[Jobs] has allowed for Mac users to be able to buy music online, something they could not do if there wasn't an iTunes Store. Because almost everything else is under a Microsoft format unreadable on a Mac. Microsoft sure seems to license PlaysForSure to anyone who asks. Why don't you ask your favorite Mac developer why they haven't licensed it?
What they completely forget is that if the iTunes Store didn't exist, nobody would ask for music without DRM. Simply because 95% of music players would only play DRM'd WMA Nonsense! You can't sell a music player that doesn't play plain MP3s; no one will buy it. Sony tried it once, and look how successful it was. MP3 has always been the lingua franca of digital music.
The consumer ombudsman didn't say it "should be illegal", he said that under his interpretation of the law, it already is illegal. Interpreting consumer law is his job, and others have come to the same conclusion for Norway's laws and those of neighboring countries. If Apple doesn't come into compliance with the law by a certain date, a lawsuit will be filed, and in all likelihood they will be forced to comply.
Again, I think you're exaggerating. I work in an office full of eMachines and other cheap, off the shelf PCs. In the past seven years, only one of them has suffered a hardware failure, and that was because there was a mouse inside it. If we had bought Macs, we'd be no better off than we are now; we'd just have half as many computers for the same money.
slightly slower speed, dimensions plus ~0.5", weight plus ~0.5lb, no ambiant light detection, no fall detection, no magnetic battery cord, no firewire, no camera, no DVI port... It does have a camera (and mic, and remote).
Are you honestly trying to convince me that an MBP should be the same price as an inferior, heavier, larger laptop? Only that the "inferior" laptop is more attractive to a lot of buyers, who consider saving $500 well worth losing a few pointless bells and whistles. And when they look down from the MBP, the lower-end model still has all that crap - instead of cutting away the fluff, Apple kept the fluff and cut away the important features to make their low-end model. So they look over to HP, Compaq, Toshiba, or some other brand where they can save a few hundred bucks by keeping the steak and losing the chocolate sprinkles.
If Apple had a middle product, say a 15" mb with fast video for 1500... it would probably GUT the sales of the MBP. And sure, it might be what you want... but is it really in Apple's best interest? Sure they'd lose a few sales to people who simply refuse to buy... but I expect overall profit from people ante-ing up to the MBP more than offsets that loss. On the contrary, I think the increase in sales would easily make up for the lower margin. You can sell a lot more laptops at $1200-$1500 than at $2000 if they actually compete with other models in that price range.
[Why would someone pay 4x as much for something that isn't 4x as good?] Lots of reasons. Ah yes. Perhaps they're a contestant on a game show, and they have to spend a million dollars as quickly as possible?
And I don't know what you are talking about with the MBP being more expensive than other brands... a similarly equipped Thinkpad or Sony Vaio are right there with it. Hell the Dell Precision line of laptops starts at 2500.00. Look at HP's lineup. A customized dv6000t has most of the same checklist features as the $2000 MBP, same size screen, slightly lower CPU speed (by 160 MHz), same or better RAM/HD/optical drive, dimensions within 0.5", weight within 0.5 lb, for about $500 less. What's missing is mainly fluff like FireWire and ambient light sensing.
I'm sure they could if they lowered their quality standards and hired a color blind moron to do their case design. Well, most people don't seem to have an issue with competitors' reliability or design.
But who will do this cracking? Not the average Joe. The average Joe won't have to. It only takes one person to do it, and then that person can share the decrypted file with everyone else. As long as someone, somewhere, has internet access and cracking skills, DRM will fail to prevent unauthorized copying.
That's a bizarre way to calculate. A BMW costs 4x as much as a honda civic. I don't think anybody thinks they are ever going to get 400% "utility" out it. I think they do - they value whatever comfort features the BMW provides, so much that they're willing to pay extra. If they weren't getting four times as much enjoyment out of the car, why else would they pay four times as much for it?
Which is why the MB can do everything the MBP does for 40% less. If a MB was an MBP with the same video card and screen, but with BT and Firewire stripped out it would only be maybe $150 cheaper. But wait, I thought it was features like BT and FireWire that made the MacBook Pro so much more expensive than other brands. Now you're saying that if you stripped out the fluff and kept the essentials, it'd still cost more than a 15" Core 2 Duo laptop from HP? If HP can sell a 15" laptop for $1500 or less, why can't Apple?
Yeah, and so are other reputable vendors with valuable brands who refuse to sell junk that is likely to break very soon. You know, I've owned plenty of cheap PCs, and none of them have fit that description. I don't believe Apple would have to sacrifice reliability to offer affordable computers with the features people need.
Unlike, say, a $3400 Louis Vuitton bag (if you want to talk about a rip off), the sum and quality of the parts in a Mac easily justify the price. More parts and higher quality parts doesn't necessarily translate into a better experience. It may be true that the upgrades to make a $1500 HP notebook equal a $2000 MBP would cost 33% or more of the HP's price, but that doesn't mean I'm going to get 33% more utility or enjoyment out of the MBP.
Or put another way. The MB can do everything the MBP can but costs 40% less. Its just not as big, or as fast, or as stylish. But it has all the features of its big brother and will get the job done. (Rather like the difference between an entry level Porsche Cayman and a Porsche 911 Turbo.) Except the shortcomings really are important. Screen size is one of the main factors in a notebook's price, and one of the main things buyers look for. Most people don't want a 13" toy screen.
What would be wrong with that? It wouldn't be premium product. It wouldn't be a Mac. Only if you think a Mac has to be expensive and filled with features most people will never use. In my experience, the main benefits of using a Mac are (1) OS X and (2) no driver headaches because all the hardware is standard. Those advantages would still be intact.
The fact that you were able to put together a computer with a faster CPU, and more RAM, yet can't do everything the Mac Mini does proves what exactly? That Apple is ignoring all the people who don't want to "do everything the Mac Mini does".
You can get a faster computer for less by ignoring fluff like Bluetooth and FireWire, but Apple insists that you pay for those features if you want to use their OS... and whenever someone suggests Macs are expensive, the fanboys come out in droves to do semantic backflips, explaining that they're not really expensive because they do so much.
Well, not everyone wants to spend $50,000 on a car, and that's why smart car manufacturers offer low-end models as well as the Avalons and Escalades. The low-end models don't sacrifice any of the key features like safety or reliability, they just strip away nonessentials like heated seats and 10 speaker audio. Apple does just the opposite: the MacBook, for example, keeps most of the fluff from the MBP but has 40% less screen area and a crappy video chipset.
It's not a question of licensees choosing WM DRM because they trust it more than FairPlay - Apple doesn't license FairPlay at all, so Windows Media is the only choice for a third party.
Ok... but what would a $300 Mac look like? I mean, Apple would have to gut it down to the same specs -- meaning a Celeron, CDRW (no DVD), 10/100 instead of gigabit, drop the bluetooth, drop the wifi, drop the firewire, drop dvi, switch to a paper-thin aluminum case with a $10 power supply, What's wrong with that? A lot of people don't need any of those things. Keep the DVD burner, make wifi an option, and design a nice looking yet still cheap case.
Sure they could get the price to $300 but what would be the point? Half of iLife would be seriously crippled, half of the available peripherals wouldn't work, etc. iLife wouldn't be any more crippled than it already is on a PPC, and the only peripherals that wouldn't work would be those using FireWire and Bluetooth - both of which are fairly rare, compared to USB, and both of which can be added later if need be.
Or you could get 450Mhz g4 tower "sawtooth" era, with 500Mhz, 1GB ram, Tiger, combodrive, firewire for as little as $200. Comparable to a decently loaded pentium III, and perfectly serviceable for most tasks. You could probably get a used PC for that price running at 1 GHz or faster.
Or a 1.5Gz G4 Mac Mini with 512MB RAM, bluetooth, wifi, dvdrw, Tiger, etc etc for $500. On par with an older decently loaded P4, and likely better than what you'd get from dell at that price. Heh, not really... I just priced a Dell Dimension E521 for $479: AMD Sempron 3400+, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB HD, 16x DVD RW. You can pick up wifi and BT adapters for about another $60 together at CompUSA.
IMO, the Apples are priced VERY competitively - they're clearly high-quality machines, and they compete in the Sony Vaio and Lenovo Thinkpad market. THAT'S how the computers need to be evaluated. But like the GP said, what often matters to the purchaser is the overall price, not the value per dollar. If you're a parent buying a car for your kid, you're probably going to prefer the $12,000 Honda over the $50,000 BMW, even if customizing the Honda to have all the same features as the BMW would cost far more than $50k. Your kid doesn't need all those features.
Apple is missing out on a lot of sales by not offering anything in these price ranges. If you want to spend $300 for a desktop, you can get a PC, but you can't get a Mac. If you want to spend $1500 for a 15" laptop, you can get a PC, but you can't get a Mac.
I realize that, which makes this story even more ridiculous.
Out of curiosity, what's the legal basis for copying software to your hard drive, if the shrink wrap license has no legal effect in your country? Does your copyright law specifically allow you to install software that you've purchased?
The only thing stopping you from installing OS X on a Dell is exactly what stops you from installing Vista Basic on a virtual machine: the license agreement. Copying the software (say, from the installation disc to your hard drive) is illegal except as allowed by that agreement.
I admit I'm not familiar with virtualization software, so I can't make any recommendations. From a technical standpoint, it seems like a VM should be indistinguishable from a slow computer - VMware and Virtual PC appear to be detectable on purpose. If you're using an open source virtualizer, it should be easy enough to make it undetectable.
Well, yeah.. you can do that, and it works, but it's illegal. If you don't mind breaking the law, you can install the low-end version of Vista in a virtual machine too. The "tax" is only for installing it legally.
I recommend DVD-lab (for Windows). It's easy enough for a beginner to get started, but has enough functionality to rival the professional tools. There's a 30 day trial, and it's relatively inexpensive after that.
There are these things called analog sticks, they work pretty well. An analog stick is slightly better than a D-pad for controlling a cursor, but not much. Nowhere near as easy as moving a mouse or just pointing at the screen.
Also some consoles have USB ports, making porting a PC point and click game easier since you don't have to change the controls/UI at all. They didn't have USB ports until the PS2 came out, and in the meantime, adventure games sort of died. (The SNES had a nonstandard mouse, and it's hard to sell a game that needs a special peripheral.)
The current generation of consoles all have USB ports, but they also have wireless controllers (except for the sucker version of the Xbox 360), which encourages players to put the console somewhere it'd be hard for a mouse to reach. And who wants to use a mouse in the living room anyway? I've tried it with Halo 2 and a SmartJoy FRAG, and it's just not comfortable, because couches and coffee tables aren't set up like computer desks.
Plus the [iPod] interface is easy (yes yes, I know it's like Creatives one who gives a crap, the clickwheel rocks) Are you serious? I've had my iPod since Christmas and I still have trouble clicking just one stop at a time. The click wheel is fine if you want to scroll from Muse to Radiohead in a single gesture, but going from track 3 to track 4 almost always involves a stop at track 5 or 6, then back to track 3, etc... such a pain.
Another failure of the click wheel is the letter search. You know, when you're in a list of songs, you spin around really fast until a letter appears in the middle of the screen, and then you're skipping through your library letter by letter. But I don't believe it's humanly possible to actually stop at the right letter. Just like above, I always go right past the place where I want to stop - but now I'm not just one or two songs off, I'm one or two whole letters off. (Also, just try spinning fast enough to trigger the letter search while holding the iPod in just one hand. It's nearly impossible unless you're using a case that keeps your finger on the scroll wheel.)
The player is fine except for that stupid wheel. I'm not a fan of the Creative Zen interface, but IMO the Zune is a lot easier to use than the iPod. Click once and it moves once, hold the button down and it moves a lot... just like a computer or a remote control.
Slashdot Mirror
Still on that kick, eh?
The consumer ombudsman didn't say it "should be illegal", he said that under his interpretation of the law, it already is illegal. Interpreting consumer law is his job, and others have come to the same conclusion for Norway's laws and those of neighboring countries. If Apple doesn't come into compliance with the law by a certain date, a lawsuit will be filed, and in all likelihood they will be forced to comply.
Again, I think you're exaggerating. I work in an office full of eMachines and other cheap, off the shelf PCs. In the past seven years, only one of them has suffered a hardware failure, and that was because there was a mouse inside it. If we had bought Macs, we'd be no better off than we are now; we'd just have half as many computers for the same money.
You can get a faster computer for less by ignoring fluff like Bluetooth and FireWire, but Apple insists that you pay for those features if you want to use their OS... and whenever someone suggests Macs are expensive, the fanboys come out in droves to do semantic backflips, explaining that they're not really expensive because they do so much.
Well, not everyone wants to spend $50,000 on a car, and that's why smart car manufacturers offer low-end models as well as the Avalons and Escalades. The low-end models don't sacrifice any of the key features like safety or reliability, they just strip away nonessentials like heated seats and 10 speaker audio. Apple does just the opposite: the MacBook, for example, keeps most of the fluff from the MBP but has 40% less screen area and a crappy video chipset.
It's not a question of licensees choosing WM DRM because they trust it more than FairPlay - Apple doesn't license FairPlay at all, so Windows Media is the only choice for a third party.
Apple is missing out on a lot of sales by not offering anything in these price ranges. If you want to spend $300 for a desktop, you can get a PC, but you can't get a Mac. If you want to spend $1500 for a 15" laptop, you can get a PC, but you can't get a Mac.
Interesting. Thank you.
I realize that, which makes this story even more ridiculous.
Out of curiosity, what's the legal basis for copying software to your hard drive, if the shrink wrap license has no legal effect in your country? Does your copyright law specifically allow you to install software that you've purchased?
The only thing stopping you from installing OS X on a Dell is exactly what stops you from installing Vista Basic on a virtual machine: the license agreement. Copying the software (say, from the installation disc to your hard drive) is illegal except as allowed by that agreement.
I admit I'm not familiar with virtualization software, so I can't make any recommendations. From a technical standpoint, it seems like a VM should be indistinguishable from a slow computer - VMware and Virtual PC appear to be detectable on purpose. If you're using an open source virtualizer, it should be easy enough to make it undetectable.
Bah, splitting hairs. Contracts only have power because the law gives them power.
If your virtualization software is any good, Vista won't be able to detect that it's running in a VM.
Well, yeah.. you can do that, and it works, but it's illegal. If you don't mind breaking the law, you can install the low-end version of Vista in a virtual machine too. The "tax" is only for installing it legally.
Yeah, it's crazy - for that much, you could almost get two 17" MacBook Pros!
I recommend DVD-lab (for Windows). It's easy enough for a beginner to get started, but has enough functionality to rival the professional tools. There's a 30 day trial, and it's relatively inexpensive after that.
The current generation of consoles all have USB ports, but they also have wireless controllers (except for the sucker version of the Xbox 360), which encourages players to put the console somewhere it'd be hard for a mouse to reach. And who wants to use a mouse in the living room anyway? I've tried it with Halo 2 and a SmartJoy FRAG, and it's just not comfortable, because couches and coffee tables aren't set up like computer desks.
Another failure of the click wheel is the letter search. You know, when you're in a list of songs, you spin around really fast until a letter appears in the middle of the screen, and then you're skipping through your library letter by letter. But I don't believe it's humanly possible to actually stop at the right letter. Just like above, I always go right past the place where I want to stop - but now I'm not just one or two songs off, I'm one or two whole letters off. (Also, just try spinning fast enough to trigger the letter search while holding the iPod in just one hand. It's nearly impossible unless you're using a case that keeps your finger on the scroll wheel.)
The player is fine except for that stupid wheel. I'm not a fan of the Creative Zen interface, but IMO the Zune is a lot easier to use than the iPod. Click once and it moves once, hold the button down and it moves a lot... just like a computer or a remote control.
I picked mine up just a couple weeks ago from CompUSA.