iTunes is 256 kbit/s AAC — when you factor in that iTunes doesn't skip, doesn't get scratched, today's iTunes music is higher-quality than CD. People make the mistake of assuming laboratory conditions. Instead, go into someone's home and take a CD off the shelf and it will be covered in scratches, the CD player will be making up bits to fill in the gaps, and it will likely skip at least once per hour.
And you may not know this, but it is Apple that generates the ISO MPEG-4 AAC audio file from their own master archive, which includes many songs and albums in lossless 24-bit 96kHz or even 192kHz audio — the actual audio from the studio masters. The actual mix that the producer made. Going forward, Apple will at some point release iPods, iPhones, and iPads that have 24-bit audio support (Macs have all supported 24-bit audio for many years now) and they will start releasing music in the actual studio master format, so you hear exactly what the producer made. There are frequencies in 96/192kHz audio that you hear with your internal organs, not your ears.
Vinyl is not a truer copy, unless you're listening to something that was recorded onto vinyl, which stopped in the 1950's. Since then, music has been recorded onto analog tape, digital tape, digital hard disks, and digital solid-state hard disks. For more than 10 years now, the typical studio master has a much, much larger soundscape than even CD can reproduce. Putting that soundscape on vinyl gives you an even smaller picture of it. And most vinyl recordings have too long of a running time, which reduces the audio quality considerably. And vinyl always has scratches, clicks and pops, that are not part of the original recording. It's not really the vinyl that people are nostalgic for, it's the old amps, which were made not to be accurate, but to be musical. We see some of this coming back with Beats headphones, which were not made to be accurate, but rather to be musical.
No way — the most annoying person is the one like you whose guilt causes them to lambaste the innocent.
Sorry the guy reminded you that there are artists in your music collection who are going without health care because you decided they should work for you for free.
Napster totally sucked unless all you wanted to do was generate a high file count in your MP3 collection. You might as well just record the radio in that case. The rips were awful quality, the labels were often wrong, and the version of the song you got was often not the one you wanted.
The one exception might be that you could find rare live versions or alternate versions of a track in some cases that were previously harder to find. If that had been Napster's focus — sharing music that wasn't available on CD — then it would have had a reason to exist.
I think iTunes is better in every way. Yes, you have to pay, but it is a small amount and you get exactly what you wanted, you never have to pay again as you download for life to whatever devices you want, and in many cases today, almost all of what you pay goes directly to the artist. If you don't like a song enough to pay for it on iTunes, then listen to it on the radio or as part of a monthly subscription service of some kind. If you like a song enough to pay for it on iTunes, you'll have it forever.
Needs to constantly be plugged in, runs viruses, only runs phone apps, has taken up a bunch of your time, and cost 30% of the very best tablet in the world, which gives you 10 hours per day for 2 years of AC-free, weight-free, desk-free computing. How in the fuck is that “a decent tablet?”
In San Francisco there was a Sony store and a Microsoft store in the Metreon mall before Apple Store was even started, and neither made money. Apple put a store one block away and you can barely get in there because it is so full. That is because Apple really thought out what their customers want and need from a retail store and then they built it and iterated on it until it was better and better. Sony and Microsoft did not do that, they just built what were essentially advertisements you could walk into and be further advertised to, like a walk-in billboard. Microsoft's next step was not to learn from Apple and then create a unique Microsoft store that really serves the needs of Microsoft customers, but rather just to copy Apple Store. Same as how Vista was really made for Mac users at a time when Windows users wanted XP version 2.
So I'm very interested to see if Google really sweats the details and comes up with a unique store that serves the needs of their own customers, or whether they just copy Apple Store. If the former, they have a chance to have huge success. If the latter, then everybody will yawn. Consumer will just fucking yawn at the Google Store on their way past it to an Apple Store. If you don't do your own unique thing, there is no news. News is a very, very important part of marketing today, because the Internet is one big news feed. People have already seen the dog riding a skateboard. You have to come with something new to get their interest. Microsoft basically offered a cat riding a skateboard. No news. Hopefully, Google will surprise us and wow us with their new stores. If not, they should not bother.
The thing is, Apple Store does not look or feel like Gateway stores at all. Not in any way. And Apple Store was made to sell iPod and iPhone and iPad, not PC's like Gateway. And when the first Apple Store opened, people didn't say "wow, that is a copy of a Gateway store!" With Microsoft, the way they cloned Apple Store was disturbing, and Microsoft's stores are not even practical for them. They should have bought Blockbuster and had lower-end stores in lots of neighborhoods where their customers could transition from DVD to Xbox/PC.
I don't think anyone has a problem with Google opening a store. The issue is will they do stores that are truly designed for Google products, or will they just copy Apple Store? After seeing Microsoft copy Apple and Google copy Microsoft and Apple, it is hard not to be cynical. Many people expect we are just going to see another Apple Store clone from Google. A Google store should be much, much smaller, and have more of a science fair or Exploratorium vibe than Apple Store. If they do their own thing, that could really be spectacular, and everyone will benefit because we can go to the mall and there will be an additional modern store with modern products. But if they copy Apple Store that is just pissing in the pool. That just confuses people into thinking Google is another fake Apple, and makes the mall more generic. Hopefully, Google will take this seriously (almost no chance, I know) and create something really unique and special.
There is almost no consumer demand for Nexus devices, therefore there is almost no retailer demand for Nexus devices, therefore you can't find Nexus devices at retail very easily. The idea with Google opening its own store is apparently to stimulate consumer demand by showing them the devices and enabling them to try them out.
Another problem with Nexus devices at retail is that Google is not a phone maker or seller, or a consumer electronics company. They did not know what they were doing when it came to marketing the Nexus devices and they did an extremely poor job of it.
The Nexus devices sell in extremely small numbers, and mostly to computer nerds who decided to buy them before they even shipped, and who will almost certainly just order them online whenever they become available. That's the exact opposite of why you open a store.
You're going to spend $10,000 on a phone that doesn't have a video editor? That can't run C apps? That has viruses (and in fact has more viruses than apps?)
Better to get an iPhone and a $10,000 diamond-encrusted case.
$21 million in retail price savings is easily blown on I-T consultant costs to setup an OpenOffice system, train the users, and respond to their never-ending help requests.
The truth is, the cheapest office workflow is on iPad. Pages, Keynote, and Numbers cost $10 each, run on all your iOS devices, have only the features that 90% of users need and want and understand, require almost no training, and run great for 10 hours straight on an iPad mini in your coat pocket. These are apps in which you get a ton of work done. And Keynote is by far the best presentation client in the world. Almost every world class speaker uses Keynote, for example Al Gore, Tony Robbins, and everyone at Apple.
If you can function as your own I-T consultant, then by all means, OpenOffice away. That is great for you. But the idea that OpenOffice should be inflicted on the long-suffering office worker is at best nerd elitism, a kind of father-knows-best attitude, and at worst is an ad hoc conspiracy to increase the number of I-T consultant jobs.
All that stuff fits in 2 GB on an iPad. Which also means it can be restored easily over Wi-Fi if it has to be. iOS is designed not only for tiny SSD but for tiny wireless bandwidth. So apps that create giant uncompressed files on the Mac create tiny compresses files on iOS, and it adds up to tiny SSD sizes like 16 GB or 32 GB feeling like a giant amount of storage on an iPad. My Mac has 8 times the storage of my iPad, but they both have 20 GB free.
Windows was made for AC power, Ethernet, and giant hard drives. iOS was made for batteries, wireless networking, and tiny SSD storage. It shows at every level.
SSD may get bigger soon but wireless bandwidth is going to be constrained for quite some time to come. A device that has 40 GB of data preinstalled on it is not ready for the wireless world.
With Apple, the recovery data resides on the Internet. With Microsoft, it resides on the device itself.
You can recover a Mac by booting to firmware and installing the system over the Internet. You can recover an iPad by plugging it into iTunes and installing the system over the Internet.
There is this thing called the Internet. Apple's system installer lives on the Internet, so it doesn't have to take up space on every single system. That is why the Mac recovery partition is a half a gigabyte. No disk space has to be wasted on system recovery. Microsoft simply doesn't know what the fuck they are doing.
We are about to buy and deploy 10,000 more iPads, but now that you mention this, I think we'll buy 10,000 Surface Pros, 10,000 USB flash drives, and 10,000 I-T hours to move the recovery partitions over to the USB drives. Makes total sense.
Macs also don't have optical disc drives, and the Mac recovery partition is a half a gigabyte. System files are fetched over this thing called the Internet as they are needed.
iPads also don't have optical disc drives, but you can reset them with any copy of iTunes.
So, to be fair, Microsoft is doing a really, really poor job with their recovery partition.
> is it 23GB in base 2 like the OS, or is it base 10 like the manufacturers?
It is always in base 10, same as all other SI measurements. If it is not, then it is in error and needs to be corrected.
That decision was made long ago and then implemented long ago. Get over it.
> end users have been confused as hell since the HDD manufacturers switched from base 2 to base 10
No, the opposite is true. Only nerds have been confused. End users now have a chance to work with GB in a sensible way since GB is now based on the same base 10 units as other measurements.
The touch on a MacBook Air is also more useful at this time than the touch on Surface Pro, because the Mac touch is over 5 years old and is well-supported in the entire app platform. For example, it is very common to zoom in and out with a pinch on the Mac, even in apps like Logic. And the Mac scrolling is very fast, very fluid.
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iTunes is 256 kbit/s AAC — when you factor in that iTunes doesn't skip, doesn't get scratched, today's iTunes music is higher-quality than CD. People make the mistake of assuming laboratory conditions. Instead, go into someone's home and take a CD off the shelf and it will be covered in scratches, the CD player will be making up bits to fill in the gaps, and it will likely skip at least once per hour.
And you may not know this, but it is Apple that generates the ISO MPEG-4 AAC audio file from their own master archive, which includes many songs and albums in lossless 24-bit 96kHz or even 192kHz audio — the actual audio from the studio masters. The actual mix that the producer made. Going forward, Apple will at some point release iPods, iPhones, and iPads that have 24-bit audio support (Macs have all supported 24-bit audio for many years now) and they will start releasing music in the actual studio master format, so you hear exactly what the producer made. There are frequencies in 96/192kHz audio that you hear with your internal organs, not your ears.
Vinyl is not a truer copy, unless you're listening to something that was recorded onto vinyl, which stopped in the 1950's. Since then, music has been recorded onto analog tape, digital tape, digital hard disks, and digital solid-state hard disks. For more than 10 years now, the typical studio master has a much, much larger soundscape than even CD can reproduce. Putting that soundscape on vinyl gives you an even smaller picture of it. And most vinyl recordings have too long of a running time, which reduces the audio quality considerably. And vinyl always has scratches, clicks and pops, that are not part of the original recording. It's not really the vinyl that people are nostalgic for, it's the old amps, which were made not to be accurate, but to be musical. We see some of this coming back with Beats headphones, which were not made to be accurate, but rather to be musical.
Do you have any idea how little money the RIAA has? No, you don't.
No way — the most annoying person is the one like you whose guilt causes them to lambaste the innocent.
Sorry the guy reminded you that there are artists in your music collection who are going without health care because you decided they should work for you for free.
If that was all you could find on Napster, it would have had a legitimate reason to exist and might still be around today.
Napster totally sucked unless all you wanted to do was generate a high file count in your MP3 collection. You might as well just record the radio in that case. The rips were awful quality, the labels were often wrong, and the version of the song you got was often not the one you wanted.
The one exception might be that you could find rare live versions or alternate versions of a track in some cases that were previously harder to find. If that had been Napster's focus — sharing music that wasn't available on CD — then it would have had a reason to exist.
I think iTunes is better in every way. Yes, you have to pay, but it is a small amount and you get exactly what you wanted, you never have to pay again as you download for life to whatever devices you want, and in many cases today, almost all of what you pay goes directly to the artist. If you don't like a song enough to pay for it on iTunes, then listen to it on the radio or as part of a monthly subscription service of some kind. If you like a song enough to pay for it on iTunes, you'll have it forever.
Needs to constantly be plugged in, runs viruses, only runs phone apps, has taken up a bunch of your time, and cost 30% of the very best tablet in the world, which gives you 10 hours per day for 2 years of AC-free, weight-free, desk-free computing. How in the fuck is that “a decent tablet?”
In San Francisco there was a Sony store and a Microsoft store in the Metreon mall before Apple Store was even started, and neither made money. Apple put a store one block away and you can barely get in there because it is so full. That is because Apple really thought out what their customers want and need from a retail store and then they built it and iterated on it until it was better and better. Sony and Microsoft did not do that, they just built what were essentially advertisements you could walk into and be further advertised to, like a walk-in billboard. Microsoft's next step was not to learn from Apple and then create a unique Microsoft store that really serves the needs of Microsoft customers, but rather just to copy Apple Store. Same as how Vista was really made for Mac users at a time when Windows users wanted XP version 2.
So I'm very interested to see if Google really sweats the details and comes up with a unique store that serves the needs of their own customers, or whether they just copy Apple Store. If the former, they have a chance to have huge success. If the latter, then everybody will yawn. Consumer will just fucking yawn at the Google Store on their way past it to an Apple Store. If you don't do your own unique thing, there is no news. News is a very, very important part of marketing today, because the Internet is one big news feed. People have already seen the dog riding a skateboard. You have to come with something new to get their interest. Microsoft basically offered a cat riding a skateboard. No news. Hopefully, Google will surprise us and wow us with their new stores. If not, they should not bother.
The Web originated on the Apple platform, not the Internet. The rest you have right.
The thing is, Apple Store does not look or feel like Gateway stores at all. Not in any way. And Apple Store was made to sell iPod and iPhone and iPad, not PC's like Gateway. And when the first Apple Store opened, people didn't say "wow, that is a copy of a Gateway store!" With Microsoft, the way they cloned Apple Store was disturbing, and Microsoft's stores are not even practical for them. They should have bought Blockbuster and had lower-end stores in lots of neighborhoods where their customers could transition from DVD to Xbox/PC.
I don't think anyone has a problem with Google opening a store. The issue is will they do stores that are truly designed for Google products, or will they just copy Apple Store? After seeing Microsoft copy Apple and Google copy Microsoft and Apple, it is hard not to be cynical. Many people expect we are just going to see another Apple Store clone from Google. A Google store should be much, much smaller, and have more of a science fair or Exploratorium vibe than Apple Store. If they do their own thing, that could really be spectacular, and everyone will benefit because we can go to the mall and there will be an additional modern store with modern products. But if they copy Apple Store that is just pissing in the pool. That just confuses people into thinking Google is another fake Apple, and makes the mall more generic. Hopefully, Google will take this seriously (almost no chance, I know) and create something really unique and special.
There is almost no consumer demand for Nexus devices, therefore there is almost no retailer demand for Nexus devices, therefore you can't find Nexus devices at retail very easily. The idea with Google opening its own store is apparently to stimulate consumer demand by showing them the devices and enabling them to try them out.
Another problem with Nexus devices at retail is that Google is not a phone maker or seller, or a consumer electronics company. They did not know what they were doing when it came to marketing the Nexus devices and they did an extremely poor job of it.
The Nexus devices sell in extremely small numbers, and mostly to computer nerds who decided to buy them before they even shipped, and who will almost certainly just order them online whenever they become available. That's the exact opposite of why you open a store.
and then give you a virus.
You're going to spend $10,000 on a phone that doesn't have a video editor? That can't run C apps? That has viruses (and in fact has more viruses than apps?)
Better to get an iPhone and a $10,000 diamond-encrusted case.
$21 million in retail price savings is easily blown on I-T consultant costs to setup an OpenOffice system, train the users, and respond to their never-ending help requests.
The truth is, the cheapest office workflow is on iPad. Pages, Keynote, and Numbers cost $10 each, run on all your iOS devices, have only the features that 90% of users need and want and understand, require almost no training, and run great for 10 hours straight on an iPad mini in your coat pocket. These are apps in which you get a ton of work done. And Keynote is by far the best presentation client in the world. Almost every world class speaker uses Keynote, for example Al Gore, Tony Robbins, and everyone at Apple.
If you can function as your own I-T consultant, then by all means, OpenOffice away. That is great for you. But the idea that OpenOffice should be inflicted on the long-suffering office worker is at best nerd elitism, a kind of father-knows-best attitude, and at worst is an ad hoc conspiracy to increase the number of I-T consultant jobs.
I don't think you need to use this one to boot a Mac. Any USB volume (or FireWire, or SD, or network volume) should work.
All that stuff fits in 2 GB on an iPad. Which also means it can be restored easily over Wi-Fi if it has to be. iOS is designed not only for tiny SSD but for tiny wireless bandwidth. So apps that create giant uncompressed files on the Mac create tiny compresses files on iOS, and it adds up to tiny SSD sizes like 16 GB or 32 GB feeling like a giant amount of storage on an iPad. My Mac has 8 times the storage of my iPad, but they both have 20 GB free.
Windows was made for AC power, Ethernet, and giant hard drives. iOS was made for batteries, wireless networking, and tiny SSD storage. It shows at every level.
SSD may get bigger soon but wireless bandwidth is going to be constrained for quite some time to come. A device that has 40 GB of data preinstalled on it is not ready for the wireless world.
With Apple, the recovery data resides on the Internet. With Microsoft, it resides on the device itself.
You can recover a Mac by booting to firmware and installing the system over the Internet. You can recover an iPad by plugging it into iTunes and installing the system over the Internet.
There is this thing called the Internet. Apple's system installer lives on the Internet, so it doesn't have to take up space on every single system. That is why the Mac recovery partition is a half a gigabyte. No disk space has to be wasted on system recovery. Microsoft simply doesn't know what the fuck they are doing.
We are about to buy and deploy 10,000 more iPads, but now that you mention this, I think we'll buy 10,000 Surface Pros, 10,000 USB flash drives, and 10,000 I-T hours to move the recovery partitions over to the USB drives. Makes total sense.
Macs also don't have optical disc drives, and the Mac recovery partition is a half a gigabyte. System files are fetched over this thing called the Internet as they are needed.
iPads also don't have optical disc drives, but you can reset them with any copy of iTunes.
So, to be fair, Microsoft is doing a really, really poor job with their recovery partition.
What's the I-T cost of doing that for 10,000 Surface devices?
> you could start by deleting the leftover installation source files
What's the I-T cost of doing that for 10,000 deployed Surface devices?
> is it 23GB in base 2 like the OS, or is it base 10 like the manufacturers?
It is always in base 10, same as all other SI measurements. If it is not, then it is in error and needs to be corrected.
That decision was made long ago and then implemented long ago. Get over it.
> end users have been confused as hell since the HDD manufacturers switched from base 2 to base 10
No, the opposite is true. Only nerds have been confused. End users now have a chance to work with GB in a sensible way since GB is now based on the same base 10 units as other measurements.
Then buy a phone that comes without any preinstalled crap, like iPhone.
The touch on a MacBook Air is also more useful at this time than the touch on Surface Pro, because the Mac touch is over 5 years old and is well-supported in the entire app platform. For example, it is very common to zoom in and out with a pinch on the Mac, even in apps like Logic. And the Mac scrolling is very fast, very fluid.