Well, it makes syncing the iPod shuffle take longer, because iTunes unmounts and remounts it twice during the process.
The iPod never mounts at all unless you explicitly turn on disk mode. When you turn on disk mode, it mounts when you plug it in and unmounts when you hit the little eject button.
It also means you have to remember to eject the shuffle before fiddling with its playlist, because it'll go through the whole resync dance every time you move a file around.
No, that's not how it works. The sync process kicks in when you first plug in the iPod and also when you use the "Update iPod" command from the iTunes menu bar. If you plug in your iPod then make a change to your library, your iPod won't be synced again until you unplug and re-plug, or until you specifically tell it to. This is to avoid the very problem you described.
And it lets you sort the iPod Shuffle's playlist in case you don't want to use the shuffle feature.
Well, "sort" isn't really the right way to describe it. Playlists are completely free-form. You can arrange the songs in any order you like, not just sorted.
The iTunes interface really needs tweaking.
Sounds more like you really need to use iTunes once or twice, because practically everything you wrote here is wrong.
These guys can change the name to muffle or something else in less than 10 minutes
No, they can't. Have you seen all the marketing materials they assembled for the show? There are posters and banners all over the booth, not to mention product packaging. Changing the name would be a major expense.
And changing it to "Muffle" would not satisfy the requirements of trade dress laws.
To keep the numbers simple and because I'm too lazy to look them up right now, let's say there are 10 million iPod owners. (I think that's pretty close.) Let's say that Apple has telephone numbers for half of them, because they bought their iPods from an Apple retail store on the online Apple store.
Apple picks a thousand of them and calls them up and asks them how they're enjoying their iPods. They follow up with a series of questions, one of which is, "Do you wish your iPod had a radio in it?" They note the answers. People who take the time to respond get a $10 gift certificate or something.
They go back and collate the answers, and discover that out of their statistically valid sample of 1,000 users, only 20 said that they wanted a radio in an iPod. That's only 2%, compared to the 85% who said they'd like their iPod to have a longer battery life or hold more songs or be cheaper. So when Apple makes their list of priorities, battery life, size and cost are up top and adding a radio is way, WAY down on the list.
But let's ignore that for a second. Let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that Apple has the opportunity to add a radio for zero cost and zero time. Let's say somebody waves a magic "radio" wand and there it is.
What do we know? We know that only 2% of iPod customers, on average, are interested in getting a radio, but that 85% of their customers wish the product were cheaper. What does that mean?
That means that a whole bunch of people are going to look at the new radio-equipped, same-priced iPod and think, "I don't want a stupid radio, but Apple's making me buy one! How much cheaper could this thing be if it didn't have the stupid radio in it?"
Even though, in our contrived example, the answer is "zero dollars cheaper," the damage has been done. The customers perceive that they're paying for something they don't want.
A device like an iPod, especially a cheap iPod, needs to be as stripped down as possible to give the customer the impression that he's getting pure value for his money. All it does is play prerecorded music, so every dollar you spend on it is going toward prerecorded music playback. You're not paying for a radio you'll never use.
And of course, because the market for a radio-equipped iPod is so small, the idea of manufacturing one version with a radio and one without is just absurd. They'd never sell enough of the radio-equipped iPods to cover the cost of designing, building, shipping, marketing and selling another model of iPod.
The use of symbols is not required by law. If you register your trademark, you get to skip over the part of the lawsuit where you demonstrate that it's a trademark.
In this case, demonstrating that "shuffle" is an integral part of the "iPod shuffle" mark would take about two paragraphs and ten minutes of a legal assistant's time to type up.
Ever hear of the Apple Airport aka the Lucent RG1000?
It's been a couple of years now since Apple used that card's guts as the basis of their AirPort card.
Also last time I checked Apple wasn't the manufacturer of any of their display products.
Apple doesn't make the LCDs themselves. They do manufacture the displays themselves.
So yes their are OEM versions of Apples products that wind up in the open market.
You have that completely backwards. Apple has, in the past, bought OEM versions of other products and used them as the basis for their products. But Apple does not offer OEM versions of its own products.
I don't actually think that's correct. You can plug in a third-party music player and drag songs to it, but you can't sync.
I've had a music player since 2001, and I absolutely would not be willing to part with it... but if you took away my ability to sync, I'd just drop it in a drawer and forget about it. Sync is what makes an iPod practical.
It's entirely possible that Apple has added syncing to third-party players at some point. If so, I'm just wrong here.
Where's the difference between the valid example you give and just calling someone a name?
Are you kidding? The different is obvious. In the one case, someone tries to cast doubt in the mind of a third-party observer by calling the qualifications or impartiality of the other party into question. In the other case, he's just being a penis.
Not the point. The Think Secret Web site specifically promises anonymity to those who divulge Apple trade secrets. That's an offer before the fact, which is inducement.
Thanks for pre-empting the only thing I was going to say in response. Your comment was silly. If you decide to come on back to earth, you let me know. You seem to be a thoughtful guy, but you've got your head completely on backwards this time.
Neverthless, I would like to see some tangible evidence that Apple has lost money because of these reports.
That's not the standard. The standard in a civil dispute is a preponderance of evidence. There's no requirement that the evidence be "tangible," to use your word. It can be entirely circumstantial or inferential.
You're trying to hold Apple to a higher standard than a court would. That's a mistake.
That's pretty irresponsible, don't you think? You, as a professional journalist, are an opinion-maker. You're essentially dismissing Apple's case in the court of public opinion based on grounds that would never stand up in an actual court.
It's not impossilbe, but I don't think Apple's demonstrated it yet.
I'm sure you're aware that they are under absolutely no obligation to demonstrate anything until trial, right? At this point, all they need to do is make a reasonable and sound claim, which they've done.
For something to be a trade secret it needs to be... um, secret.
Interestingly, no, it doesn't. According to the law, a trade secret is any information with value that the holder tries to keep secret. If it meets those two qualifications, it's still a secret, even if it gets out.
As long as Apple is making a diligent effort to protect its secrets, they're still secrets, as far as the law is concerned.
I think the word you wanted to use was "contrast." I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think what you were trying to do was illustrated differences, not similarities. Right?
You think that because of this report, someone will be able to imitate the features of Tiger -- which have already been announced by the company itself -- between today and April 1? Come on!
No, I don't. But that's not the criterion by which we judge. Read on.
Apple jealously guards everything pertaining to the company and its products. That doesn't make everything a trade secret.
Actually, in California, it kinda does. The Uniform Trade Secrets Act, 3426.1, defines a trade secret as any information that has economic value and that the company acts to protect. The release date of an upcoming product clearly has economic value. You don't even have to argue that. Just look around this Web page and see how many people are saying that they've been planning to make a purchase but that, on the strength of this rumor, they would wait for Tiger's release. Any time anybody wants a product today but decides to wait until tomorrow to buy it, the company loses just a little bit of money. A few bucks. Multiply that by thousands of people and a month or more and suddenly it's a significant deal. Clearly the premature announcement of a release date has significant economic impact on Apple's bottom line.
So yeah. Under California law, it's a trade secret. Cut-and-dried, open-and-shut.
I don't know if I'd call it painfully obvious, but I do feel like you're missing something. See, Gruber's point was that any parallel you might draw between professional reporters and Nick Ciarelli are completely outweighed by the massive differences. Namely, that a professional reporter would never have done with Ciarelli did. Of the comparison, Gruber says, "This is a bogus argument, on several levels." (He then goes on to explain the levels, but I'm not gonna quote the whole article.)
Saying there are parallels between what Ciarelli does and what The New York Times does is kinda like saying that they're the same because they both write in English. The similarities are superficial and meaningless compared to the differences, which are huge and significant.
Given the fact that for nine months Apple has been jealously guarding the release date, referring only to "the first half of 2005," and that Apple has a track record of being the most imitated company in the industry, I'd say that a very good argument can be made that the release dates of upcoming products are trade secrets.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it makes syncing the iPod shuffle take longer, because iTunes unmounts and remounts it twice during the process.
The iPod never mounts at all unless you explicitly turn on disk mode. When you turn on disk mode, it mounts when you plug it in and unmounts when you hit the little eject button.
It also means you have to remember to eject the shuffle before fiddling with its playlist, because it'll go through the whole resync dance every time you move a file around.
No, that's not how it works. The sync process kicks in when you first plug in the iPod and also when you use the "Update iPod" command from the iTunes menu bar. If you plug in your iPod then make a change to your library, your iPod won't be synced again until you unplug and re-plug, or until you specifically tell it to. This is to avoid the very problem you described.
And it lets you sort the iPod Shuffle's playlist in case you don't want to use the shuffle feature.
Well, "sort" isn't really the right way to describe it. Playlists are completely free-form. You can arrange the songs in any order you like, not just sorted.
The iTunes interface really needs tweaking.
Sounds more like you really need to use iTunes once or twice, because practically everything you wrote here is wrong.
These guys can change the name to muffle or something else in less than 10 minutes
No, they can't. Have you seen all the marketing materials they assembled for the show? There are posters and banners all over the booth, not to mention product packaging. Changing the name would be a major expense.
And changing it to "Muffle" would not satisfy the requirements of trade dress laws.
It has to do with perceived value.
To keep the numbers simple and because I'm too lazy to look them up right now, let's say there are 10 million iPod owners. (I think that's pretty close.) Let's say that Apple has telephone numbers for half of them, because they bought their iPods from an Apple retail store on the online Apple store.
Apple picks a thousand of them and calls them up and asks them how they're enjoying their iPods. They follow up with a series of questions, one of which is, "Do you wish your iPod had a radio in it?" They note the answers. People who take the time to respond get a $10 gift certificate or something.
They go back and collate the answers, and discover that out of their statistically valid sample of 1,000 users, only 20 said that they wanted a radio in an iPod. That's only 2%, compared to the 85% who said they'd like their iPod to have a longer battery life or hold more songs or be cheaper. So when Apple makes their list of priorities, battery life, size and cost are up top and adding a radio is way, WAY down on the list.
But let's ignore that for a second. Let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that Apple has the opportunity to add a radio for zero cost and zero time. Let's say somebody waves a magic "radio" wand and there it is.
What do we know? We know that only 2% of iPod customers, on average, are interested in getting a radio, but that 85% of their customers wish the product were cheaper. What does that mean?
That means that a whole bunch of people are going to look at the new radio-equipped, same-priced iPod and think, "I don't want a stupid radio, but Apple's making me buy one! How much cheaper could this thing be if it didn't have the stupid radio in it?"
Even though, in our contrived example, the answer is "zero dollars cheaper," the damage has been done. The customers perceive that they're paying for something they don't want.
A device like an iPod, especially a cheap iPod, needs to be as stripped down as possible to give the customer the impression that he's getting pure value for his money. All it does is play prerecorded music, so every dollar you spend on it is going toward prerecorded music playback. You're not paying for a radio you'll never use.
And of course, because the market for a radio-equipped iPod is so small, the idea of manufacturing one version with a radio and one without is just absurd. They'd never sell enough of the radio-equipped iPods to cover the cost of designing, building, shipping, marketing and selling another model of iPod.
That's why Apple doesn't include a radio.
The use of symbols is not required by law. If you register your trademark, you get to skip over the part of the lawsuit where you demonstrate that it's a trademark.
In this case, demonstrating that "shuffle" is an integral part of the "iPod shuffle" mark would take about two paragraphs and ten minutes of a legal assistant's time to type up.
Please moderate this comment up. It's the best anonymously posted comment I've ever seen on this site, hands down.
In other words, no, it does not work with iTunes.
Hint for you: iTunes is not just a file management program.
Ever hear of the Apple Airport aka the Lucent RG1000?
It's been a couple of years now since Apple used that card's guts as the basis of their AirPort card.
Also last time I checked Apple wasn't the manufacturer of any of their display products.
Apple doesn't make the LCDs themselves. They do manufacture the displays themselves.
So yes their are OEM versions of Apples products that wind up in the open market.
You have that completely backwards. Apple has, in the past, bought OEM versions of other products and used them as the basis for their products. But Apple does not offer OEM versions of its own products.
I don't actually think that's correct. You can plug in a third-party music player and drag songs to it, but you can't sync.
... but if you took away my ability to sync, I'd just drop it in a drawer and forget about it. Sync is what makes an iPod practical.
I've had a music player since 2001, and I absolutely would not be willing to part with it
It's entirely possible that Apple has added syncing to third-party players at some point. If so, I'm just wrong here.
I think Apple is entitled to sue people who unlawfully induce their employees to violate confidentiality.
I don't know where you get the word "deserves" from, and the question of whether the defendants are journalists or not is completely irrelevant.
Where's the difference between the valid example you give and just calling someone a name?
Are you kidding? The different is obvious. In the one case, someone tries to cast doubt in the mind of a third-party observer by calling the qualifications or impartiality of the other party into question. In the other case, he's just being a penis.
Not the point. The Think Secret Web site specifically promises anonymity to those who divulge Apple trade secrets. That's an offer before the fact, which is inducement.
This is a silly hypothetical, I know
Thanks for pre-empting the only thing I was going to say in response. Your comment was silly. If you decide to come on back to earth, you let me know. You seem to be a thoughtful guy, but you've got your head completely on backwards this time.
Neverthless, I would like to see some tangible evidence that Apple has lost money because of these reports.
That's not the standard. The standard in a civil dispute is a preponderance of evidence. There's no requirement that the evidence be "tangible," to use your word. It can be entirely circumstantial or inferential.
You're trying to hold Apple to a higher standard than a court would. That's a mistake.
That's pretty irresponsible, don't you think? You, as a professional journalist, are an opinion-maker. You're essentially dismissing Apple's case in the court of public opinion based on grounds that would never stand up in an actual court.
Am I the only one who has a hard time understanding how California law has jurisdiction over a publication that is published in Massachusetts?
Apparently you are, yes. See, Apple's offices are in California.
An anonymous reader writes ...
Gee. I wonder who that could be.
It's not impossilbe, but I don't think Apple's demonstrated it yet.
I'm sure you're aware that they are under absolutely no obligation to demonstrate anything until trial, right? At this point, all they need to do is make a reasonable and sound claim, which they've done.
For something to be a trade secret it needs to be... um, secret.
Interestingly, no, it doesn't. According to the law, a trade secret is any information with value that the holder tries to keep secret. If it meets those two qualifications, it's still a secret, even if it gets out.
As long as Apple is making a diligent effort to protect its secrets, they're still secrets, as far as the law is concerned.
You're right. One is a statement of pure fact while the other is a statement of opinion. Let's throw you a parade.
I think the word you wanted to use was "contrast." I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think what you were trying to do was illustrated differences, not similarities. Right?
Don't argue with me. Argue with California's lawmakers who defined what a trade secret is, as I explained in this comment.
You think that because of this report, someone will be able to imitate the features of Tiger -- which have already been announced by the company itself -- between today and April 1? Come on!
No, I don't. But that's not the criterion by which we judge. Read on.
Apple jealously guards everything pertaining to the company and its products. That doesn't make everything a trade secret.
Actually, in California, it kinda does. The Uniform Trade Secrets Act, 3426.1, defines a trade secret as any information that has economic value and that the company acts to protect. The release date of an upcoming product clearly has economic value. You don't even have to argue that. Just look around this Web page and see how many people are saying that they've been planning to make a purchase but that, on the strength of this rumor, they would wait for Tiger's release. Any time anybody wants a product today but decides to wait until tomorrow to buy it, the company loses just a little bit of money. A few bucks. Multiply that by thousands of people and a month or more and suddenly it's a significant deal. Clearly the premature announcement of a release date has significant economic impact on Apple's bottom line.
So yeah. Under California law, it's a trade secret. Cut-and-dried, open-and-shut.
I don't know if I'd call it painfully obvious, but I do feel like you're missing something. See, Gruber's point was that any parallel you might draw between professional reporters and Nick Ciarelli are completely outweighed by the massive differences. Namely, that a professional reporter would never have done with Ciarelli did. Of the comparison, Gruber says, "This is a bogus argument, on several levels." (He then goes on to explain the levels, but I'm not gonna quote the whole article.)
Saying there are parallels between what Ciarelli does and what The New York Times does is kinda like saying that they're the same because they both write in English. The similarities are superficial and meaningless compared to the differences, which are huge and significant.
Why should there be any laws protecting trade secrets?
Same reason we have laws protecting personal property: Because respect for other people's stuff is a core value in our culture.
Not everybody shares that value (obviously), but that doesn't change the fact that it's a core value.
Cross reference here. Short answer: If you treat it like a trade secret, the presumption is that it's a trade secret.
Given the fact that for nine months Apple has been jealously guarding the release date, referring only to "the first half of 2005," and that Apple has a track record of being the most imitated company in the industry, I'd say that a very good argument can be made that the release dates of upcoming products are trade secrets.