Thursday, February 8, 2007
News
Goldman Bumps Apple From Conviction Buy List
Goldman Sachs on Thursday dropped Apple from its Conviction Buy list, citing the potential for negative speculation in the months leadingup to the company's June iPhone launch.
Apple May Ax Next-Gen HDD iPod In Favor Of All-Flash Models
Apple may begin transitioning its flagship iPod models away from hard disk drive (HDD)-based storage and towards solid-state NAND flash memory by the end of year. According to an "IT Hardware" report from Prudential Equity Group analyst Jesse Tortora, the move would pave the way for smaller form factor players, a more diverse model mix, and improvements to both battery life and durability.
CEO Confirms "At Least Three" ARM Processors In iPhone
Warren East, president and chief executive officer of ARM Holdings plc, has confirmed that "at least three" processor cores developed at his company are present within the iPhone from Apple Inc.
Partners, Rivals React To Jobs' Anti-DRM Comments
The recording industry's trade group urged Apple to license its FairPlay DRM to other companies, while one of the iTunes Store's biggest rivals called the advent of DRM-free online music inevitable.
Bill Banning iPods In Crosswalks Slated For Albany
First it was cell phones in cars, then trans fats. Now, a new plan is on the table to ban gadget use while crossing city streets.
RIAA Misreads Jobs' Open Letter On DRM, Thinks He's Offering To License FairPlay
We already knew that the majors are totally in denial about this stuff, but to pretent that his letter (however motivated) was anything other than a broadside against DRM is silly.
Birthday Gift For MacBU
We were celebrating MacBU's 10th anniversary!
Apple: None Of Our Products Are Windows Vista Compatible
According to a document that Apple has posted on its web site, none of the software that it's made available for Windows environment has been updated for Vista compatibility. That includes not only iTunes, but QuickTime, Airport for Windows, Bonjour for Windows, iDisk utility and AppleWorks for Windows.
Opinion
Steve Jobs Likes To Repeat Himself
We thought it would be appropriate to remind ourselves of his glorious RDF moments of yore, and there didn't seem to be much of a better way to capture it all in a nutshell than this, um, repetitive video of his favorite RDF-inducing expressions.
Send Jobs, Music And Money
The Apple guru is right — let the music play unrestricted.
OS X Is The New Linux
I can't install OS X on my PC, so why should we expect Microsoft to allow the opposite?
Gil Amelio, Where Are You?
I still believe the idea of OpenDoc is sound. What's more, I think the idea is happening all around us, just in a very poor Greenspuns 10th law type of way.
Note To Self: Don't Tick Off Apple, iTunes Community
The inference i gain from iTunes' designation is that everything not purchased from iTunes would be not "purchased", i.e. "stolen."
The Cocoa Text Editor
What's with the cocoa text editor? Who designed it? A writer? I don't think so. A programmer, probably.
On The DRM Front
Apple is saying that it believes that the iPod and iTunes and the integration of the two is so superior that it is willing to compete on no other basis.
Apple Has Been Telling Its Own Story For Years
The company's (i.e. his) paranoid secrecy is specifically designed to hype those speeches, where most of Apple's real news is released.
Is Jobs Making Nice With Europe?
Jobs could simply be using a well-worn page from his playbook — look where the market is heading, and get ahead of it.
Apple Is Now A Media Company
To me the clear subtext of the Jobs piece is that Apple is today a media company. When the CEO goes direct to the people he wants to influence, without using other media to carry the story, something not too subtle has changed.
Sidetrack
As Steve Jobs explained clearly, DRM is never foolproof. The whole idea is to keep secrets — because if the encrypted data, the encryption algorithm, and the decryption key are all in the hands of the same party, namely the customers, there is really nothing stopping the customers from cracking the code.
That's why all DRMs will eventually be broken — whether you're talking about FairPlay or PlayForSure or Zune.
That's why the music industry's cry for an industry-wide DRM solution makes no sense at all technically. It can never work.
But there's a solution out, if the music industry truly believes in music portability across devices and companies. And that's GUIDs.
Each piece of music sold can be tracked by an identification code, or a certificate, that can be verified to be authentic. (I'm a bit hazy about details here, but I'm thinking if it works for SSL, it should work here too.) An iTunes certificate for a particular song, for example, will authentic that the song has been legally purchased from iTunes store. With this certificate, the customer can, for example, play the music on five different computers or iPods.
But what if one of the computer is a Zune, which, obviously, iTunes doesn't support? Well, all the customer need to do is present the certificate to the Zune store, and the Zune store will simply verify the certificate with the iTunes store. If everything works out, the customers can download another copy of the same song from the Zune store encoded in a different DRM, and have that piece of music playable on the Zune.
Ironing out the policy issues — such as how many devices is playable, the B2B interfaces and the matter of who pays for all that downloads — is not trivial, of course. But if portability is what the music industry is going after, they need not pursue an industry-wide DRM system.
(Of course, a DRM-free world is even better.)
Will this work technically? Or, even if this works technically, is this a bigger mess than what we already have today? Feedback at webmaster@myapplemenu.com.
