Besides, my point wasn't about swapping out broken units, but about upgrading components.
There are people who want to be able to keep their monitor and buy a new computer. There are people who want to keep their computer and buy a new monitor. There are even people who want to buy a new video card and keep the computer and monitor. Apple doesn't offer a product for people like this except the Mac Pro, which is not really a normal consumer/business desktop. It's a workstation.
I really don't know why you people are arguing. What I'm saying is pretty obvious.
Those people, lacking the choice, will usually compromise on their dream machine - rather than not purchasing a computer altogether. So they actually form a part of the genral market.
And they'll probably buy a Dell that's servicing their needs for a desktop machine and forego OSX. Because. Apple. Isn't. Servicing. That. Market.
On the Mac? First, you don't want to use that on the Mac. Try NeoOffice instead. That will keep you from having to run X11. Second, for all the nice things I would want to say about NeoOffice, it's not exactly snappy.
Really, I use NeoOffice. I've donated to the project. I'm grateful for all the good work they've done. But even the Intel-native version doesn't run any faster than Word 2004.
Likewise, the reasons that people buy Mac Pros and iMacs are not that different, when it comes down to it. Mac Pro buyers don't say "I want a huge metal tower that weighs approximately 3 tons."
No, but there are people who say, "I want to buy a iMac because it's a nice package, all together, and takes up no more desk space than the display. No wires!" There are people who say, "I want a Mac mini because it's a tiny little machine that is pretty fully-featured and yet doesn't take up much space." There are people who say, "I don't want to buy a Mac Pro because it's a huge metal tower that weighs approximately 3 tons." And there are also people who say, "I don't want to buy an iMac because I might want to upgrade the computer and keep the monitor or upgrade the monitor and keep the computer."
There is a very real market for a Mac mini-tower-- smaller, lighter, and cheaper than a Mac Pro, but bigger, more powerful, and more serviceable than a Mac mini, and with no monitor attached. There are people who would buy a machine like that, some of whom would not buy a Mac Pro, Mac mini, or iMac. There are marketing reasons why Apple might not want to service that market, but I really don't see how you can believe that the market doesn't exist.
There are loads of people (especially businesses) who don't want to buy an all-in-one machine because they *do* buy the monitor and computer separately. Or, more to the point, they upgrade them separately. The monitor is often the single most expensive component of your computer, and being able to replace/upgrade your computer and display independently makes good financial sense.
I think it's more accurate to say that the iMac is in a different category: all-in-one PCs. There are a lot of people who won't buy them because they don't want the PC and the monitor to be the same device.
There is the iMac, but you can't deny that there is a market for mid-line desktop machines that Apple is currently not servicing. With the Mac Mini, you're paying a premium for the small form-factor. The Mac Pro is a high-end workstation. The iMac is in the market of "all-in-one" computers, which is different from a standard mid-line desktop.
No, I really don't forget that. The point is that it's an issue of market segmentation. Let me break it down a little more simply: It's not generally valid to complain that Apple charges a huge premium for their hardware. It is valid, however, to complain that Apple isn't trying to service all markets.
If you don't understand the distinction that I'm making, I don't know what to tell you.
Please stop repeating that canard that Steve Jobs has a "preference for getting rid of DRM." That is absolutely false....
I am an IP lawyer working on music licensing. The industry consensus is that Steve Jobs is a publicity hog and pro-mp3 his editorial was an attempt to take credit for upcoming rumored announcement from the major labels regarding selling in non-DRM format. Rumor has it that such shift will occur within a few months.
Holy crap. I guess I've just been entirely gullible to believe Steve Jobs. Not anymore, though! From now on, I'll only listen to the record industry's lawyers!
I would guess that, out of the entire PC market, very few people would find the hardware on Macs "limiting". The Mac mini is a bit lightweight for a serious game machine, and unfortunately there isn't something between a Mac mini and a Mac Pro, but that's a marketing issue, not a problem inherent to the platform.
But what's the feature that Mac motherboards are failing to offer? Most likely, you're talking about something that only a person doing homebrew machines is going to even know what you're talking about, and that's not the market Apple is in.
I've done various price comparisons at various times in the past few years, and I would say that generally the price of Apple hardware is comparable to similar hardware from other companies.
What I mean is this: if you pick an Apple laptop model, and then you go to Dell and price out a similar model to have all the same features, the price will usually be pretty close. Sometimes Apple was even a little cheaper, usually slightly more expensive, but close.
I'm sure there are loads of people who will claim I'm full of it, but those people usually aren't doing what I described in the last paragraph. For example, they'll point out that you can get a Dell laptop for $600 while the cheapest Apple laptop is $1100. However, the Dell laptop they're citing will be much thicker and heavier. The Dell won't have a CD-R drive or a built-in camera. The Dell won't be as fast or have a good-quality screen.
When you price out a machine with the same quality of parts, the same features, and the same form-factor, you generally find that Apple is competitive with all the major players (Sony, Dell, HP, IBM, Toshiba). However, Apple doesn't offer el-cheapo machines. They just don't have a $300 machine where they've cut every corner to bring it to market at cheaply as possible. They don't offer a $600 laptop. They also don't offer a general mid-grade mini-tower or micro-tower. The only machine that you can really expect to be upgrading is a Mac Pro, and as the name suggests, it's an high-end workstation more than a general desktop PC.
So that's why I was talking about market segmentation. Apple might be able to expand their market into these areas, but it seems like they don't want to. I'm not sure why not, but I have some theories.
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Ironic? I'm not sure. Sounds like justice to me. DRM does mean "inferior quality", just not inferior sound quality. Ultimately, if consumers don't understand the difference, it's probably just as well that they have a vague notion that "DRM=inferior".
I feel like it's one of those situations where someone has to have some measure of control, yet whenever someone suggests a person or organization to control it, it always seems like a bad idea. Every body, whether individual, private, or governmental, will have an agenda that could damage the situation. It's really a problem of people. I don't trust people. They make too many bad decisions. But what's the alternative??
Well again, IANAL, but I read an article a while back written by someone claiming to be a lawyer specializing in IP issues. The author claimed that the law was a bit hazy, but that technically allofmp3.com was probably legal. The key question, he claimed, was whether the transaction was said to take place in Russia or the US. If it was sold in the US, the sale was contrary to US copyright laws and therefore illegal.
However, they copying was done in Russia and in accordance with Russian copyright, and therefore legal. If the sale is said to have taken place in Russia, then the sale was legal. Then the question becomes whether it's legal for US citizens to import the product for their own personal use-- so if you bought a CD while on vacation in Russia, would it be legal to stick the CD in your suitcase and bring it home. The author said it was legal. Therefore, according to this guy (random guy claiming to be a lawyer, but who knows), US citizens would probably not be committing a crime to buy songs from allofmp3.com.
IANAL, so I feel like I have to ask-- when you purchase something online, legally, where does the transaction take place? Like if I'm sitting in NYC and I buy a music track from a French store, is that purchase subject to French laws or American laws?
It seems only tangentially related, but I wonder if this is the real issue here. Let's imagine Apple is licensed to sell a song in Germany but isn't licensed to sell that track in France, not under any price. Now, someone in France buys that track in the German store. If that transaction is said to take place in France, then Apple is guilty of copyright infringement.
The reason I ask is that this problem keeps popping up again and again. This was the question about allofmp3.com: if the sale is legal according to Russian law but illegal according to American law, is it legal for Americans in America to buy the music from a Russian store in Russia.
Are these legal issues even worked out and solidified yet?
I'd also guess that Serenity might have gotten extra votes because people wouldn't think others would vote for it. Polls are funny like that. Sometimes people get in a bandwagon mentality and vote for what they think other people will vote for. Sometimes everyone tries to vote for the underdog, and end up making that "underdog" the winner in spite of no one really thinking it should win.
In other words, don't trust polls to get real answers to the questions being asked.
Yes. The DRMed music is at 128kbps and the nonDRMed is 256kbps. Some people might care about that difference in quality, but yes, it will sound better.
What I'm saying is, yes, they could've offered MP3s, risk confusing customers, paid additional patent royalties for every song sold, and given the customer a lower-quality product for a higher price. The only reason to do this is because MP3 support is more widespread, but then the purpose of the iTunes Music Store is specifically to service devices that support AAC. It simply doesn't make sense.
I do somewhat wish that they'd offer encoding quality between 128 and 256 (maybe 160, 192?). However, I'm not sure why Apple would do that, either. Most consumers are happy enough with 128, and those who aren't probably want something that is lossless or near-lossless. It's pretty hard to discern the difference between a 256kbps AAC and a lossless file, but choosing 256 saves considerably on bandwidth and hard drive space.
Also, most people probably don't realize that Apple doesn't always receive lossless files from the content-owner. I don't know if they ever receive the lossless files, but I know many record labels encode the music into AAC themselves and send the AACs to Apple. Increasing the number of encodings would increase the complexity of the operation more than you might think.
The logic is that the record labels want to offer an economic incentive to purchase whole albums. It's no secret that the record industry usually wants you to buy albums rather than buying individual songs. This is a decision on the label's end, not Apple's end.
I can think of a reason that will sound absolutely stupid to most people here: Apple might be concerned about confusing customers. They might be trying to distinguish these new DRM-free tracks as being "Premium" so that consumers don't get confused about what the difference is between DRMed and non-DRMed music. If they're offering some portion of their library without DRM and some portion with DRM, many customers might not understand the difference but might still note that things are inconsistent. If you track the way Apple does thing, they don't want their customers to face inconsistent value and changes with no apparent reason.
So that would be one theory. Another might be that EMI simply wouldn't agree to those $0.99 tracks being sold without DRM.
It might be a function of negotiations between Apple and EMI. Apple wants to drop DRM. EMI wants to increase prices. Apple wants increased bitrates. Done deal.
There are other reasons why Apple would stick with AAC beyond lock-in. First, AAC was designed to provide better sound quality at the same bitrate-- whether it delivers on this seems to depend on a few things, particularly the encoders you're comparing, but AAC is an MPEG standard developed to be better than MP3. Also, MP3 has additional legal (patent) issues which might be important for someone running an online store. According to the Wikipedia article, AAC doesn't require royalty payments for distribution. In other words, using MP3 would force Apple to pay royalties on their music sales, and AAC doesn't.
Beyond that, Apple can't prevent anyone from making AAC encoders/decoders, so there really is no lock-in to complain of.
I'm suspicious of your post. When were you working in NYC? I ask because, well, first, anyone who's afraid of going into Williamsburg these days must fear trendy college kids. Second, because I'm wondering when they moved Williamsburg to be near the Brooklyn Bridge-- last I checked, Williamsburg was near the Williamsburg Bridge.
The truth is, it's not horribly slow once you get it going, but it can take 20 seconds to load up on even a high-end machine. It's not enough to make it unusable, but it's annoying when you're trying to do something quickly.
That's not really how most lasrge businesses these days work. Firstly, they don't buy equipment, they lease it.
Sometimes. It's not so cut-and-dry. It's not as though there aren't companies still buying equipment.
typically these days, if there is a problem with a leased system, the whole thing just gets swapped out, whether the monitor is separate or not.
Leased or not, nobody is going to bother to swap the working components when they could just swap the broken one. When I'm dealing with a bad computer, I'll leave the cables, keyboard, mouse, monitor, and whatever else is hooked up and swap the computer. Besides, my point wasn't about swapping out broken units, but about upgrading components.
There are people who want to be able to keep their monitor and buy a new computer. There are people who want to keep their computer and buy a new monitor. There are even people who want to buy a new video card and keep the computer and monitor. Apple doesn't offer a product for people like this except the Mac Pro, which is not really a normal consumer/business desktop. It's a workstation.
I really don't know why you people are arguing. What I'm saying is pretty obvious.
Those people, lacking the choice, will usually compromise on their dream machine - rather than not purchasing a computer altogether. So they actually form a part of the genral market.
And they'll probably buy a Dell that's servicing their needs for a desktop machine and forego OSX. Because. Apple. Isn't. Servicing. That. Market.
...and I'll be giddy when it's done, but I've been waiting for years already.
On the Mac? First, you don't want to use that on the Mac. Try NeoOffice instead. That will keep you from having to run X11. Second, for all the nice things I would want to say about NeoOffice, it's not exactly snappy.
Really, I use NeoOffice. I've donated to the project. I'm grateful for all the good work they've done. But even the Intel-native version doesn't run any faster than Word 2004.
Likewise, the reasons that people buy Mac Pros and iMacs are not that different, when it comes down to it. Mac Pro buyers don't say "I want a huge metal tower that weighs approximately 3 tons."
No, but there are people who say, "I want to buy a iMac because it's a nice package, all together, and takes up no more desk space than the display. No wires!" There are people who say, "I want a Mac mini because it's a tiny little machine that is pretty fully-featured and yet doesn't take up much space." There are people who say, "I don't want to buy a Mac Pro because it's a huge metal tower that weighs approximately 3 tons." And there are also people who say, "I don't want to buy an iMac because I might want to upgrade the computer and keep the monitor or upgrade the monitor and keep the computer."
There is a very real market for a Mac mini-tower-- smaller, lighter, and cheaper than a Mac Pro, but bigger, more powerful, and more serviceable than a Mac mini, and with no monitor attached. There are people who would buy a machine like that, some of whom would not buy a Mac Pro, Mac mini, or iMac. There are marketing reasons why Apple might not want to service that market, but I really don't see how you can believe that the market doesn't exist.
There are loads of people (especially businesses) who don't want to buy an all-in-one machine because they *do* buy the monitor and computer separately. Or, more to the point, they upgrade them separately. The monitor is often the single most expensive component of your computer, and being able to replace/upgrade your computer and display independently makes good financial sense.
I think it's more accurate to say that the iMac is in a different category: all-in-one PCs. There are a lot of people who won't buy them because they don't want the PC and the monitor to be the same device.
There is the iMac, but you can't deny that there is a market for mid-line desktop machines that Apple is currently not servicing. With the Mac Mini, you're paying a premium for the small form-factor. The Mac Pro is a high-end workstation. The iMac is in the market of "all-in-one" computers, which is different from a standard mid-line desktop.
No, I really don't forget that. The point is that it's an issue of market segmentation. Let me break it down a little more simply: It's not generally valid to complain that Apple charges a huge premium for their hardware. It is valid, however, to complain that Apple isn't trying to service all markets.
If you don't understand the distinction that I'm making, I don't know what to tell you.
Holy crap. I guess I've just been entirely gullible to believe Steve Jobs. Not anymore, though! From now on, I'll only listen to the record industry's lawyers!
I would guess that, out of the entire PC market, very few people would find the hardware on Macs "limiting". The Mac mini is a bit lightweight for a serious game machine, and unfortunately there isn't something between a Mac mini and a Mac Pro, but that's a marketing issue, not a problem inherent to the platform.
But what's the feature that Mac motherboards are failing to offer? Most likely, you're talking about something that only a person doing homebrew machines is going to even know what you're talking about, and that's not the market Apple is in.
I've done various price comparisons at various times in the past few years, and I would say that generally the price of Apple hardware is comparable to similar hardware from other companies.
What I mean is this: if you pick an Apple laptop model, and then you go to Dell and price out a similar model to have all the same features, the price will usually be pretty close. Sometimes Apple was even a little cheaper, usually slightly more expensive, but close.
I'm sure there are loads of people who will claim I'm full of it, but those people usually aren't doing what I described in the last paragraph. For example, they'll point out that you can get a Dell laptop for $600 while the cheapest Apple laptop is $1100. However, the Dell laptop they're citing will be much thicker and heavier. The Dell won't have a CD-R drive or a built-in camera. The Dell won't be as fast or have a good-quality screen.
When you price out a machine with the same quality of parts, the same features, and the same form-factor, you generally find that Apple is competitive with all the major players (Sony, Dell, HP, IBM, Toshiba). However, Apple doesn't offer el-cheapo machines. They just don't have a $300 machine where they've cut every corner to bring it to market at cheaply as possible. They don't offer a $600 laptop. They also don't offer a general mid-grade mini-tower or micro-tower. The only machine that you can really expect to be upgrading is a Mac Pro, and as the name suggests, it's an high-end workstation more than a general desktop PC.
So that's why I was talking about market segmentation. Apple might be able to expand their market into these areas, but it seems like they don't want to. I'm not sure why not, but I have some theories.