So? Why would Walmart place an order for 100,000 more units if they had tens of thousands sitting on shelves? They'll order more product that they can move, not just because they haven't ordered any in a while.
Let the retailers give away the shuffles. Who cares? They already paid Apple for them; they can do whatever they want.
Apple has sold 100 million iPods. That's the bottom line. Some of those were given away for free in raffles and contests. Some of those were bought by schools and given to students. Some of them are bundled with other products as a free bonus. Some of them were bought by credit card companies to give away as gifts for points. Some of them were bought by Peter Jackson to move around chunks of movies in a sneakernet, and not to play music. None of that makes the feat any less impressive.
Every product is given away in some numbers, from dish towels to cars. But it makes no difference since Apple already got paid for them.
SDTV is digital. "Standard definition" refers to ATSC broadcast in 480i, not to old analog broadcasts. Look it up. Your TV from 1993 is not an SDTV in the strictest sense.
Re:"Sold" probably includes them all
on
100 Million iPods
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· Score: 1, Informative
Warranty replacements aren't sales. You're right that they *could* be reported that way, but they're not. If Apple issues a press release saying that they've SOLD their 100 millionth iPod today, they mean that someone(s) have bought 100 million iPods for money. They really don't have any need to inflate the figure with a deceptive practice--this water mark would be reached within a few months anyway, and it's not like they need anything to drive sales.
If the press release had said that they'd SHIPPED their 100 millionth iPod, then I'd be more inclined to entertain the possibility that it included warranty replacements. Even if 1 in 10 iPods are replaced under warranty (a seriously exaggerated number for nearly any electronic product), they'll still sell 100 million units by year's end.
The whole point is that an incremental improvement is harder to sell than a dramatic one. Java menus, scratch resistance, and higher audio bitrates just don't give anyone that tingly feeling. Lots of audiophiles have spent thousands of dollars on sound systems just to get the most out of AC-3 as it is--the number of audiophiles who complain about Dolby/DTS tracks is small (again, except for poor mastering, which HD/BD does not and cannot solve), and everyone else certainly doesn't care. Higher resolution doesn't give you anything on small sets or SDTV displays, and the lack of compression artifacts again doesn't counter the bad transfers and some of the other problems with effects shots (think about the modern equivalents of black lines and the TIE fighter "blue box" effect).
Not one of my 300+ DVDs is scratched to the point of having any effect on playback, and most have no scratches whatsoever. I'm glad that they're developing better coatings, but it's not a special feature of HD/BD discs that was suddenly innovated.
If you really think that there's no difference between rabbit ears, VHS, and DVD on a traditional TV set, you're either too young to remember, being deceptive, or just have poor judgment. Unless you're talking about TVs from the 70s that are still magically in service, that's simply not true. I have a projection TV from 1992 that you can clearly see the difference in all formats to this day; older sets will have this distinction too, but that's the oldest I own.
HD/BD is an incremental improvement, and it should be selling far faster, since the target market is a "spendy" one and not the entire US customer base, and DVD already broke the precedent for repurchasing. Things are not going too well.
1080p is a little unreasonable. The file sizes would be massive, and few HDTV owners have sets that support it. I don't think 1080p is meant for online distribution. There's just not a big enough market to justify the cost.
You have to buy a computer and the adapter. Most people don't want to have to surrender their computer in order to watch video on their TV. Keep in mind that people don't have multiple recent computers lying around like most of us, and most of them don't care very much for fiddling with cables. Most people wouldn't put together a Myth box even if someone handed them the hardware for the same price as a Tivo. They just don't like dicking around, and they don't want loud computers in their living rooms.
All it takes is an (included) adapter and a couple cables to use your computer as a DVD player, but that doesn't mean people want to do it.
Why would anyone buy their TV shows again? Just keep a flipping DVD player around and watch them on that. It's not as though the magic of HD is going to do anything for the majority of TV shows on DVD.
Does anyone have pictures of this "horrible" video playing on a TV so people can actually make a judgment. When I played with one, the videos from the iTunes store exceeded my expectations (I was not blown away, but it was completely watchable). I assumed it would be like watching analog broadcast television on an old set, or running my LCD monitor in 800x600, but instead it looked like standard-definition (i.e. digital) broadcast. Obviously, iTunes needs to start selling higher quality content, but it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.
If Apple had brought higher-quality videos to market first, there'd be complaints that they didn't have any device capable of pumping it to an HDTV. Since they released the device first, we get to hear about how they're not providing the content.
Moreover, this man's not really an authority on anything. He seems to be under the impression that big, loud, high power consumption equates to "capable of playing HD content better," when this of course is bullshit. He worries that the small, silent machine and its high efficiency will somehow make it incapable of playing HD--but he didn't apparently bother downloading any of the dozens of *HD* trailers available right from Apple's flipping website to test that bogus hypothesis.
It also gave us so much more. Computer DVD-ROMs existed from the beginning, and portable (battery-powered) players appeared almost instantly (at outrageous prices initially, but still). We got amazing picture, no degradation with multiple plays, multiple languages/subtitles, special features and extras, interactive menus, scene selection, no need to rewind at the end, a pause button that would actually let you see the frame, and a much smaller physical medium. It also brought us 5.1 surround sound for the first time and crystal-clear picture for any television.
HD/BD gives us better picture (on large enough displays to see it) if we have HDTVs and the right connections. Whoop-de-damn-doo. The picture is pretty amazing if done properly (bad mastering still has artifacts and fuzziness), but come on. We don't have portable playing options (almost no computer playback or handheld devices), and there is zero advantage on a standard-definition set. The movies should have been introduced at the exact same price as DVDs. The player hardware's outrageous prices could recoup the R&D costs. All in all, I'm unimpressed, very much like Laserdisc.
I didn't say the format was a dead-end, and I certainly don't expect it to take off immediately. The problem is that it's at best an intermediate step between DVD and something substantially better. DVD is good enough, and the "next most awesome thing" will have arrived before everyone gets on the HD/BD bandwagon. Even when the price comes down, what do you really get? Better image quality, if you've got the right setup and connection types, and if you're watching on a display big enough for it to make a clear difference over progressive-scan DVDs. DVD brought us special features and language tracks, and picture and audio (5.1 in your home!) that was light years ahead of VHS on any television set and didn't degrade with frequent play. You could also take it with you in battery powered devices and play them on your computers from the beginning.
HD/BD gives us a better picture and possible connection headaches if HDCP takes hold. That's it, and it takes away the portable devices and computer playing (mostly). Remember that DVD as a format has been around for a decade, and at some point customers aren't going to replace their video collections every decade. I'm thinking that time is now, especially since they're not really giving us much in return for adopting this.
Absolutely DRM is irrelevant to customers, as long as it's seamless. Macrovision and FairPlay and the like work great. HDCP is a disaster, though, so DRM will matter to consumers to the extent that they won't have any idea whether their home theater setup will work, end-to-end. You need a compliant TV, receiver, and player with the proper connections all the way through with some of the DRM proposals involved here. That's definitely going to be a source of "what's wrong with my Bluray player?" for customers.
It's not the DRM, it's the fact that this is the most poorly executed mass-market DRM yet released.
It doesn't look like these titles are all so new that you'd be correct (and anyway, new releases nearly always have greater weekly sales than ones that have been around awhile). The real story here is in comparing the HD/BD sales to regular DVD sales--the low rate reported here would probably remain quite low.
Even if Wal-Mart isn't on the list, weekly sales of less than 1000 copies isn't good news for the next-generation titles (particularly because all the HD/BD discs I've seen tend to be the "money makers"--not box office flops). Lots of the movies do suck, but that never stopped people from buying them in massive quantities on DVD or VHS.
The more pressing problem is that no one really needs these discs. There are about 30 million HDTV sets, which is still a small fraction of all televisions in this country. Of those, most people think DVDs look good enough. Why buy an expensive player with wacky DRM schemes and maybe-HDCP and all kinds of other bogus crap, only to have to buy more expensive movies that are presently nowhere NEAR the quality difference that DVD had over VHS? I have an HDTV, and I've seen some amazing HD-DVD content, but I was an early adopter of DVD players and I'm just not doing it again for HD/BD players. It's someone else's turn to fund the birth of this industry.
Wake me when I can get the player for $100 and the disc gives me something better than "great high-definition video mastering" on one of my TVs. I can play my DVDs anywhere, and they mostly look pretty good with progressive scan. Maybe that whole "multiple camera angles" vaporware from DVD would be a good thing to include so I could have some fun with my movies.
No, it isn't. Your family pack does not contain Intel binaries. Therefore, the only way for you to get this software is to download it from the Internet, which places you in an act of illegal distribution if you torrent it, and in possession of unlicensed software even if you're not using a torrent.
There's no NEED to specify PowerPC in the license, because the license attached to the software is only applicable to that software--there IS NO Intel OS X available to license or to make the distinction. You could claim that your license to OS X does not specify which architecture (and you'd be correct), but when asked where you got unreleased software without its attached license agreement, you'd be stuck.
It will depend on what the license says when the Intel version is actually released for sale with the launch of 10.5.
There is no "+cost of OS" if you just download Windows, either. If you have one copy of OS X licensed and you're using, then there absolutely is a "+cost of OS" to getting a second copy if you're doing a true comparison over-the-table. Unfortunately, there's no way to buy a copy of the OS legitimately for the Intel platform.
That's why statutory laws don't say "distribute" alone. They say "distribution or offer for distribution." Manifest intent to commit a crime with tangible evidence (the equivalent of a signed letter stating that you intend to rob bank X on date Y with weapon Z) is more than enough for law enforcement to take action. If you're stopped before anyone gets hurt, you're still charged--the whole IDEA behind law enforcement is to intercept crimes, to punish crimes that have occurred despite those attempts, and to discourage the incentive to attempt those crimes in the first place by virtue of a good track record and a strong fist of justice.
The problem isn't the sample size, it's the sampling method. With the proper setup, you can get a pretty damn accurate study with 1500 people out of the US's 220something million adults. That's way less that 0.08 percent by about 3 orders of magnitude.
You're not making sense. It's not that people buy a computer they weren't planning to in order to get the OS for free, it's that they delay buying their (already planned) computer so that they get the OS for free.
If they're planning to spend $1500 on a computer and they know that a new OS is coming out in 2-3 months, many of them will wait until the OS is launched. That way, instead of spending $1629, they only spend their originally planned $1500.
Waiting for Leopard before buying (their first/another) Mac. Sales always level off in the months before a new Apple OS launch, at least since Panther. I know it's hard to imagine tangible anticipation of an OS, but there it is.
Well, Intel's next-generation CPU core is supposed to move the memory controller on-die and actually adopt a dedicated HyperTransport-style arrangement, rather than the frankenstein layout Intel currently uses. If that's true, I really hope that AMD has something special in the pipeline, because Intel will absolutely crush them in performance. (Note: I am a huge AMD fan, so that's saying something.)
Ahead by about $30, yeah. The Intel mainboard and the $1440 in processors really eat into that. If your arrangement is suitable for your purposes, that's great and an excellent price. But it's not the same machine as the Mac Pro.
You'd be surprised how much a Mac Pro case and power supply cost. That's all anodized aircraft-grade aluminum. About 50 pounds of it, crisply cut and tightly finished, with laser-cut perforated grilles. Needless embellishment, sure, but if you're trying to do an apt comparison, all factors must be considered.
As to why I'd prefer the 2x2 arrangement, it's due to extreme inefficiency in the way Intel cores communicate. There are also times when I am not using massively multithreaded applications, but I'm using a lot of them simultaneously. The 800MHz speed boost across four cores works best given the multicore affinity of OS X when running these applications. All told, the machine would be faster all around, and for major number crunching, the biggest practical speed loss is much closer to 10% than 40%...and 3 hours and 30 minutes vs. 3 hours and 45 minutes is not enough of a difference to give up 30% in single-threaded performance.
In related news, 5 cents is a 150% markup over 2 cents!
Seriously, a price increase of less than 50 cents on any product not bought in tremendous volumes is nothing to balk at, especially with inflation and the USD in the toilet.
It's not percentage of player models that matter, it's percentage of players sold. iPod has 80% of the units sold, and most phones, the Zune, and several other players support AAC. Revolutions take place at far lower majorities than 90%.
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So? Why would Walmart place an order for 100,000 more units if they had tens of thousands sitting on shelves? They'll order more product that they can move, not just because they haven't ordered any in a while.
Let the retailers give away the shuffles. Who cares? They already paid Apple for them; they can do whatever they want.
Apple has sold 100 million iPods. That's the bottom line. Some of those were given away for free in raffles and contests. Some of those were bought by schools and given to students. Some of them are bundled with other products as a free bonus. Some of them were bought by credit card companies to give away as gifts for points. Some of them were bought by Peter Jackson to move around chunks of movies in a sneakernet, and not to play music. None of that makes the feat any less impressive.
Every product is given away in some numbers, from dish towels to cars. But it makes no difference since Apple already got paid for them.
SDTV is digital. "Standard definition" refers to ATSC broadcast in 480i, not to old analog broadcasts. Look it up. Your TV from 1993 is not an SDTV in the strictest sense.
Warranty replacements aren't sales. You're right that they *could* be reported that way, but they're not. If Apple issues a press release saying that they've SOLD their 100 millionth iPod today, they mean that someone(s) have bought 100 million iPods for money. They really don't have any need to inflate the figure with a deceptive practice--this water mark would be reached within a few months anyway, and it's not like they need anything to drive sales.
If the press release had said that they'd SHIPPED their 100 millionth iPod, then I'd be more inclined to entertain the possibility that it included warranty replacements. Even if 1 in 10 iPods are replaced under warranty (a seriously exaggerated number for nearly any electronic product), they'll still sell 100 million units by year's end.
The whole point is that an incremental improvement is harder to sell than a dramatic one. Java menus, scratch resistance, and higher audio bitrates just don't give anyone that tingly feeling. Lots of audiophiles have spent thousands of dollars on sound systems just to get the most out of AC-3 as it is--the number of audiophiles who complain about Dolby/DTS tracks is small (again, except for poor mastering, which HD/BD does not and cannot solve), and everyone else certainly doesn't care. Higher resolution doesn't give you anything on small sets or SDTV displays, and the lack of compression artifacts again doesn't counter the bad transfers and some of the other problems with effects shots (think about the modern equivalents of black lines and the TIE fighter "blue box" effect).
Not one of my 300+ DVDs is scratched to the point of having any effect on playback, and most have no scratches whatsoever. I'm glad that they're developing better coatings, but it's not a special feature of HD/BD discs that was suddenly innovated.
If you really think that there's no difference between rabbit ears, VHS, and DVD on a traditional TV set, you're either too young to remember, being deceptive, or just have poor judgment. Unless you're talking about TVs from the 70s that are still magically in service, that's simply not true. I have a projection TV from 1992 that you can clearly see the difference in all formats to this day; older sets will have this distinction too, but that's the oldest I own.
HD/BD is an incremental improvement, and it should be selling far faster, since the target market is a "spendy" one and not the entire US customer base, and DVD already broke the precedent for repurchasing. Things are not going too well.
1080p is a little unreasonable. The file sizes would be massive, and few HDTV owners have sets that support it. I don't think 1080p is meant for online distribution. There's just not a big enough market to justify the cost.
You have to buy a computer and the adapter. Most people don't want to have to surrender their computer in order to watch video on their TV. Keep in mind that people don't have multiple recent computers lying around like most of us, and most of them don't care very much for fiddling with cables. Most people wouldn't put together a Myth box even if someone handed them the hardware for the same price as a Tivo. They just don't like dicking around, and they don't want loud computers in their living rooms.
All it takes is an (included) adapter and a couple cables to use your computer as a DVD player, but that doesn't mean people want to do it.
Why would anyone buy their TV shows again? Just keep a flipping DVD player around and watch them on that. It's not as though the magic of HD is going to do anything for the majority of TV shows on DVD.
Does anyone have pictures of this "horrible" video playing on a TV so people can actually make a judgment. When I played with one, the videos from the iTunes store exceeded my expectations (I was not blown away, but it was completely watchable). I assumed it would be like watching analog broadcast television on an old set, or running my LCD monitor in 800x600, but instead it looked like standard-definition (i.e. digital) broadcast. Obviously, iTunes needs to start selling higher quality content, but it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.
If Apple had brought higher-quality videos to market first, there'd be complaints that they didn't have any device capable of pumping it to an HDTV. Since they released the device first, we get to hear about how they're not providing the content.
Moreover, this man's not really an authority on anything. He seems to be under the impression that big, loud, high power consumption equates to "capable of playing HD content better," when this of course is bullshit. He worries that the small, silent machine and its high efficiency will somehow make it incapable of playing HD--but he didn't apparently bother downloading any of the dozens of *HD* trailers available right from Apple's flipping website to test that bogus hypothesis.
It also gave us so much more. Computer DVD-ROMs existed from the beginning, and portable (battery-powered) players appeared almost instantly (at outrageous prices initially, but still). We got amazing picture, no degradation with multiple plays, multiple languages/subtitles, special features and extras, interactive menus, scene selection, no need to rewind at the end, a pause button that would actually let you see the frame, and a much smaller physical medium. It also brought us 5.1 surround sound for the first time and crystal-clear picture for any television.
HD/BD gives us better picture (on large enough displays to see it) if we have HDTVs and the right connections. Whoop-de-damn-doo. The picture is pretty amazing if done properly (bad mastering still has artifacts and fuzziness), but come on. We don't have portable playing options (almost no computer playback or handheld devices), and there is zero advantage on a standard-definition set. The movies should have been introduced at the exact same price as DVDs. The player hardware's outrageous prices could recoup the R&D costs. All in all, I'm unimpressed, very much like Laserdisc.
I didn't say the format was a dead-end, and I certainly don't expect it to take off immediately. The problem is that it's at best an intermediate step between DVD and something substantially better. DVD is good enough, and the "next most awesome thing" will have arrived before everyone gets on the HD/BD bandwagon. Even when the price comes down, what do you really get? Better image quality, if you've got the right setup and connection types, and if you're watching on a display big enough for it to make a clear difference over progressive-scan DVDs. DVD brought us special features and language tracks, and picture and audio (5.1 in your home!) that was light years ahead of VHS on any television set and didn't degrade with frequent play. You could also take it with you in battery powered devices and play them on your computers from the beginning.
HD/BD gives us a better picture and possible connection headaches if HDCP takes hold. That's it, and it takes away the portable devices and computer playing (mostly). Remember that DVD as a format has been around for a decade, and at some point customers aren't going to replace their video collections every decade. I'm thinking that time is now, especially since they're not really giving us much in return for adopting this.
Absolutely DRM is irrelevant to customers, as long as it's seamless. Macrovision and FairPlay and the like work great. HDCP is a disaster, though, so DRM will matter to consumers to the extent that they won't have any idea whether their home theater setup will work, end-to-end. You need a compliant TV, receiver, and player with the proper connections all the way through with some of the DRM proposals involved here. That's definitely going to be a source of "what's wrong with my Bluray player?" for customers.
It's not the DRM, it's the fact that this is the most poorly executed mass-market DRM yet released.
It doesn't look like these titles are all so new that you'd be correct (and anyway, new releases nearly always have greater weekly sales than ones that have been around awhile). The real story here is in comparing the HD/BD sales to regular DVD sales--the low rate reported here would probably remain quite low.
Even if Wal-Mart isn't on the list, weekly sales of less than 1000 copies isn't good news for the next-generation titles (particularly because all the HD/BD discs I've seen tend to be the "money makers"--not box office flops). Lots of the movies do suck, but that never stopped people from buying them in massive quantities on DVD or VHS.
The more pressing problem is that no one really needs these discs. There are about 30 million HDTV sets, which is still a small fraction of all televisions in this country. Of those, most people think DVDs look good enough. Why buy an expensive player with wacky DRM schemes and maybe-HDCP and all kinds of other bogus crap, only to have to buy more expensive movies that are presently nowhere NEAR the quality difference that DVD had over VHS? I have an HDTV, and I've seen some amazing HD-DVD content, but I was an early adopter of DVD players and I'm just not doing it again for HD/BD players. It's someone else's turn to fund the birth of this industry.
Wake me when I can get the player for $100 and the disc gives me something better than "great high-definition video mastering" on one of my TVs. I can play my DVDs anywhere, and they mostly look pretty good with progressive scan. Maybe that whole "multiple camera angles" vaporware from DVD would be a good thing to include so I could have some fun with my movies.
No, it isn't. Your family pack does not contain Intel binaries. Therefore, the only way for you to get this software is to download it from the Internet, which places you in an act of illegal distribution if you torrent it, and in possession of unlicensed software even if you're not using a torrent.
There's no NEED to specify PowerPC in the license, because the license attached to the software is only applicable to that software--there IS NO Intel OS X available to license or to make the distinction. You could claim that your license to OS X does not specify which architecture (and you'd be correct), but when asked where you got unreleased software without its attached license agreement, you'd be stuck.
It will depend on what the license says when the Intel version is actually released for sale with the launch of 10.5.
There is no "+cost of OS" if you just download Windows, either. If you have one copy of OS X licensed and you're using, then there absolutely is a "+cost of OS" to getting a second copy if you're doing a true comparison over-the-table. Unfortunately, there's no way to buy a copy of the OS legitimately for the Intel platform.
That's why statutory laws don't say "distribute" alone. They say "distribution or offer for distribution." Manifest intent to commit a crime with tangible evidence (the equivalent of a signed letter stating that you intend to rob bank X on date Y with weapon Z) is more than enough for law enforcement to take action. If you're stopped before anyone gets hurt, you're still charged--the whole IDEA behind law enforcement is to intercept crimes, to punish crimes that have occurred despite those attempts, and to discourage the incentive to attempt those crimes in the first place by virtue of a good track record and a strong fist of justice.
The problem isn't the sample size, it's the sampling method. With the proper setup, you can get a pretty damn accurate study with 1500 people out of the US's 220something million adults. That's way less that 0.08 percent by about 3 orders of magnitude.
I don't think he was talking about SALES...
You're not making sense. It's not that people buy a computer they weren't planning to in order to get the OS for free, it's that they delay buying their (already planned) computer so that they get the OS for free.
If they're planning to spend $1500 on a computer and they know that a new OS is coming out in 2-3 months, many of them will wait until the OS is launched. That way, instead of spending $1629, they only spend their originally planned $1500.
Waiting for Leopard before buying (their first/another) Mac. Sales always level off in the months before a new Apple OS launch, at least since Panther. I know it's hard to imagine tangible anticipation of an OS, but there it is.
Well, Intel's next-generation CPU core is supposed to move the memory controller on-die and actually adopt a dedicated HyperTransport-style arrangement, rather than the frankenstein layout Intel currently uses. If that's true, I really hope that AMD has something special in the pipeline, because Intel will absolutely crush them in performance. (Note: I am a huge AMD fan, so that's saying something.)
Ahead by about $30, yeah. The Intel mainboard and the $1440 in processors really eat into that. If your arrangement is suitable for your purposes, that's great and an excellent price. But it's not the same machine as the Mac Pro.
You'd be surprised how much a Mac Pro case and power supply cost. That's all anodized aircraft-grade aluminum. About 50 pounds of it, crisply cut and tightly finished, with laser-cut perforated grilles. Needless embellishment, sure, but if you're trying to do an apt comparison, all factors must be considered.
As to why I'd prefer the 2x2 arrangement, it's due to extreme inefficiency in the way Intel cores communicate. There are also times when I am not using massively multithreaded applications, but I'm using a lot of them simultaneously. The 800MHz speed boost across four cores works best given the multicore affinity of OS X when running these applications. All told, the machine would be faster all around, and for major number crunching, the biggest practical speed loss is much closer to 10% than 40%...and 3 hours and 30 minutes vs. 3 hours and 45 minutes is not enough of a difference to give up 30% in single-threaded performance.
*nor.
In related news, 5 cents is a 150% markup over 2 cents!
Seriously, a price increase of less than 50 cents on any product not bought in tremendous volumes is nothing to balk at, especially with inflation and the USD in the toilet.
It's not percentage of player models that matter, it's percentage of players sold. iPod has 80% of the units sold, and most phones, the Zune, and several other players support AAC. Revolutions take place at far lower majorities than 90%.
Closer to 90%, but you're right (Sandisk players have an 8% global market share alone, and most of them don't play AAC).