Actually, it’s surprising that it made it onto the store in the first place. I think that was either one of two things: a slip-up in Apple’s review process (which would be a bad sign) or (more likely) a PR move. The PR move plays out like this: Unless they…
Well, you know how the saying goes.
So, I’ve decided to take a hiatus from posting anything negative about Apple for a while, either here or anywhere else.
I’m thinking six months is a good start.
A lot of people know that I’m not too fond of Apple as a company. I’ll often joke about it with a lot of my friends who are Apple fans, but I’ll occasionally get a question from someone I know who isn’t quite familiar with why I can be so down on them sometimes, and I usually do not have a short, simple answer for them that’s easy to understand [other than "Apple hates freedom", but even that requires a lot more explanation for most people 
].
For right now, I think I’ll just point them to this recent article by Mark Pilgrim, which neatly summarizes most of what I don’t like about how Apple operates.
I don’t understand this continuing obsession with buying things that you need to break before they do what you want. It’s not just the iPhone; people did the exact same thing with the AppleTV too. Primarily to add support for other video codecs, like DivX and XviD. Why? [...] I thought the big draw for Apple hardware was that “It Just Works.” By breaking it, you must know you’re giving up the “Just Works” factor, so what’s left? Rounded corners?
My current theory is that it’s some twisted form of wish fulfillment. “I wish this company understood the value of openness, but they don’t, so I’m going to keep buying their closed, crippled shit until they get it.” Yeah, let me know how that works out for you. And while you were waiting breathlessly for them to “get it,” Apple locked out third-party videos. And third-party hardware. And third-party ringtones, applications, and carriers.
ProsperityOpenness is just around the corner!
There’s certainly been a lot of coverage on Apple’s recent announcement of bringing Safari to Windows.
A lot of hype has been thrown around on both sides, but the most useful / interesting thing so far is the widespread discussion and analysis of the differences in font rendering between the Mac and Windows platforms.
I did just come across an interesting post from John Lilly of Mozilla, who (understandably) caught a particularly insidious detail that most people have overlooked so far in Steve’s presentation. Read the article in the link above, but here’s a short summary:
What’s wrong with the before / after pictures Steve presents?
If it was a simple mistake, it seems unlikely that it wouldn’t have been caught for such a high profile presentation, but obviously it’s even worse if that’s really how they’re hoping it goes.
I think it’s a good idea, and I applaud Apple for doing it.
It’s always good to have more options / competition to keep the quality level up all around, even now when browsers are probably the best they’ve ever been in many respects.
I do wonder how they’ll get convince people (the “average user”) to download and use it, though; perhaps they will bundle it with iTunes like they did with Quicktime.
Great article from the NY Times pointing out Apple’s blatant hypocrisy regarding Steve’s recently published letter outlining his supposed stance that they only use DRM on the iTunes store because the record companies make them.
Some excerpts:
Apple pretends that the decision to use copy protection is out of its hands. In defending itself against Ms. Tucker’s lawsuit, Apple’s lawyers noted in passing that digital-rights-management software is required by the major record companies as a condition of permitting their music to be sold online: “Without D.R.M., legal online music stores would not exist.�
In other words, however irksome customers may find the limitations imposed by copy protection, the fault is the music companies’, not Apple’s.
This claim requires willful blindness to the presence of online music stores that eschew copy protection. For example, one online store, eMusic, offers two million tracks from independent labels that represent about 30 percent of worldwide music sales.
Among the artists who can be found at eMusic are Barenaked Ladies, Sarah McLachlan and Avril Lavigne, who are represented by Nettwerk Music Group, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. All Nettwerk releases are available at eMusic without copy protection.
But when the same tracks are sold by the iTunes Music Store, Apple insists on attaching FairPlay copy protection that limits their use to only one portable player, the iPod. Terry McBride, Nettwerk’s chief executive, said that the artists initially required Apple to use copy protection, but that this was no longer the case. At this point, he said, copy protection serves only Apple’s interests.
Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, agreed, saying copy protection “just locks people into Apple.� He said he had recently asked Apple when the company would remove copy protection and was told, “We see no need to do so.�
Apple’s statement is a detailed treatise on the subject, compared with what I received when I asked the company last week whether it would offer tracks without copy protection if the publisher did not insist on it: the Apple spokesman took my query and never got back to me.
I’ve heard other stories like this as well. So, Steve, if you’d really like to sell DRM free music on the iTunes store, why aren’t you already doing it? There are lots of artists out there who aren’t under the thumb of the “big four” oppressive record labels, who would love to do it, and have tried and been denied.
I knew that this was coming, but I never figured Bob Dylan would be a part of it.
Of course, I doubt Bob himself even knows much about it. It’s much more likely due to his record label (Columbia), which is owned by Sony.
After all, anyone remotely interested in tech news recently knows the lengths Sony is willing to go to enforce copy protection schemes, and now it sounds like they’ve found a willing partner in Apple, who will go above and beyond copy protection, helping to provide lock-in support, like we’ve talked about before.
After our recent conversation about one of the aspects I don’t like about Apple over on Dan’s blog, I just happened to listen to a recent episode of the Geek Nights podcast on which they discuss their recent (but short lived) switch to a Mac (and Garage Band) for their podcasting duties.
These guys do multiple shows per week, and until this point had been using Audacity and Rezound with Linux. They had heard so many good things about how podcasting (and audio recording in general) is so much better on the Mac that they bought one, and that episode is a recounting of some of their experiences. To be honest (even though I give Apple a hard time a lot) I never suspected that there were so many big problems, of the nature that they ran into. I’d urge you to listen to the show, and (especially if you’re a Mac person, you know who you guys are), comment here and tell me if anything was wrong, or if they were just missing something on some issues, etc.
After hearing this, I was prompted to do some searching, and found a couple very recent entries from pretty knowledgeable people who (until now) were die-hard Mac advocates (Cory Doctorow and Mark Pilgrim) explaining on their blogs why they are making the move away from Apple and to Linux.
At least this gives me comfort in knowing that my anti-Apple tendencies do not make me crazy…
From Creative Labs’ ZENCast site:
Podcasts, short for Personal On Demand broadCast, are audio files you can download into any MP3 player or computer.
While I don’t necessarily like the term “podcast” because it is kind of associated with iPods, I’m not going to try to redefine it when it’s obvious to everyone where the term comes from.
*Note: for those who don’t know, Creative Labs makes competing portable media players to Apple, like the recent ZEN release.