apple news/media reports
05/09/2005, 8:35am, EDT
Monday, May 9th
iPod clones, iTunes Video Store coming?
Industry pundit Robert Cringely says desite the success of the iPod, Apple's future is in the iTunes Music Store and perhaps an iTunes Video Store: "The Year of HD is dependent on 10.4 and its H.264 video codec that I believe will be at the heart of an Apple HD video download service to be announced shortly... Ultimately, what Apple wants to do is make its money through iTunes, where the profit margins are better in the long term and the system is easily scalable. It was necessary to create the iPod platform to make this happen. But downward price pressures will eventually hurt iPod profit margins and affect Apple's stock price, so the trick is to know when to switch the business from being a mix of hardware and software to one that is software-only. That switch, which I believe to be inevitable, will happen shortly after Apple begins to license iPod clones."
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Because they suck at making computers. They don't market them. They don't make them to sell in quantity (i.e. cheap), they don't make them to fill more than niche markets (and then overprice them for those markets). The only computer Apple sells that I would call a 'switchers' computer is the mini, because it let's you bring your own monitor, and its fairly cheap. Its also fairly underpowered (its cheap, what do you expect), which isn't going to draw rave reviews for its performance (yeah, I know, who cares, it looks nice, and it'll be a great media-center hub, once you add another $500-$1000 worth of software/hardware). They have the lovely stupid habit of crippling their low and mid-range computers to force people who need a specific feature to buy high-end. Is there any reason that dual-monitor support is disabled in the iMac or iBook other than for Apple to say "Hey, that's a pro feature, you need to spend another $500 and get a Powerbook instead, who cares if there's nothing else in the powerbook you want"? No (esp. since there's a hack that gets it to work, in most cases). Have you ever heard of a PC manufacturer doing something like this? Do you think Dell would put a motherboard in their 3000 line that had an AGP slot, but screwing up the BIOS to disable it, telling customers "You want a replaceable graphics card, you need to buy at least this." (sure, they sell computers without the AGP slot, but cheap mobo in a cheap computer, you expect that. Apple's video cards support the feature, its just being disabled).
BTW, Tiger reportedly adds support (if you're monitor and card can handle it) to rotate your monitors. People are claiming this is great. Me, I see it as an accident, that Apple didn't realize the feature was in the drivers, and that 10.4.1 will disable this feature. They've never liked people computing in any way they don't envision.
BTW, Tiger reportedly adds support (if you're monitor and card can handle it) to rotate your monitors. People are claiming this is great. Me, I see it as an accident, that Apple didn't realize the feature was in the drivers, and that 10.4.1 will disable this feature. They've never liked people computing in any way they don't envision.
Why do people like you even read this board?
it would be nice to be able to download missed episodes of TV shows, such as LOST or Battlestar Galatica, etc. Folks I've spoken with use something called Bit Torent to do that now.
Greetings
Thomas