"Well, it's funny that Jobs likes to lecture the music and movie industry about the futility of DRM, but then he tries to lock down the iPhone."
Wrong: Jobs only ever disputed the need to put DRM on music downloads, because the labels are already selling their music DRM-free on CDs. Therefore, their insistence that Apple maintain and police a DRM system for music sold in iTunes is a bit ridiculous. Jobs has never recommended that movies and software ship without any sort of copy protection, because both products have historically been sold with copy protection. DVDs were never offered without DRM in the way CDs are. DRM involves a lot of complexity; it is not inherently "wrong."
When you simplify your jingoism down to the point where everything is black and white, it's easy to say things that aren't accurate and be rated "insightful."
Well no it doesn't if your only experience is being a clerk in a small chain store.
Another thing to consider: your chain's suppliers were likely not developers, but middleman wholesale resellers who took a huge chunk of the box revenue before shipping it to you. Every link in the chain that extorts a cut has to be added up to arrive at the overall retail cut. Apple's App Store only has one link: from the developer straight to iTunes.
Instead of insisting you know everything because you've rung up a retail box, talk to some developers--particularly small developers--who will sign deals to distribute their software that returns them 50% or less (often much less), while leaving them the burden of hosting all support information, handling software updates, and handling theft prevention measures, only to find that the majority of their software is stolen by users who get a cracked serial number on the web. That is, incidentally, a huge part why there is no market for mobile software right now, nor much serious interest in shareware in general.
Now compare that to getting paid 70% for uploading a title in a venue directly visible to millions of customers, promoted by Apple in iTunes, with credit card and hosting included at no extra cost, a slick system for delivering upgrades, and unprecedented protection from wide scale piracy. Rather than selling a few hundred units at $40, you can sell tens or hundreds of thousands of units at $5 and make vastly more money.
But none of this stuff is theoretical: just ask iTunes suppliers now, who make less than a 70% cut and still report being happy with their share. Look at iPod games, which sell for $5 but are rapidly increasing in count. Those developers--including Sega and EA--are clearly not hurting under their arrangement. Apple has sold 4 billion audio tracks and owns 91% of the video downloads business. This isn't exactly an unknown market.
If the retail markup is really only 5%, how do you suppose that big box retailers and low overhead mail order operations like Amazon can regularly offer titles at deep discounts often close to 50%? Are you aware of this phenomenon?
In reality, retail markups are usually at least 50%, as are most online mobile software sources. The Danger/Sidekick store takes 50%, as does Handango. Neither offers the audience of iTunes or can promise the kind of sales volume that would make Apple's cut any more significant of a barrier than it is for studios and indie labels listing their music in iTunes.
Yeah there's lots of small developers making lots of money selling code for Linux. And what a profitable business Windows shareware is.
Of course, we're talking about mobile software here, so adjust your belt to consider that Windows Mobile software is a joke and most Linux phones don't even support development, and in particular open development.
"The more than $450 of popular third party software for Windows Mobile listed above is either already provided or is not necessary on the iPhone. That's enough for the iPhone to pay for itself!"
Yes, and nobody will buy your software from that freebee site because nobody know about it.
Apple is publishing developer's software using the same model as iTunes uses to sign up indie artists who want to sell their music without signing up with a big label. Apple is allowing developers (and musicians) to sign their own work and distribute it with high visibility. That will allow them to sell it at a lower cost, dramatically boosting their volume of sales, reaching a much wider audience, and enjoying a business that is much easier to maintain.
Seriously, anyone crying about a $99 program to get started as a publisher is completely ignorant. Look up how much it costs to develop for a games console ($15,000) or as a Palm or RIM developer. Apple is selling more phones in the US than all of Microsoft's licensees together. That's a huge market, and one hungry for software. There is currently no significant market for mobile software. Apple is going to create it, and the iFund is putting up $100 M to bet that a lot of developers are going to make big money selling $5 titles to tens of millions of iPhone users over the next couple years.
And anyone trying to make a 30% cut sound like a big deal apparently doesn't know that most retail software gives 50% or more to the retailer, leaving the developer to pay for their development, packaging, marketing, and distribution costs themselves from their own half. And if you can't afford it, maybe you should apply for some of those iFund dollars and get cracking on the next big thing.
So, you agree then that Apple sued pretty much everybody that they could, and that they lost the lawsuits that they did file.
No, read that again with your eyes open. Apple didn't sue any of a wide range of companies selling a Mac knock off, including Atari's ST, which was so blatantly patterned after the Mac it was called the Jackintosh after CEO Jack Tramiel. Nor did it sue Amiga or Acorn or GEOS, all of which copied the Mac desktop even closer than Windows. Apple only sued Microsoft and HP (and threatened DRI) for porting Mac technology to the IBM PC. And the only thing Apple "lost" was the fact that it had not patented Mac inventions, and since Microsoft had obtained a license to Mac technology under threat of porting Excel to the PC, the court ruled that there were only minimal things Microsoft had to change.
The rest of your stuff is just non-sensical gibberish that dashes around asserting "facts" you pulled out of your ass without any context.
We don't have $150,000 workstations networked like Xerox was selling in the early 80s. Macs weren't priced any higher than similarly equipped PCs; its just that DOS-tards thought a stripped down box that could do 16 colors compared to a 32-bit color Mac. Saying "the Mac team only introduced one major advance: a substantially lower price" proves you know nothing. Among other things, Apple invented Regions, which were critical to auto-updating multiple overlapping windows, something Xerox didn't ever do. Clearly, you've never used an oddball Xerox Star and are just asstalking.
You are so absolutely full of shit the world deserves an apology for your nonsense.
Apple didn't sue Atari's TOS, the Commodore Amiga, Berkeley System's GEOS, DRI's GEM/1, Acorn Archimedes or any of the other graphical desktops. It only sued Microsoft and HP, which was selling an add-on for Windows that made it more Mac-like. [1]
That's because Apple was utterly defeated during the first couple of lawsuits.
Wrong: Apple didn't lose its case until 1992 and appealed for another ruling in 1994. By that time, all of the other small GUIs had been trampled by Microsoft's PC. You have things backwards. The Atari ST, Amiga, C64 GEOS and GEM all existed during the 80s and sold against the Mac. Windows never sold in any volume throughout the 80s. Apple sued Microsoft to stop it from porting its own technology to the IBM PC, as IBM was Apple's primary hardware threat in the 80s.
I was there at the time. I programmed in Smalltalk, Cedar, the Lisa, and the original Mac, and I followed the lawsuits closely. The Mac was an imitation of the Xerox technologies, and not even a very good one.
Wrong again: Xerox attempted to sell its own GUI hardware and later desktop software and failed miserably. The Mac team introduced a number of clear advances well beyond what had been accomplished at Xerox. While the Mac was a far lower priced product (roughly 2% the price of a Xerox Star), and didn't deliver anything like a Smalltalk environment, it was far ahead in terms of GUI and human user interface design. That's why cloners copied the Mac instead of the Star.
Well, duh! That's because Apple bought the company producing the multitouch controllers and the company that owns the multitouch patents.
That's not accurate either. There are plenty of sources of multitouch controllers and Apple didn't buy any company with multitouch patents. Are you thinking of FingerWorks or did you just invent that factoid? Because Apple didn't buy Fingerworks, it hired its employees. That's because Fingerworks was being sued by patent trolls itself, and Apple didn't want to inherit a patent troll lawsuit. You are completely wrong in everything you said.
First, you say that Apple is using patents to prevent Chinese cloners, then you say that cloning is too much of an investment.
Innovating is too much work for Chinese cloners. Or don't you know that either? Good job making up a bunch of bullshit to support your opinions. Do you think everything you invent is a fact?
You've certainly mastered the keyboard shortcuts for typing in italics. However, if you have a clear point, you don't need to add all the ARTIFICIAL ***emphasis*** bullshit kind of stuff.
I did like how you defended Microsoft by praising its ability to leave copy and paste out of its CLI environment and its heroic efforts to color code plugs in 1997. Having blue and green plugs that were otherwise identical is a real life saver, and so much more convenient than ADB or USB! That must be why the PC Enraptured continued using PS/2 as the default keyboards shipping with machines from companies like Dell well into 2006, a decade after Microsoft introduced the innovation of color coding legacy ports. What would the PC world do without Microsoft's brave leadership? Make slightly shittier PCs? Praise Microsoft and its bold innovation.
Nice efforts with the desperate spin, but does the sloppy, profiteering mistakes of Microsoft in perpetuating legacy in the PC architecture really need such effusive cheerleading? Why not be a teary-eyed fanboy for a product that isn't crap? Just a thought. Also, the next time you crap your pants over RoughlyDrafted, at least bother to point out what you find so challenging about it. You sound like a rabid fundamentalist on a crusade to attack someone else's opinion as heretical instead of just presenting your own outlook on things. Yet you never get out what you find so upsetting, which just makes you like a jerk.
That's not even remotely true. Apple invested well over $60 million (in early 80s dollars) into developing the Lisa desktop interface, along with the followup Mac desktop in parallel between the late 70s and 1984. By the time the Mac arrived, Apple had been showing the tech off for 2-3 years, so rivals began copying a lot of the same ideas. Apple didn't sue any of those rivals apart from two that were transferring a copy of Apple's tech directly to IBM's PC.
Apple didn't sue Atari's TOS, the Commodore Amiga, Berkeley System's GEOS, DRI's GEM/1, Acorn Archimedes or any of the other graphical desktops. It only sued Microsoft and HP, which was selling an add-on for Windows that made it more Mac-like. [1]
The reason Apple sued Microsoft to stop it was because Apple had entered an development contract with MS in 1982, giving MS early access to Mac technology. MS agreed not to release a competing product for IBM's PC until the Mac was delivered, but found a technicality that enabled it to announce Windows 1.0 in 1983. Even though Windows 1.0 was unusable garbage, it cloned enough of the Mac ideas to create a product concept that could make the PC look useful, and create the suggestion that Windows would deliver something similar to the Mac. It didn't even come close until 1995, more than a decade later. Windows was a vaporware distraction based entirely upon theft of ideas Apple released to Microsoft as a trusted partner.
Interestingly, Wikipedia presents this as a revised history where Microsoft invented Windows 1.0 first and suggests Apple copied it for the Mac. Windows Enthusiasts like Rob Enderle have also stated that Microsoft developed the Mac OS for Apple, despite the fact that at the time, Apple was already a huge company turning out blockbuster products and engaging in major R&D, while Microsoft was still a contract developer that simply relicensed Unix and DOS adding very little value, and didn't really develop any of its own original products for another ten years. Microsoft didn't even invent Excel, it only cloned the existing VisiCalc inside Apple's Mac GUI. It bought Word directly from Xerox. That's why those of use who were paying attention find it hard to swallow the idea the Microsoft has some significant history in the original development of the GUI. It did not.
Even MS knew that it infringed enough upon Apple's technology that it could not sell Windows 1.0. Despite showing off an early preview in 1983, MS didn't sell Windows 1.0 until 1985, partly because it had to keep working on it, and partly because it had to force Apple into licensing its Mac technology first. MS used the threat of porting Mac Excel to the PC as leverage to obtain a license from John Sculley's Apple for Mac interface ideas that were unique to Apple (as opposed to GUI ideas that had originated at Xerox PARC or other places). MS then used that 1985 license to copy even more of the Mac UI for Windows 2.0, which served almost entirely as a vehicle for porting Mac Excel to the PC.
No PC makers preinstalled Windows on their machines until Windows 3.0 in 1990. Apple's 1986 suit against MS was limited to copyright ideas about the user interface, because at the time, there was no established concept of software patents. Recall that Bill Gates was also warning the world that software patents would be a bad idea and stifle competition. He believed that at the time (1990) because he wanted full access to Apple's technology without paying for it. After MS began patenting its own software ideas, the company changed its tune. It now threatens to sue open source using its patent pool.
In a world where everyone patents every idea they think might ever have any value, and where companies are all sued by small inventors who have patented ideas that may seem obvious but end up getting millions awarded in claims from the court, the idea of patenting every line of research isn't evil, but necessary.
Open Source developers are at the mercy of lots of patent nonsense, so they critically need to cont
Apple isn't in the business of profiting from song/movie media creation. It is a reseller. It is a retail store. WalMart doesn't really care if you bootleg Britney Spears, as long as you don't shoplift the CD. Similarly, Apple doesn't care "financially" that you use some FairPlay track outside of its studio designed license.
However, Apple has legal contracts with the studios that assure them that it will work in good faith to preserve its DRM in such a way that iTunes remains a store and not a source for widespread bootlegging and Internet distribution. This is somewhat silly because every CD sold is more of a source of unrestricted copying than a FairPlay song, and Apple would just as soon sell its tracks DRM free. That would mean Apple doesn't have to police a system that exists to keep honest people honest with some inconvenience, and try to prevent thieves from stealing, which is somewhat impossible anyway.
However, reality means that Apple does have to stop flagrant activity designed to facilitate theft. The iTunes license specifically outlines how songs can be used. The fact that Hymn allows users to violate their contract with Apple at the time of sale does not redefine the contract terms. It does however force Apple to put pressure on Hymn so Apple won't be sued or abandoned by its studio partners for failing to uphold its own resale license.
Anyone crying about iTunes restrictions should be buying CDs. There's nothing more that can be said about that. Nobody has a right to redefine the licensing terms of a product unilaterally just because they want to use it in a different way than it is being offered. If you disagree, remember how butt hurt you get when you read that TiVo or Microsoft whoever is violating the GPL.
If you support the idea of free software enforced by GPL/BSD/MIT style licenses, you have to also respect the licensing rules offered by commercial vendors, and either chose not to use them or use them in compliance with the terms of the agreement.
But there's no honor among thieves, as this thread demonstrates.
HD-DVD discs were not significantly cheaper, and "storing more data" requires comparing fewer layers of Blu-Ray against HD-DVD (asshat!). If manufacturers were so excited about HD-DVD, why was Toshiba the only one making them?
The reality was that industry collectively got behind Blu-Ray back in 2005 long before consumers even had a choice in the matter. Microsoft and Intel hoped to keep HD-DVD going, influenced Toshiba to stay in the race despite its interests in backing Blu-Ray itself, and later pushed Paramount/DreamWorks to sign up as exclusive HD-DVD studios. That was entirely because Microsoft hoped to monopolize the HD video market with Windows Media/VC-1, WinCE-based HDi interactivity, and the Windows-only Managed Copy DRM.
The rest of the industry fought Microsoft on HD-DVD, and the PS3's Blu-Ray pushed the critical mass to bury HD-DVD. Any amount of money paid to Warner Bros. to pull out of the HD-DVD fiasco and kill the format war prior to Microsoft's marketing push at CES was in the interests of consumers, manufacturers, and studios. It also helps rid the world of Microsoft's domination of video codecs and development, and further helps tank Microsoft's plan to tie HD-DVD into Vista and the 360.
Since no significant number of Blu-Ray players have really sold outside of the PS3, your boo-hooing about consumers needing to buy new BR players in order to play the newest spec discs is as retarded as the rest of your HD-DVD talking points.
Your replies are so much better at making my point than my own scribbles.
Typical response of a person unable to assert their own ideas: call everyone else "nonsense" insult their ability to think without saying why, then run away from the conversation insisting that you are superior.
You are in may ways more religious than the fanatical nuts of Middle America and the Middle East. Sorry to have reality come crashing down upon you like that, but the truth is the truth, and plugging your ears and chanting out your dogmatic mantras doesn't make you enlightened, even if you hate everyone else for having a different set of beliefs.
Your frothing over semantics kind of illustrates my point for me.
A + thiest = belief in no god. Not hard to figure out. There are people who believe in God or gods or fairies or crystals or oil or meth or whatever, and of those, some float along solo with their own ideas, while others congregate together. You might experience the world as your own person (just as plenty of personally religious people do), but other atheists form little groups that shout at religion. And others try to force the world to see things the way they do, as did the KR in Cambodia. There is absolutely no difference between how atheists chose to act and how people who believe something different choose to act. Human nature is far more powerful that some artificial bullshit definition you can use to exalt yourself as better than anyone else.
The main difference between me and you isn't our religious/ideological views but the fact that I can see that other people have a right to believe whatever they want, and it appears that you think you know what everyone else should think. That makes you just as religious as any other fanatical dipshit.
Most all behavior is learned. We are not born atheist or we'd have cultures around the world untainted by religious ideas. That hasn't happened. Atheists have only sprang from an intellectual elite who decided they were above what their parents believed. Your comments are no less silly than saying we're all born Hippies and have to learn Establishment. Sounds nice, but it's still bullshit that reflects a certain enrapturement with your own sense of reality, indistinguishable from any other fundamentalist religious idea. The louder you defend atheism as The Only Truth the more religious it makes you.
"How could it have any connection to reality when the bible doesn't even contain a physical description of Jesus?" Yeah that's the point. Writers of the Bible, whether you want to think of them as creators or literature or inspired by something else, didn't think Jesus appearance was all that important, while human nature puts a huge emphasis on looks. So Christianity developed around a series of images that have nothing to do with anything it is supposed to be based upon, whereas the text of Islam was carefully segregated from imagery for that very purpose: the words were supposed to have the impact, not a fantasy pictorial invented by someone else further down along the line.
Wikipedia's insistence on including Islamic artwork is therefore an insult to certain people's concept of their own beliefs and what they represent, much as readers of a great novel might hate to see it associated with the visuals a shitty movie version that did not convey the story or characters well at all.
We're all trying to figure out the world around us. We don't need anyone insisting that their religious ideas are the only ones that can be had. From that perspective, if doesn't matter if you want to believe in ghosts or not, if you demand that your ideas are the only rational, reasonable, and allowable ones, how are you any different from the Crusaders?
Or does that idea just not penetrate your fundamentalist atheist ideas that you've taught yourself?
Of course, insisting oneself to be the unassailable voice of reason and demanding that what one believes should be forced upon others makes most atheists indistinguishable from any other religion/ideology. There are rational people who have religious faith and there are hateful, dogmatic, and overbearing atheists.
Everything bad about religion, from enflaming wars to persecuting non-believers to attacking education, has also been perpetuated by fervent atheists such as the intellectual elite who decided to forcibly communize Cambodia.
So get over yourself. Calling yourself an atheist doesn't make you better person, and thinking you have some special override that makes you superior to anyone with a god-centric religion and enlightened beyond everyone else just because you think you know everything just makes you a hypocrite. If you want to be superior, teach people something useful. Claiming you are the Chosen People because your beliefs are different just makes you equally as bad as every self righteous religious asshole who has ever lived.
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On the subject of Islam, since their prophet was dead and gone by ~800 AD, well before photography, there are no pictures of him, only artistic representations. There are plenty of Christians who think they know what Jesus looked like too (or maybe Jews/Moses, etc) but its all based on artwork, and rarely has any connection to reality. Most paintings of Christ portray him as a fair-skinned European rather than a middle eastern Jew, because they were drawn by Europeans.
That means there is nothing really encyclopedic about putting a Mohammed painting in an article about Islam any more than putting a White Jesus with Blond Hair in an article about Christianity. There is no "censoring" going on; it's just fanboys of a particular group wanting to influence how their product is portrayed. There is no real story here.
Now back to regularly scheduled programming which accuses all of Islam for a Saudi fringe group blowing up the WTC and killing 3,000 people, but absolving all of Christendom for killing hundreds of thousands of unrelated civilians in Iraq and 3,000 US soldiers in a retaliation that had nothing to do with that Saudi terrorist group and everything to do with money.
For the record, I don't believe Islam or Christendom tends to make people better, although I know people of various religious backgrounds who are excellent people. Unfortunately they are a minority. Converting the world to atheism won't make shitty people intelligent, altruistic, or less greedy.
Wow what a surprise that the recording industry is looking after its own interests rather than the clients it sells.
And where is the source for Apple wanting songwriter royalties to be lower? Why would a retailer like Apple care how the RIAA divides up its royalty payments? Apple pays a set wholesale fee, and doesn't negotiate the RIAA labels' business.
This sounds like an inflammatory Digg posting and the majority of the replies sound like knee jerk diggtards. Please, there's already a site for morons. Can't/. rise above printing crap designed to elicit a waaa response?
you have trouble seeing the difference between copied bits and the effort required to arrange those bits. The value of software isn't in the commercial packaging or plastic media, it's obviously in the efforts required to create something people will pay for. While you can argue a fallacy of "duplicating doesn't deprive you of the original copy," you're simply ignorantly wrong.
Copying software doesn't deprive somebody of the version you copied, it deprives the creator/owner of their ability to legitimately sell copies of their work. That's what you are stealing when you copy.
Your same silly argument could be applied to counterfeiting currency: copying real money doesn't deprive anyone of their legitimate currency. The problem is, it devalues money by depriving the government of its ability to regulate the supply and value of money. That's why the Secret Service exists.
The best agreements involve partners who both need each other. Apple needs exclusive partners with the iPhone to push its unique features, gain lower service fee terms, and promote the iPhone. Apple wants providers to benefit from exclusive availability of the iPhone. AT&T had little opportunity to gain on Verizon until it had a unique phone that nobody else could get. I'd imagine that in addition to the 40% defection to AT&T that new iPhone users caused directly, that there was also a large number of people attracted by the iPhone who bought other AT&T phones on family plans or similar "halo" effects. Clearly AT&T is happy.
In Europe, the market is different. O2 didn't provide as good of pricing, but apparently thought the iPhone was helping to bring in new customers (or had the potential to do so) enough to boost its plans dramatically after the initial launch. TFA says Apple would be better off trying to sell its phone without carrier limitations. I'd imagine that Apple exercised some due diligence in examining that course of action long ago and decided against it.
If Apple can keep its current 4 carriers happy, it will have a much easier time expanding its exclusive agreeements to other carriers in other regions. If it starts experimenting with cheating on its current exclusive carriers by allowing or facilitating unlockable iPhones, why would other carriers concede anything to get the iPhone? Apple would end up like Motorola: carriers would all demand the iPhone get cheaper while increasing their service fees. Apple has a big bargaining chip with the iPhone, and is using it to pry open the mobile market.
Saying Apple needs to cater to unlocking customers is a bit like saying The Unions should allow their members to pay dues only if they want to. Sounds good to a moron, but it doesn't really work that way unfortunately. If you want the bubble of protection, you have to pay something for it. If you don't, you live outside the bubble. It looks like most iPhone customers are happy with the bubble. The ~25% that are unlocking appear to be scattered around the world (web stats show iPhones in nearly every country) where there is no bubble.
Apple is selling a desirable product at an upfront price with clearly stated limitations in an industry that prefers to sell inferior phone sets at fake subsidized prices with all kinds of unstated limitations. I think consumers are smart enough to figure out if the iPhone works for them or not without Apple being forced to play the same carrier-centric game that all the other phone manufactures have been failing in.
Can Apple afford to stick to an exclusive carrier in the future? If for no other reason than consumer choice?"
Can Apple leave its five year exclusive contract with AT&T? If for no other reason that to heed the cautionary woes of a Computerworld writer with tenuous grasp of business and markets?
The problem with wags is that they talk about Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, etc as if they were characters in a play they were writing, apparently unaware of the real world constrains of money, technology, personnel, opportunity cost, and other resources. They write like they're genus for printing ignorant wishful thinking that sounds good only if you don't know what else is involved.
And you cowardly took credit for saying nothing and running away from the issues. I guess that means you win. Step up to the windows to receive your plate of bullshit prize and a spoon.
I am humbled for not predicting your limp reply using all caps, and salute your prowess at knock and run distraction trolling.
The iPhone has 20-27% (depending on who is counting) market share in US smartphones. So yes, that doesn't count millions of free handsets that do nothing.
As far as WiFi mobile devices, there really isn't anything outside of niche toys currently. Archos and Cowon and Nokia Internet Tablets are fun to play with, but do not represent a volume market. Apple is transitioning the iPod to become that very thing, in a practical package that ships in high volume at a very competitive price.
It will be far harder for competitors to copy the Touch than the simpler iPod, but look how difficult its been for companies to deliver an attractive alternative to the first five generations of the iPod. Even players that delivered better hardware features couldn't challenge the iPod's position because they were held back by shoddy software.
Which is the difference: Microsoft taxes the economy without adding value, while Apple introduces products people voluntarily buy.
That's why launching the iPhone successfully was notable, while Vista isn't impressing anyone for doing poorly despite its heavily leveraged and entrenched position as an automatically sold license tax.
How much more money did Microsoft make by releasing Vista? Any? Was it a loss? Why not just release XP SP3 and collect the same revenue? It's not like Microsoft is selling retail copies of the more expensive Vista Ultimate. Also, what's the satisfaction rating for users of each product? What's the likelihood users will buy additional products from the same company?
One difference is that Vista isn't being sold only in the US.
The other difference is that Vista isn't an entirely new product entering a competitive market, but merely an adjusted version of a product that enjoys a monopoly position. Even so, it is clearly be rejected in the consumer market, at retail, and by corporations.
Another difference is that Vista is a liberally accounted software license, not a product people buy. So Microsoft can count all the vouchers it handed out as sales, and can count all the PCs that are hit with the Windows Tax as sales, despite the fact that corporations are re-imaging them with Win2k or XP. Many laptops ship with a Vista/XP Downgrade DVD for good reason.
Microsoft isn't selling Vista at retail at all. Even new PCs, which typically all come with whatever version of Windows Microsoft wants, have vastly outnumbered the sales of 100M Vista licenses Microsoft is counting. That means most new PCs sold in 2007 shipped with XP!
As for the OP wondering where the iPhones are, if you live in the middle of nowhere, you might be seeing a diluted number of iPhones. Try going to a concert in a major US city and not spotting lots of them. An increasing number of the amateur porn mirror pics I've seen online are taken with iPhones. In other words, they're mostly in populated areas where affluent early adopter people live.
What connection do you see between file names on the iPod and how iTunes' graphical interface works?
iTunes is certainly designed to guide users into using the iPod as a "pod" of music spun from iTunes' library, and not as an overt file sharing mechanism to copy/paste music between users' libraries. However, that has zero relation to how iTunes lays out the tracks it copies to the iPod.
If Apple were trying to make an ultra secured media library on the iPod, it would have offered no HD disk mode and would have gone beyond simply hiding the music directory. The iPhone/Touch both have no disk mode or simple way to move files off, so that appears to be the direction of the future. But that has no relation to how those files are named.
With Flash storage, there's little compelling need to copy files to the iPhone in disk mode, and less need to copy files back manually. Are you using it as a backup drive for 8GB of your music? That's what Time Machine or some other backup program is for. The only other reason I can see for wanting to move files back and forth is file trading. Am I missing something?
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"Well, it's funny that Jobs likes to lecture the music and movie industry about the futility of DRM, but then he tries to lock down the iPhone."
Wrong: Jobs only ever disputed the need to put DRM on music downloads, because the labels are already selling their music DRM-free on CDs. Therefore, their insistence that Apple maintain and police a DRM system for music sold in iTunes is a bit ridiculous. Jobs has never recommended that movies and software ship without any sort of copy protection, because both products have historically been sold with copy protection. DVDs were never offered without DRM in the way CDs are. DRM involves a lot of complexity; it is not inherently "wrong."
When you simplify your jingoism down to the point where everything is black and white, it's easy to say things that aren't accurate and be rated "insightful."
Well no it doesn't if your only experience is being a clerk in a small chain store.
Another thing to consider: your chain's suppliers were likely not developers, but middleman wholesale resellers who took a huge chunk of the box revenue before shipping it to you. Every link in the chain that extorts a cut has to be added up to arrive at the overall retail cut. Apple's App Store only has one link: from the developer straight to iTunes.
Instead of insisting you know everything because you've rung up a retail box, talk to some developers--particularly small developers--who will sign deals to distribute their software that returns them 50% or less (often much less), while leaving them the burden of hosting all support information, handling software updates, and handling theft prevention measures, only to find that the majority of their software is stolen by users who get a cracked serial number on the web. That is, incidentally, a huge part why there is no market for mobile software right now, nor much serious interest in shareware in general.
Now compare that to getting paid 70% for uploading a title in a venue directly visible to millions of customers, promoted by Apple in iTunes, with credit card and hosting included at no extra cost, a slick system for delivering upgrades, and unprecedented protection from wide scale piracy. Rather than selling a few hundred units at $40, you can sell tens or hundreds of thousands of units at $5 and make vastly more money.
But none of this stuff is theoretical: just ask iTunes suppliers now, who make less than a 70% cut and still report being happy with their share. Look at iPod games, which sell for $5 but are rapidly increasing in count. Those developers--including Sega and EA--are clearly not hurting under their arrangement. Apple has sold 4 billion audio tracks and owns 91% of the video downloads business. This isn't exactly an unknown market.
Apple TV Digital Disruption at Work: iTunes Takes 91% of Video Download Market
If the retail markup is really only 5%, how do you suppose that big box retailers and low overhead mail order operations like Amazon can regularly offer titles at deep discounts often close to 50%? Are you aware of this phenomenon?
In reality, retail markups are usually at least 50%, as are most online mobile software sources. The Danger/Sidekick store takes 50%, as does Handango. Neither offers the audience of iTunes or can promise the kind of sales volume that would make Apple's cut any more significant of a barrier than it is for studios and indie labels listing their music in iTunes.
Yeah there's lots of small developers making lots of money selling code for Linux. And what a profitable business Windows shareware is.
Of course, we're talking about mobile software here, so adjust your belt to consider that Windows Mobile software is a joke and most Linux phones don't even support development, and in particular open development.
More Absurd iPhone Myths: Third Party Software Panic
"The more than $450 of popular third party software for Windows Mobile listed above is either already provided or is not necessary on the iPhone. That's enough for the iPhone to pay for itself!"
Yes, and nobody will buy your software from that freebee site because nobody know about it.
Apple is publishing developer's software using the same model as iTunes uses to sign up indie artists who want to sell their music without signing up with a big label. Apple is allowing developers (and musicians) to sign their own work and distribute it with high visibility. That will allow them to sell it at a lower cost, dramatically boosting their volume of sales, reaching a much wider audience, and enjoying a business that is much easier to maintain.
Seriously, anyone crying about a $99 program to get started as a publisher is completely ignorant. Look up how much it costs to develop for a games console ($15,000) or as a Palm or RIM developer. Apple is selling more phones in the US than all of Microsoft's licensees together. That's a huge market, and one hungry for software. There is currently no significant market for mobile software. Apple is going to create it, and the iFund is putting up $100 M to bet that a lot of developers are going to make big money selling $5 titles to tens of millions of iPhone users over the next couple years.
And anyone trying to make a 30% cut sound like a big deal apparently doesn't know that most retail software gives 50% or more to the retailer, leaving the developer to pay for their development, packaging, marketing, and distribution costs themselves from their own half. And if you can't afford it, maybe you should apply for some of those iFund dollars and get cracking on the next big thing.
Apple's iPhone vs Smartphone Software Makers
So, you agree then that Apple sued pretty much everybody that they could, and that they lost the lawsuits that they did file.
No, read that again with your eyes open. Apple didn't sue any of a wide range of companies selling a Mac knock off, including Atari's ST, which was so blatantly patterned after the Mac it was called the Jackintosh after CEO Jack Tramiel. Nor did it sue Amiga or Acorn or GEOS, all of which copied the Mac desktop even closer than Windows. Apple only sued Microsoft and HP (and threatened DRI) for porting Mac technology to the IBM PC. And the only thing Apple "lost" was the fact that it had not patented Mac inventions, and since Microsoft had obtained a license to Mac technology under threat of porting Excel to the PC, the court ruled that there were only minimal things Microsoft had to change.
The rest of your stuff is just non-sensical gibberish that dashes around asserting "facts" you pulled out of your ass without any context.
We don't have $150,000 workstations networked like Xerox was selling in the early 80s.
Macs weren't priced any higher than similarly equipped PCs; its just that DOS-tards thought a stripped down box that could do 16 colors compared to a 32-bit color Mac.
Saying "the Mac team only introduced one major advance: a substantially lower price" proves you know nothing. Among other things, Apple invented Regions, which were critical to auto-updating multiple overlapping windows, something Xerox didn't ever do. Clearly, you've never used an oddball Xerox Star and are just asstalking.
You are so absolutely full of shit the world deserves an apology for your nonsense.
Apple didn't sue Atari's TOS, the Commodore Amiga, Berkeley System's GEOS, DRI's GEM/1, Acorn Archimedes or any of the other graphical desktops. It only sued Microsoft and HP, which was selling an add-on for Windows that made it more Mac-like. [1]
That's because Apple was utterly defeated during the first couple of lawsuits.
Wrong: Apple didn't lose its case until 1992 and appealed for another ruling in 1994. By that time, all of the other small GUIs had been trampled by Microsoft's PC. You have things backwards. The Atari ST, Amiga, C64 GEOS and GEM all existed during the 80s and sold against the Mac. Windows never sold in any volume throughout the 80s. Apple sued Microsoft to stop it from porting its own technology to the IBM PC, as IBM was Apple's primary hardware threat in the 80s.
I was there at the time. I programmed in Smalltalk, Cedar, the Lisa, and the original Mac, and I followed the lawsuits closely. The Mac was an imitation of the Xerox technologies, and not even a very good one.
Wrong again: Xerox attempted to sell its own GUI hardware and later desktop software and failed miserably. The Mac team introduced a number of clear advances well beyond what had been accomplished at Xerox. While the Mac was a far lower priced product (roughly 2% the price of a Xerox Star), and didn't deliver anything like a Smalltalk environment, it was far ahead in terms of GUI and human user interface design. That's why cloners copied the Mac instead of the Star.
Well, duh! That's because Apple bought the company producing the multitouch controllers and the company that owns the multitouch patents.
That's not accurate either. There are plenty of sources of multitouch controllers and Apple didn't buy any company with multitouch patents. Are you thinking of FingerWorks or did you just invent that factoid? Because Apple didn't buy Fingerworks, it hired its employees. That's because Fingerworks was being sued by patent trolls itself, and Apple didn't want to inherit a patent troll lawsuit. You are completely wrong in everything you said.
First, you say that Apple is using patents to prevent Chinese cloners, then you say that cloning is too much of an investment.
Innovating is too much work for Chinese cloners. Or don't you know that either? Good job making up a bunch of bullshit to support your opinions. Do you think everything you invent is a fact?
You've certainly mastered the keyboard shortcuts for typing in italics. However, if you have a clear point, you don't need to add all the ARTIFICIAL ***emphasis*** bullshit kind of stuff.
I did like how you defended Microsoft by praising its ability to leave copy and paste out of its CLI environment and its heroic efforts to color code plugs in 1997. Having blue and green plugs that were otherwise identical is a real life saver, and so much more convenient than ADB or USB! That must be why the PC Enraptured continued using PS/2 as the default keyboards shipping with machines from companies like Dell well into 2006, a decade after Microsoft introduced the innovation of color coding legacy ports. What would the PC world do without Microsoft's brave leadership? Make slightly shittier PCs? Praise Microsoft and its bold innovation.
Nice efforts with the desperate spin, but does the sloppy, profiteering mistakes of Microsoft in perpetuating legacy in the PC architecture really need such effusive cheerleading? Why not be a teary-eyed fanboy for a product that isn't crap? Just a thought. Also, the next time you crap your pants over RoughlyDrafted, at least bother to point out what you find so challenging about it. You sound like a rabid fundamentalist on a crusade to attack someone else's opinion as heretical instead of just presenting your own outlook on things. Yet you never get out what you find so upsetting, which just makes you like a jerk.
Apple didn't sue
All the Mac GUI cloners
Only the Gates beast
That's not even remotely true. Apple invested well over $60 million (in early 80s dollars) into developing the Lisa desktop interface, along with the followup Mac desktop in parallel between the late 70s and 1984. By the time the Mac arrived, Apple had been showing the tech off for 2-3 years, so rivals began copying a lot of the same ideas. Apple didn't sue any of those rivals apart from two that were transferring a copy of Apple's tech directly to IBM's PC.
Apple didn't sue Atari's TOS, the Commodore Amiga, Berkeley System's GEOS, DRI's GEM/1, Acorn Archimedes or any of the other graphical desktops. It only sued Microsoft and HP, which was selling an add-on for Windows that made it more Mac-like. [1]
The reason Apple sued Microsoft to stop it was because Apple had entered an development contract with MS in 1982, giving MS early access to Mac technology. MS agreed not to release a competing product for IBM's PC until the Mac was delivered, but found a technicality that enabled it to announce Windows 1.0 in 1983. Even though Windows 1.0 was unusable garbage, it cloned enough of the Mac ideas to create a product concept that could make the PC look useful, and create the suggestion that Windows would deliver something similar to the Mac. It didn't even come close until 1995, more than a decade later. Windows was a vaporware distraction based entirely upon theft of ideas Apple released to Microsoft as a trusted partner.
Interestingly, Wikipedia presents this as a revised history where Microsoft invented Windows 1.0 first and suggests Apple copied it for the Mac. Windows Enthusiasts like Rob Enderle have also stated that Microsoft developed the Mac OS for Apple, despite the fact that at the time, Apple was already a huge company turning out blockbuster products and engaging in major R&D, while Microsoft was still a contract developer that simply relicensed Unix and DOS adding very little value, and didn't really develop any of its own original products for another ten years. Microsoft didn't even invent Excel, it only cloned the existing VisiCalc inside Apple's Mac GUI. It bought Word directly from Xerox. That's why those of use who were paying attention find it hard to swallow the idea the Microsoft has some significant history in the original development of the GUI. It did not.
Even MS knew that it infringed enough upon Apple's technology that it could not sell Windows 1.0. Despite showing off an early preview in 1983, MS didn't sell Windows 1.0 until 1985, partly because it had to keep working on it, and partly because it had to force Apple into licensing its Mac technology first. MS used the threat of porting Mac Excel to the PC as leverage to obtain a license from John Sculley's Apple for Mac interface ideas that were unique to Apple (as opposed to GUI ideas that had originated at Xerox PARC or other places). MS then used that 1985 license to copy even more of the Mac UI for Windows 2.0, which served almost entirely as a vehicle for porting Mac Excel to the PC.
No PC makers preinstalled Windows on their machines until Windows 3.0 in 1990. Apple's 1986 suit against MS was limited to copyright ideas about the user interface, because at the time, there was no established concept of software patents. Recall that Bill Gates was also warning the world that software patents would be a bad idea and stifle competition. He believed that at the time (1990) because he wanted full access to Apple's technology without paying for it. After MS began patenting its own software ideas, the company changed its tune. It now threatens to sue open source using its patent pool.
In a world where everyone patents every idea they think might ever have any value, and where companies are all sued by small inventors who have patented ideas that may seem obvious but end up getting millions awarded in claims from the court, the idea of patenting every line of research isn't evil, but necessary.
Open Source developers are at the mercy of lots of patent nonsense, so they critically need to cont
Apple isn't in the business of profiting from song/movie media creation. It is a reseller. It is a retail store. WalMart doesn't really care if you bootleg Britney Spears, as long as you don't shoplift the CD. Similarly, Apple doesn't care "financially" that you use some FairPlay track outside of its studio designed license.
However, Apple has legal contracts with the studios that assure them that it will work in good faith to preserve its DRM in such a way that iTunes remains a store and not a source for widespread bootlegging and Internet distribution. This is somewhat silly because every CD sold is more of a source of unrestricted copying than a FairPlay song, and Apple would just as soon sell its tracks DRM free. That would mean Apple doesn't have to police a system that exists to keep honest people honest with some inconvenience, and try to prevent thieves from stealing, which is somewhat impossible anyway.
However, reality means that Apple does have to stop flagrant activity designed to facilitate theft. The iTunes license specifically outlines how songs can be used. The fact that Hymn allows users to violate their contract with Apple at the time of sale does not redefine the contract terms. It does however force Apple to put pressure on Hymn so Apple won't be sued or abandoned by its studio partners for failing to uphold its own resale license.
Anyone crying about iTunes restrictions should be buying CDs. There's nothing more that can be said about that. Nobody has a right to redefine the licensing terms of a product unilaterally just because they want to use it in a different way than it is being offered. If you disagree, remember how butt hurt you get when you read that TiVo or Microsoft whoever is violating the GPL.
If you support the idea of free software enforced by GPL/BSD/MIT style licenses, you have to also respect the licensing rules offered by commercial vendors, and either chose not to use them or use them in compliance with the terms of the agreement.
But there's no honor among thieves, as this thread demonstrates.
Lessons from the Death of HD-DVD
Is Apple Shedding its Final Cut Pro Apps at NAB?
HD-DVD discs were not significantly cheaper, and "storing more data" requires comparing fewer layers of Blu-Ray against HD-DVD (asshat!). If manufacturers were so excited about HD-DVD, why was Toshiba the only one making them?
The reality was that industry collectively got behind Blu-Ray back in 2005 long before consumers even had a choice in the matter. Microsoft and Intel hoped to keep HD-DVD going, influenced Toshiba to stay in the race despite its interests in backing Blu-Ray itself, and later pushed Paramount/DreamWorks to sign up as exclusive HD-DVD studios. That was entirely because Microsoft hoped to monopolize the HD video market with Windows Media/VC-1, WinCE-based HDi interactivity, and the Windows-only Managed Copy DRM.
The rest of the industry fought Microsoft on HD-DVD, and the PS3's Blu-Ray pushed the critical mass to bury HD-DVD. Any amount of money paid to Warner Bros. to pull out of the HD-DVD fiasco and kill the format war prior to Microsoft's marketing push at CES was in the interests of consumers, manufacturers, and studios. It also helps rid the world of Microsoft's domination of video codecs and development, and further helps tank Microsoft's plan to tie HD-DVD into Vista and the 360.
Since no significant number of Blu-Ray players have really sold outside of the PS3, your boo-hooing about consumers needing to buy new BR players in order to play the newest spec discs is as retarded as the rest of your HD-DVD talking points.
Lessons from the Death of HD-DVD
Your replies are so much better at making my point than my own scribbles.
Typical response of a person unable to assert their own ideas: call everyone else "nonsense" insult their ability to think without saying why, then run away from the conversation insisting that you are superior.
You are in may ways more religious than the fanatical nuts of Middle America and the Middle East. Sorry to have reality come crashing down upon you like that, but the truth is the truth, and plugging your ears and chanting out your dogmatic mantras doesn't make you enlightened, even if you hate everyone else for having a different set of beliefs.
Your frothing over semantics kind of illustrates my point for me.
A + thiest = belief in no god. Not hard to figure out. There are people who believe in God or gods or fairies or crystals or oil or meth or whatever, and of those, some float along solo with their own ideas, while others congregate together. You might experience the world as your own person (just as plenty of personally religious people do), but other atheists form little groups that shout at religion. And others try to force the world to see things the way they do, as did the KR in Cambodia. There is absolutely no difference between how atheists chose to act and how people who believe something different choose to act. Human nature is far more powerful that some artificial bullshit definition you can use to exalt yourself as better than anyone else.
The main difference between me and you isn't our religious/ideological views but the fact that I can see that other people have a right to believe whatever they want, and it appears that you think you know what everyone else should think. That makes you just as religious as any other fanatical dipshit.
Most all behavior is learned. We are not born atheist or we'd have cultures around the world untainted by religious ideas. That hasn't happened. Atheists have only sprang from an intellectual elite who decided they were above what their parents believed. Your comments are no less silly than saying we're all born Hippies and have to learn Establishment. Sounds nice, but it's still bullshit that reflects a certain enrapturement with your own sense of reality, indistinguishable from any other fundamentalist religious idea. The louder you defend atheism as The Only Truth the more religious it makes you.
"How could it have any connection to reality when the bible doesn't even contain a physical description of Jesus?" Yeah that's the point. Writers of the Bible, whether you want to think of them as creators or literature or inspired by something else, didn't think Jesus appearance was all that important, while human nature puts a huge emphasis on looks. So Christianity developed around a series of images that have nothing to do with anything it is supposed to be based upon, whereas the text of Islam was carefully segregated from imagery for that very purpose: the words were supposed to have the impact, not a fantasy pictorial invented by someone else further down along the line.
Wikipedia's insistence on including Islamic artwork is therefore an insult to certain people's concept of their own beliefs and what they represent, much as readers of a great novel might hate to see it associated with the visuals a shitty movie version that did not convey the story or characters well at all.
We're all trying to figure out the world around us. We don't need anyone insisting that their religious ideas are the only ones that can be had. From that perspective, if doesn't matter if you want to believe in ghosts or not, if you demand that your ideas are the only rational, reasonable, and allowable ones, how are you any different from the Crusaders?
Or does that idea just not penetrate your fundamentalist atheist ideas that you've taught yourself?
Of course, insisting oneself to be the unassailable voice of reason and demanding that what one believes should be forced upon others makes most atheists indistinguishable from any other religion/ideology. There are rational people who have religious faith and there are hateful, dogmatic, and overbearing atheists.
Everything bad about religion, from enflaming wars to persecuting non-believers to attacking education, has also been perpetuated by fervent atheists such as the intellectual elite who decided to forcibly communize Cambodia.
So get over yourself. Calling yourself an atheist doesn't make you better person, and thinking you have some special override that makes you superior to anyone with a god-centric religion and enlightened beyond everyone else just because you think you know everything just makes you a hypocrite. If you want to be superior, teach people something useful. Claiming you are the Chosen People because your beliefs are different just makes you equally as bad as every self righteous religious asshole who has ever lived.
--
On the subject of Islam, since their prophet was dead and gone by ~800 AD, well before photography, there are no pictures of him, only artistic representations. There are plenty of Christians who think they know what Jesus looked like too (or maybe Jews/Moses, etc) but its all based on artwork, and rarely has any connection to reality. Most paintings of Christ portray him as a fair-skinned European rather than a middle eastern Jew, because they were drawn by Europeans.
That means there is nothing really encyclopedic about putting a Mohammed painting in an article about Islam any more than putting a White Jesus with Blond Hair in an article about Christianity. There is no "censoring" going on; it's just fanboys of a particular group wanting to influence how their product is portrayed. There is no real story here.
Now back to regularly scheduled programming which accuses all of Islam for a Saudi fringe group blowing up the WTC and killing 3,000 people, but absolving all of Christendom for killing hundreds of thousands of unrelated civilians in Iraq and 3,000 US soldiers in a retaliation that had nothing to do with that Saudi terrorist group and everything to do with money.
For the record, I don't believe Islam or Christendom tends to make people better, although I know people of various religious backgrounds who are excellent people. Unfortunately they are a minority. Converting the world to atheism won't make shitty people intelligent, altruistic, or less greedy.
Why Does Microsoft Really Want Yahoo?
Wow what a surprise that the recording industry is looking after its own interests rather than the clients it sells.
/. rise above printing crap designed to elicit a waaa response?
And where is the source for Apple wanting songwriter royalties to be lower? Why would a retailer like Apple care how the RIAA divides up its royalty payments? Apple pays a set wholesale fee, and doesn't negotiate the RIAA labels' business.
This sounds like an inflammatory Digg posting and the majority of the replies sound like knee jerk diggtards. Please, there's already a site for morons. Can't
Why does Microsoft really want Yahoo?
you have trouble seeing the difference between copied bits and the effort required to arrange those bits. The value of software isn't in the commercial packaging or plastic media, it's obviously in the efforts required to create something people will pay for. While you can argue a fallacy of "duplicating doesn't deprive you of the original copy," you're simply ignorantly wrong.
Copying software doesn't deprive somebody of the version you copied, it deprives the creator/owner of their ability to legitimately sell copies of their work. That's what you are stealing when you copy.
Your same silly argument could be applied to counterfeiting currency: copying real money doesn't deprive anyone of their legitimate currency. The problem is, it devalues money by depriving the government of its ability to regulate the supply and value of money. That's why the Secret Service exists.
The best agreements involve partners who both need each other. Apple needs exclusive partners with the iPhone to push its unique features, gain lower service fee terms, and promote the iPhone. Apple wants providers to benefit from exclusive availability of the iPhone. AT&T had little opportunity to gain on Verizon until it had a unique phone that nobody else could get. I'd imagine that in addition to the 40% defection to AT&T that new iPhone users caused directly, that there was also a large number of people attracted by the iPhone who bought other AT&T phones on family plans or similar "halo" effects. Clearly AT&T is happy.
In Europe, the market is different. O2 didn't provide as good of pricing, but apparently thought the iPhone was helping to bring in new customers (or had the potential to do so) enough to boost its plans dramatically after the initial launch. TFA says Apple would be better off trying to sell its phone without carrier limitations. I'd imagine that Apple exercised some due diligence in examining that course of action long ago and decided against it.
If Apple can keep its current 4 carriers happy, it will have a much easier time expanding its exclusive agreeements to other carriers in other regions. If it starts experimenting with cheating on its current exclusive carriers by allowing or facilitating unlockable iPhones, why would other carriers concede anything to get the iPhone? Apple would end up like Motorola: carriers would all demand the iPhone get cheaper while increasing their service fees. Apple has a big bargaining chip with the iPhone, and is using it to pry open the mobile market.
Saying Apple needs to cater to unlocking customers is a bit like saying The Unions should allow their members to pay dues only if they want to. Sounds good to a moron, but it doesn't really work that way unfortunately. If you want the bubble of protection, you have to pay something for it. If you don't, you live outside the bubble. It looks like most iPhone customers are happy with the bubble. The ~25% that are unlocking appear to be scattered around the world (web stats show iPhones in nearly every country) where there is no bubble.
Apple is selling a desirable product at an upfront price with clearly stated limitations in an industry that prefers to sell inferior phone sets at fake subsidized prices with all kinds of unstated limitations. I think consumers are smart enough to figure out if the iPhone works for them or not without Apple being forced to play the same carrier-centric game that all the other phone manufactures have been failing in.
Is the MacBook Air Another Cube?"
Can Apple afford to stick to an exclusive carrier in the future? If for no other reason than consumer choice?"
Can Apple leave its five year exclusive contract with AT&T? If for no other reason that to heed the cautionary woes of a Computerworld writer with tenuous grasp of business and markets?
The problem with wags is that they talk about Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, etc as if they were characters in a play they were writing, apparently unaware of the real world constrains of money, technology, personnel, opportunity cost, and other resources. They write like they're genus for printing ignorant wishful thinking that sounds good only if you don't know what else is involved.
Video Game Consoles 2007: Wii, PS3 and the Death of Microsoft's Xbox 360
And you cowardly took credit for saying nothing and running away from the issues. I guess that means you win. Step up to the windows to receive your plate of bullshit prize and a spoon.
I am humbled for not predicting your limp reply using all caps, and salute your prowess at knock and run distraction trolling.
Pundits Pounce On Apple in a Contest of Epic Idiocy
The iPhone has 20-27% (depending on who is counting) market share in US smartphones. So yes, that doesn't count millions of free handsets that do nothing.
As far as WiFi mobile devices, there really isn't anything outside of niche toys currently. Archos and Cowon and Nokia Internet Tablets are fun to play with, but do not represent a volume market. Apple is transitioning the iPod to become that very thing, in a practical package that ships in high volume at a very competitive price.
It will be far harder for competitors to copy the Touch than the simpler iPod, but look how difficult its been for companies to deliver an attractive alternative to the first five generations of the iPod. Even players that delivered better hardware features couldn't challenge the iPod's position because they were held back by shoddy software.
John Dvorak Finally Gets Something Right on Apple
Which is the difference: Microsoft taxes the economy without adding value, while Apple introduces products people voluntarily buy.
That's why launching the iPhone successfully was notable, while Vista isn't impressing anyone for doing poorly despite its heavily leveraged and entrenched position as an automatically sold license tax.
How much more money did Microsoft make by releasing Vista? Any? Was it a loss? Why not just release XP SP3 and collect the same revenue? It's not like Microsoft is selling retail copies of the more expensive Vista Ultimate. Also, what's the satisfaction rating for users of each product? What's the likelihood users will buy additional products from the same company?
Pundits Pounce On Apple in a Contest of Epic Idiocy
One difference is that Vista isn't being sold only in the US.
The other difference is that Vista isn't an entirely new product entering a competitive market, but merely an adjusted version of a product that enjoys a monopoly position. Even so, it is clearly be rejected in the consumer market, at retail, and by corporations.
Another difference is that Vista is a liberally accounted software license, not a product people buy. So Microsoft can count all the vouchers it handed out as sales, and can count all the PCs that are hit with the Windows Tax as sales, despite the fact that corporations are re-imaging them with Win2k or XP. Many laptops ship with a Vista/XP Downgrade DVD for good reason.
CES: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Microsoft isn't selling Vista at retail at all. Even new PCs, which typically all come with whatever version of Windows Microsoft wants, have vastly outnumbered the sales of 100M Vista licenses Microsoft is counting. That means most new PCs sold in 2007 shipped with XP!
As for the OP wondering where the iPhones are, if you live in the middle of nowhere, you might be seeing a diluted number of iPhones. Try going to a concert in a major US city and not spotting lots of them. An increasing number of the amateur porn mirror pics I've seen online are taken with iPhones. In other words, they're mostly in populated areas where affluent early adopter people live.
What connection do you see between file names on the iPod and how iTunes' graphical interface works?
iTunes is certainly designed to guide users into using the iPod as a "pod" of music spun from iTunes' library, and not as an overt file sharing mechanism to copy/paste music between users' libraries. However, that has zero relation to how iTunes lays out the tracks it copies to the iPod.
If Apple were trying to make an ultra secured media library on the iPod, it would have offered no HD disk mode and would have gone beyond simply hiding the music directory. The iPhone/Touch both have no disk mode or simple way to move files off, so that appears to be the direction of the future. But that has no relation to how those files are named.
With Flash storage, there's little compelling need to copy files to the iPhone in disk mode, and less need to copy files back manually. Are you using it as a backup drive for 8GB of your music? That's what Time Machine or some other backup program is for. The only other reason I can see for wanting to move files back and forth is file trading. Am I missing something?
Why Low Def is the New HD