Perhaps in 2014 WebM will include VP9, a successor to the current VP8.
I hope that Google does build on WebM with a second generation and more. Competition in the marketplace is a good thing and leads to innovation
The reality of the situation is that Google is continuing to assert their strong position in the marketplace to potentially negatively affect the consumer, and all of their existing devices, to potentially positively affect their bottom line and that of their shareholders.
My phone, my browser, and my operating system all support WebM already. I don't think I'll be much inconvenienced.
You simply are proving my point that Google is in a position to assert itself in the market. Google is on its way to becoming like Microsoft from the 90's and Apple of the 2000's. They are asserting their influence in sometimes anti-competitive manners while claiming that they "do no evil." They are in business to make money, plain and simple. They will operate in such a manner as be as efficient as possible in an effort to make more money for their shareholders. They are not doing this for the sake of open source or open standards. They are doing it for the sake of making more money, that comes through selling advertising, or by giving away operating systems to device makers that ostensibly provide additional screens for Google to advertise on.
FYI... I don't have a problem with any of this. I just wish they would be honest about it.
Does anybody really think that there won't be a new next-generation video codec to supersede both h.264 and WebM by the time the royalty free licenses expire in 2014? The reality of the situation is that Google is continuing to assert their strong position in the marketplace to potentially negatively affect the consumer, and all of their existing devices, to potentially positively affect their bottom line and that of their shareholders. To all of those who believe that Google is a "good" company, please remember that they are a publicly traded company that is really only beholden to benefit of their shareholders.
Open Source != (Open) Standard
Whether a tool is open source or not doesn't make it a standard, open or otherwise. What makes something a standard is when a group of people, companies, etc... (IEEE, ISO, ITU,etc...) get together propose and ratify a standard. In the case of h.264 the MPEG-LA and its members contributed their technologies and processes to the pool to build many of the wonderful products we like today. The only way that all of these different products by different manufacturers work is if they all support the standard. All of these companies built these technologies to make money.
What Google did with WebM was buy a company and provide one of their newly purchased products as open-source. This product may, or may not, come under scrutiny for various IP issues. Many have stated in the past that a number of WebM's algorithms are very similar to those of h.264 and its "freeness" may come in to question.
Googles actions today are not for you or for me. They are for the positive gain of Google as well as the negative impact on all of Google's competitors. This would not be a bad thing if this did not take into account the fact that millions, if not billions, of people already own products that make use of h.264 and therefore negatively affects consumers if they are forced to buy new products.
In the long run, will it matter? Won't there be something new by 2014 anyways? I doubt the MPEG-LA members are resting on their laurels and not working on h.265 or MPEG-5 or whatever is next anyways.
I wish people would wake up and stop believing the "don't be evil" mantra when Google is as bad as Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and/or Oracle.
Is it just me, or does this laptop remind anyone else of the short-lived Apple eMate? In fact it seems to me that the concept of the computer was lifted from Apple. Gaudy colors, slimmed down OS and functionality, built rugged for students. Obviously the tech in the machine is a decade newer and as such likely significantly more powerful, but the same principles apply, low power footprint, small screen, readable outdoors.
Outside of some modernization of the concept and technologies can someone show me what this device does that the eMate didn't? The eMate even lasted up to 28 hours on a single charge. I don't want to discount what MIT Media Labs has accomplished, but it looks to me like another rip-off of Apple technology.
Here is a link to a picture and the specs of an Apple eMate 300.
You are correct. The article is pretty unreliable. But there may be more reasons for the loss on the benchmark.
I noticed three differences in the hardware and software configuration of the demo. The hard drives were different, there was a slightly different version of the ATI Catalyst driver on the systems, and there was a different motherboard.
Even though the the size of the hard drives was only off by 50GB, that can throw any disk based benchmarks out the window. A rough way of estimating the the maximum throughput of a harddrive is to multiply the number of platters by the hard drive density. Even this slight difference will cause change. Who knows how much has changed in the ATI driver. The biggest factor is that despite the same chipset being in use on both motherboards, one was an Intel design and one was an Asus motherboard. How different are these motherboards???
If you are going to compare the actual processors effectively you should use a processor based benchmark that shows just the differences of the processors. I am sure that Intel could have put one their motherboards into use for the Presler chip. I am also sure that they could have picked a benchmark that ignored the rest of the system variables and only tested the performance of the processors. They could have used any of the various SPEC benchmarks or actually done some real world testing. These synthetic benchmarks tell us nothing.
I put a lot more faith in the testing that Apple did a few years back when they released the Power Mac G5. They actually used an independent testing firm to perform there test and you guys filleted them for being flawed, yet you pay any attention to this crap. It actually astounds me the ignorance that people post here these days.
Hyper-Threading is a load of crap. It fooled the computer into believing that the computer has an additional processor. The reason that they removed Hyper-Threading from the dual core chips is that it is redundant and not needed. You are not going to get any greater performance gains from multithreading on a single chip than you are from a dual core chip.
On another note, it is up to the developer of the optimize his/her program for the best performance. Individual tasks inside a program can be made to run single threaded or multithreaded based on how well that part of the program performs. The programmer must make these decisions or leave them to the compiler. In many cases the programmers will understand that the compiler is building generic code that may not be suitable for their program.
These benchmarks were run as single threaded or multithreaded. This has absolutely NOTHING to do with multitasking. Multitasking is running several programs or processes simultaneously. The individual programs in these benchmarks may not have been that optimized for these tasks and may have left significant headroom for other processes to run efficiently. An example of this is that many programs that I use on a dual processor G5 will never take full utilization of the available processing power. It may take running several instances of a process to fully load up the CPU utilization on the system. This is why virtualization is being looked at as a holy grail of saving money in the data-center as it will allow those data-centers to make better use of their investments.
Next time you are encoding audio or video go check your task manager or activity monitor and look to see what your CPU utilization is. Go load your web browser and surf around a while. You will not notice the encoding stop, it may slow for a few cycles every time you load a new page. This is your computer multitasking. Multithreading is allowing an individual process or program to do more things at once instead of waiting for an invidiudal task to complete before moving on to another task. You do not need multiple processors to take advantage of multithreading, nor do you need that crap called Hyper-Threading.
I thought this was a place for geeks and nerds who knew something.
The greater question is what does Microsoft want to do with the Open Standard PDF. There is certain functionality of PDF that is included in the standard, and then are other parts that set it apart from the Adobe Acrobat Distiller product. Much of Adobe's use of PDF is set around print production and such is proprietary to their products. Many of these features do not react the way you would expect in program's like Apple's preview or other PDF viewers. There are a number of compression technologies that are not accessible outside of Acrobat Distiller. The question in my mind is does Microsoft want to include proprietary functions in their save to PDF functionality, or are they simply trying to print a PDF to a file?
If Microsoft is just going to use the open standard then there is not much Adobe can do. Example, Apple removed Display PostScript from the developer previews of Mac OS X because they did not want to pay for the licensing involved with Display PostScript. Instead they built their display model on the open PDF standard. They do not use Adobe code in their product.
Now that said if you open a complex Adobe PDF in Apple's preview IT WILL NOT LOOK CORRECT, especially if their is transparency in the document.
The other end of the spectrum is, does Microsoft want to "embrace and extend" the tehnology much like they did with JAVA, basically bastardazing the product and killing it for all intents and purposes so that they can push their own technology.
Neither the article or the benchmark seem to actually look at multi-tasking performance. As far as I can tell from the available information the benchmarks were running multithreaded versions of the benchmark. Unless they specifically come back and show us that they were running multiple processes, doing different things, then you cannot extrapolate whether or not the multitasking performance of the chip is any good.
On the other end of the spectrum it may just be that the operating system that was used to perform the tests is lacking in multitasking performance, as the operating system is going to be the ultimate decider of when the task is handed off to the processor to be performed.
This review, it's analysis, and the resulting comments in this thread are all garbage.
When I was studying Computer Science in College I took a Parrellel Programming class. One of the first things my professor taught my class was that not all tasks are well suited for parrallel processing. In many cases it is more difficult to break the task up into smaller tasks and hand off to other processors or cores. In many cases performance will be significantly degraded by parallelizing a task that is not well suited to multiprocessing.
During several of the tests, the author of the article ran single threaded and multithreaded tests. In some of these tests, the performance of both the Conroe and Pressler chips decreased. The author incorrectly states that the multitasking performance of the Conroe chip is lower than the Pressler chips. He is incorrect becuase his own graphs reference multi-threaded performance. These are two entirely different things. While the multi-threaded perfomance of Conroe is slower in some cases, the single threaded performance was faster in most cases. These tasks obviously are not tasks well suited for parallel processing, and as such should be coded to run as a single thread to keep performace high.
While the rest of the benchmark seems solid, his analyis should be brought into question as he doesn't seem to have a solid grasp on his technology vocabulary. That or his editors don't know what they are reading either. If that is the case their reviews should not be showcased.
How do we know that Apple hasn't just decided to keep their options open. Apple's engineers are already experts at pulling the most out of the PowerPC architecture. Who is to say that if/when IBM get's there act in gear and releases a product based on these claims Apple won't say "Hey, we went Universal binary for a reason. We wanted to be able to use whichever fab is producing the best tech today!" We all know about how the party line might change over night and we are transitioning back.
The fact of the matter is that Apple is ready to run native on two hardware platforms. Their developers are on their way to having their code run native on two hardware platforms. I do also seem to remember some reference to the Playstation 3 not having a finalized OS at this point and that they could easily choose linux or Mac OS X. All that said maybe Apple is making a play for, gasp, both the home and the enterprise.
I don't believe that this will actually happen, but if any company knows, Apple knows that it is suicide to have all of your eggs in one basket.
There are no real surprises here. This is very similar to how they transitioned Photoshop and Illustrator to Mac OS X several years ago. My main hopes are that CS3 is not living half in two worlds like they did with Illustrator 10 and Photoshop 7.
On the bright side, if Adobe keeps up the status quo on Creative Suite 3 then we will see all of the Apps that ship in Creative Suite, ship together. Acrobat 5 was horrible on Mac OS X, the Acrobat application ran natively in OS X, but the distiller ran in Classic and suffered severe performance penalties as a result. Hopefully all of the apps tranistioning around the same time will leave a better taste in their customers mouths.
I am glad to see them attempting to show off their xCode developemtn prowess by delivering the LightRoom beta earlier than their other software packages.
I sent this e-mail to the author of the article. I think he missed the point.
John,
I think you are missing a few of the points of the phone. First off this is not a phone built by Apple. This is a phone built by Motorola with some software by Apple thrown in. This is not an iPod. This device is not as cool as an iPod and a such was named otherwise. This was not to dilute the iPod brand. However this is an expansion of the iTunes brand.
Previously you were only able to play FairPlay songs on either iTunes or an iPod. This is the next major expansion of the iTunes brand. The first major expansion was expanding iTunes to Windows. The second major expansion was to build the online store. There were several evolutionary expansions with more international stores but these were of lesser importance. The ROKR is the expansion of iTunes and FairPlay to other devices. This is a big deal for Apple to licensing out it's technology at all, even if it is a partner. This is also a big deal for Motorola to be working with Apple again after their previous licensing debacle.
At some point probably next year a new much bigger expansion of the iTunes phone will probably happen, possibly to other device manufacturers that may blow your mind.
On your other points. Do you really think that Cell phone users want to download music at today's data rates for cellular networks. Unless you feel like dropping $99/month for unlimited download access and whatever else the cell phone companies would like per song to buy music. So let's look at the breakdown of the money from the purchase of a song on iTunes. I think I read that the labels get $0.71 per song leaving Apple with about $0.28 per song. So now Cingular wants their share for using their network to get the music. Over the internet you are already paying your share for your access to the internet. You will end up paying to download music as well as paying for your music. Whether it is your $20-40/month for broadband (you get the other benefits of the internet as well) or the $1/song for Cingular to download the track. Now let's add another $1 so each song and cost twice as much. Let's see, do you work for Napster. Are you trying to help the labels distribute the wealth to a number of online retailers that are not being supported by the consumer. Think about how long it will take to download that song at approximately the 90kbps that is at the upper edge of the Cingular data networks' speed. On to your USB point, let's come back to reality USB2 while more limited than firewire is certainly faster than any Cellular network EDGE or otherwise.
Look at this device as it is meant to be. A first generation iTunes phone. Their will be more. Their will be a lot of focus group research. And they will figure things out. Look at this move as it is meant to be. Other manufactures devices able to play FairPlay songs. Long for iTunes convergence on other devices. Maybe not this year, but if it pulls in a 33% margin Apple will sell it.
I personally am glad that Apple had the cajones to stand up to Cingular and the other cellular networks and recognize that in the same way people don't want to rent music, people also don't want to pay a retailer, wholesaler, distributor, and producer of the music as well. Let's cut out all of the middle-men.
Overall I agreed with much of your article, but I can't help but think you missed the big picture.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps in 2014 WebM will include VP9, a successor to the current VP8.
I hope that Google does build on WebM with a second generation and more. Competition in the marketplace is a good thing and leads to innovation
The reality of the situation is that Google is continuing to assert their strong position in the marketplace to potentially negatively affect the consumer, and all of their existing devices, to potentially positively affect their bottom line and that of their shareholders.
My phone, my browser, and my operating system all support WebM already. I don't think I'll be much inconvenienced.
You simply are proving my point that Google is in a position to assert itself in the market. Google is on its way to becoming like Microsoft from the 90's and Apple of the 2000's. They are asserting their influence in sometimes anti-competitive manners while claiming that they "do no evil." They are in business to make money, plain and simple. They will operate in such a manner as be as efficient as possible in an effort to make more money for their shareholders. They are not doing this for the sake of open source or open standards. They are doing it for the sake of making more money, that comes through selling advertising, or by giving away operating systems to device makers that ostensibly provide additional screens for Google to advertise on.
FYI... I don't have a problem with any of this. I just wish they would be honest about it.
Open Source != (Open) Standard
Whether a tool is open source or not doesn't make it a standard, open or otherwise. What makes something a standard is when a group of people, companies, etc... (IEEE, ISO, ITU,etc...) get together propose and ratify a standard. In the case of h.264 the MPEG-LA and its members contributed their technologies and processes to the pool to build many of the wonderful products we like today. The only way that all of these different products by different manufacturers work is if they all support the standard. All of these companies built these technologies to make money.
What Google did with WebM was buy a company and provide one of their newly purchased products as open-source. This product may, or may not, come under scrutiny for various IP issues. Many have stated in the past that a number of WebM's algorithms are very similar to those of h.264 and its "freeness" may come in to question.
Googles actions today are not for you or for me. They are for the positive gain of Google as well as the negative impact on all of Google's competitors. This would not be a bad thing if this did not take into account the fact that millions, if not billions, of people already own products that make use of h.264 and therefore negatively affects consumers if they are forced to buy new products.
In the long run, will it matter? Won't there be something new by 2014 anyways? I doubt the MPEG-LA members are resting on their laurels and not working on h.265 or MPEG-5 or whatever is next anyways.
I wish people would wake up and stop believing the "don't be evil" mantra when Google is as bad as Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and/or Oracle.
Is it just me, or does this laptop remind anyone else of the short-lived Apple eMate? In fact it seems to me that the concept of the computer was lifted from Apple. Gaudy colors, slimmed down OS and functionality, built rugged for students. Obviously the tech in the machine is a decade newer and as such likely significantly more powerful, but the same principles apply, low power footprint, small screen, readable outdoors.
s tats/emate_300.html
Outside of some modernization of the concept and technologies can someone show me what this device does that the eMate didn't? The eMate even lasted up to 28 hours on a single charge. I don't want to discount what MIT Media Labs has accomplished, but it looks to me like another rip-off of Apple technology.
Here is a link to a picture and the specs of an Apple eMate 300.
http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/messagepad/
You are correct. The article is pretty unreliable. But there may be more reasons for the loss on the benchmark.
I noticed three differences in the hardware and software configuration of the demo. The hard drives were different, there was a slightly different version of the ATI Catalyst driver on the systems, and there was a different motherboard.
Even though the the size of the hard drives was only off by 50GB, that can throw any disk based benchmarks out the window. A rough way of estimating the the maximum throughput of a harddrive is to multiply the number of platters by the hard drive density. Even this slight difference will cause change. Who knows how much has changed in the ATI driver. The biggest factor is that despite the same chipset being in use on both motherboards, one was an Intel design and one was an Asus motherboard. How different are these motherboards???
If you are going to compare the actual processors effectively you should use a processor based benchmark that shows just the differences of the processors. I am sure that Intel could have put one their motherboards into use for the Presler chip. I am also sure that they could have picked a benchmark that ignored the rest of the system variables and only tested the performance of the processors. They could have used any of the various SPEC benchmarks or actually done some real world testing. These synthetic benchmarks tell us nothing.
I put a lot more faith in the testing that Apple did a few years back when they released the Power Mac G5. They actually used an independent testing firm to perform there test and you guys filleted them for being flawed, yet you pay any attention to this crap. It actually astounds me the ignorance that people post here these days.
Hyper-Threading is a load of crap. It fooled the computer into believing that the computer has an additional processor. The reason that they removed Hyper-Threading from the dual core chips is that it is redundant and not needed. You are not going to get any greater performance gains from multithreading on a single chip than you are from a dual core chip.
On another note, it is up to the developer of the optimize his/her program for the best performance. Individual tasks inside a program can be made to run single threaded or multithreaded based on how well that part of the program performs. The programmer must make these decisions or leave them to the compiler. In many cases the programmers will understand that the compiler is building generic code that may not be suitable for their program.
These benchmarks were run as single threaded or multithreaded. This has absolutely NOTHING to do with multitasking. Multitasking is running several programs or processes simultaneously. The individual programs in these benchmarks may not have been that optimized for these tasks and may have left significant headroom for other processes to run efficiently. An example of this is that many programs that I use on a dual processor G5 will never take full utilization of the available processing power. It may take running several instances of a process to fully load up the CPU utilization on the system. This is why virtualization is being looked at as a holy grail of saving money in the data-center as it will allow those data-centers to make better use of their investments.
Next time you are encoding audio or video go check your task manager or activity monitor and look to see what your CPU utilization is. Go load your web browser and surf around a while. You will not notice the encoding stop, it may slow for a few cycles every time you load a new page. This is your computer multitasking. Multithreading is allowing an individual process or program to do more things at once instead of waiting for an invidiudal task to complete before moving on to another task. You do not need multiple processors to take advantage of multithreading, nor do you need that crap called Hyper-Threading.
I thought this was a place for geeks and nerds who knew something.
The greater question is what does Microsoft want to do with the Open Standard PDF. There is certain functionality of PDF that is included in the standard, and then are other parts that set it apart from the Adobe Acrobat Distiller product. Much of Adobe's use of PDF is set around print production and such is proprietary to their products. Many of these features do not react the way you would expect in program's like Apple's preview or other PDF viewers. There are a number of compression technologies that are not accessible outside of Acrobat Distiller. The question in my mind is does Microsoft want to include proprietary functions in their save to PDF functionality, or are they simply trying to print a PDF to a file?
If Microsoft is just going to use the open standard then there is not much Adobe can do. Example, Apple removed Display PostScript from the developer previews of Mac OS X because they did not want to pay for the licensing involved with Display PostScript. Instead they built their display model on the open PDF standard. They do not use Adobe code in their product.
Now that said if you open a complex Adobe PDF in Apple's preview IT WILL NOT LOOK CORRECT, especially if their is transparency in the document.
The other end of the spectrum is, does Microsoft want to "embrace and extend" the tehnology much like they did with JAVA, basically bastardazing the product and killing it for all intents and purposes so that they can push their own technology.
Neither the article or the benchmark seem to actually look at multi-tasking performance. As far as I can tell from the available information the benchmarks were running multithreaded versions of the benchmark. Unless they specifically come back and show us that they were running multiple processes, doing different things, then you cannot extrapolate whether or not the multitasking performance of the chip is any good.
On the other end of the spectrum it may just be that the operating system that was used to perform the tests is lacking in multitasking performance, as the operating system is going to be the ultimate decider of when the task is handed off to the processor to be performed.
This review, it's analysis, and the resulting comments in this thread are all garbage.
When I was studying Computer Science in College I took a Parrellel Programming class. One of the first things my professor taught my class was that not all tasks are well suited for parrallel processing. In many cases it is more difficult to break the task up into smaller tasks and hand off to other processors or cores. In many cases performance will be significantly degraded by parallelizing a task that is not well suited to multiprocessing.
During several of the tests, the author of the article ran single threaded and multithreaded tests. In some of these tests, the performance of both the Conroe and Pressler chips decreased. The author incorrectly states that the multitasking performance of the Conroe chip is lower than the Pressler chips. He is incorrect becuase his own graphs reference multi-threaded performance. These are two entirely different things. While the multi-threaded perfomance of Conroe is slower in some cases, the single threaded performance was faster in most cases. These tasks obviously are not tasks well suited for parallel processing, and as such should be coded to run as a single thread to keep performace high.
While the rest of the benchmark seems solid, his analyis should be brought into question as he doesn't seem to have a solid grasp on his technology vocabulary. That or his editors don't know what they are reading either. If that is the case their reviews should not be showcased.
How do we know that Apple hasn't just decided to keep their options open. Apple's engineers are already experts at pulling the most out of the PowerPC architecture. Who is to say that if/when IBM get's there act in gear and releases a product based on these claims Apple won't say "Hey, we went Universal binary for a reason. We wanted to be able to use whichever fab is producing the best tech today!" We all know about how the party line might change over night and we are transitioning back.
The fact of the matter is that Apple is ready to run native on two hardware platforms. Their developers are on their way to having their code run native on two hardware platforms. I do also seem to remember some reference to the Playstation 3 not having a finalized OS at this point and that they could easily choose linux or Mac OS X. All that said maybe Apple is making a play for, gasp, both the home and the enterprise.
I don't believe that this will actually happen, but if any company knows, Apple knows that it is suicide to have all of your eggs in one basket.
There are no real surprises here. This is very similar to how they transitioned Photoshop and Illustrator to Mac OS X several years ago. My main hopes are that CS3 is not living half in two worlds like they did with Illustrator 10 and Photoshop 7.
On the bright side, if Adobe keeps up the status quo on Creative Suite 3 then we will see all of the Apps that ship in Creative Suite, ship together. Acrobat 5 was horrible on Mac OS X, the Acrobat application ran natively in OS X, but the distiller ran in Classic and suffered severe performance penalties as a result. Hopefully all of the apps tranistioning around the same time will leave a better taste in their customers mouths.
I am glad to see them attempting to show off their xCode developemtn prowess by delivering the LightRoom beta earlier than their other software packages.
I sent this e-mail to the author of the article. I think he missed the point.
John,
I think you are missing a few of the points of the phone. First off this is
not a phone built by Apple. This is a phone built by Motorola with some
software by Apple thrown in. This is not an iPod. This device is not as
cool as an iPod and a such was named otherwise. This was not to dilute the
iPod brand. However this is an expansion of the iTunes brand.
Previously you were only able to play FairPlay songs on either iTunes or an
iPod. This is the next major expansion of the iTunes brand. The first
major expansion was expanding iTunes to Windows. The second major expansion
was to build the online store. There were several evolutionary expansions
with more international stores but these were of lesser importance. The
ROKR is the expansion of iTunes and FairPlay to other devices. This is a
big deal for Apple to licensing out it's technology at all, even if it is a
partner. This is also a big deal for Motorola to be working with Apple
again after their previous licensing debacle.
At some point probably next year a new much bigger expansion of the iTunes
phone will probably happen, possibly to other device manufacturers that may
blow your mind.
On your other points. Do you really think that Cell phone users want to
download music at today's data rates for cellular networks. Unless you feel
like dropping $99/month for unlimited download access and whatever else the
cell phone companies would like per song to buy music. So let's look at the
breakdown of the money from the purchase of a song on iTunes. I think I
read that the labels get $0.71 per song leaving Apple with about $0.28 per
song. So now Cingular wants their share for using their network to get the
music. Over the internet you are already paying your share for your access
to the internet. You will end up paying to download music as well as paying
for your music. Whether it is your $20-40/month for broadband (you get the
other benefits of the internet as well) or the $1/song for Cingular to
download the track. Now let's add another $1 so each song and cost twice as
much. Let's see, do you work for Napster. Are you trying to help the
labels distribute the wealth to a number of online retailers that are not
being supported by the consumer. Think about how long it will take to
download that song at approximately the 90kbps that is at the upper edge of
the Cingular data networks' speed. On to your USB point, let's come back to
reality USB2 while more limited than firewire is certainly faster than any
Cellular network EDGE or otherwise.
Look at this device as it is meant to be. A first generation iTunes phone.
Their will be more. Their will be a lot of focus group research. And they
will figure things out. Look at this move as it is meant to be. Other
manufactures devices able to play FairPlay songs. Long for iTunes
convergence on other devices. Maybe not this year, but if it pulls in a 33%
margin Apple will sell it.
I personally am glad that Apple had the cajones to stand up to Cingular and
the other cellular networks and recognize that in the same way people don't
want to rent music, people also don't want to pay a retailer, wholesaler,
distributor, and producer of the music as well. Let's cut out all of the
middle-men.
Overall I agreed with much of your article, but I can't help but think you
missed the big picture.