Apparently Apple has started inserting cryptographic checksums in the DB of music stored on iPods. This breaks 3rd party software for managing your iPod music library, tying the iPod to iTunes.
I’m sure there are a lot of bad reasons for implementing this, like keeping people from creating applications that let people share music directly between WiFi enabled iPod’s and iPhones.
I use iTunes, I own Apple stock, but really, this is complete customer hostile crap. Screw them.
Yesterday Apple announced a major update across the iPhone line, as well as big price-cuts to the iPhone. It’s interesting to consider what this means for the future of the iPhone.
Briefly, for context, the Shuffle gets more colors, the Nano gets a bigger screen and video playback, the hard disk iPod’s get even more capacity, and the iPod touch is a lot like the iPhone without the phone for $100 less. These updates are relatively uncontroversial, other than, perhaps, the fact that there isn’t a hard disk based iPod with a large touch screen for all the video you can cram on it.
What is controversial is that Apple also cut the price on the iPhones by $200, which makes the 8gb model a $399 item, and drops the 4gb to $299 while supplies last. This is, of course, great news for anyone who wants an iPhone. It is rather upsetting though to some of those who already have an iPhone to have the price on their shiny new toy drop so much so soon. There has been a lot of huffy complaining in online forums. Meanwhile, people who bought their iPhone recently are able to get credits under Apple’s 14 day price protection. Some early adopters also report success getting full or partial credits for the price difference, though many others have not.
I think it is unfortunate that Apple didn’t better anticipate the upset this move caused wasn’t better prepared to assuage unhappy early adopters. Offering a $200 credit towards Apple merchandise up front would have been a brilliant move that would have a positive ripple effect across all of Apple’s product lines. The true Apple faithful would be excited to have $200 to spend on more Apple stuff. PC users would have strong inducement to further explore their newfound taste for Apple products by picking up a new iPod for their spouse or significant other, or perhaps a new Mac for themselves. In the end, the hit on Apple’s revenues would be minimal, especially since they are taking revenue from the iPhone over 8 quarters.
Apple also announced that they’d be selling iPhone ringtones through the iTunes store. They will run $0.99 on top of the $0.99 to buy the track in the first place and you’ll be able to select which portion of the track you want for your ringtone. It is, of course, outrageous that we are expected to pay extra for a track that we’ve already purchased to use it as a ringtone, but it is even more outrageous to pay $2 for a ringtone and not get the whole track.
Now though, lets step back and look at the whole landscape and what the implications might be.
By dropping the iPhone $200 and phasing out the 4GB model, Apple has clearly made room for at least one more product in the iPhone product line.
I expect pretty much everything, except the 3G iPhone and the Bluetooth networking, would happen in plenty of time for the Christmas buying season. I’d guess they’ll be metered out over the next two months or so to keep the iPhone and Apple in the news. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw some sort of integration with the AppleTV soon either.
I’m worried though, that if Apple moves to start selling apps for the iPhone, that they will start deliberately making life difficult for the authors of 3rd party apps being developed now without official support from Apple.
I’ve been trying to find a way to stream video to my iphone without much luck.
TVersity, which transcodes on the fly, is pretty cool. It looked like a great option except it doesnt seem to do things quite right. Plus, the iphone compatible web interface is ugly and clunky (they have a slick flash UI for regular browsers). Safari says the file is too big, even though tversity offers to byte-serve it.
I also tried using apache with some existing mpeg4 files, but even after telling apache to return the “ranges accepted” header and adding the appropriate mime-type it choked, giving an unhappy icon to replace the initial QuickTime icon without showing any video. I’m not convinced that I did everything needed to configure apache to byteserve. The documentation isn’t any help, and my googling wasn’t very successful.
Apple announced today that they’ll start selling tracks on the iTunes Music Store without DRM. As an added bonus, those tracks will be 256kbps, rather than the 128kbps currently offered. This should make a big difference in quality. 128kbps AAC isn’t quite good enough, in my opinion, 256kbps is just about right.
Doing so also establishes 256kbps is the new quality standard. It’ll be interesting to see if the make 256kbps the default for ripping CDs with iTunes. If they do, it’ll speed up the growth in storage required by people’s music collections, which will mean it’ll be time for an iPod upgrade sooner.
Over a year ago, “Downhill Battle”:http://www.downhillbattle.org/ did a little math on some numbers from some Apple press releases and came to the conclusion that there have been an average of 21 songs sold on the iTunes Music Store for every iPod sold. It’s a striking statistic that’s been getting a lot of attention after “Boing Boing linked to it”:http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/14/21_itunes_sold_per_i.html yesterday.
What’s getting lost in the retelling is that the data is over a year old. Boing Boing includes the full dateline on the quote in their post, but “other people”:http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/1442 aren’t being careful about including the year, making it look like the data is recent. I have to wonder if they are even aware that this news isn’t really news.
Other’s picked up on things and note that the current numbers (now that more than 16M iPods have been sold) are more like “31 songs per iPod”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/online/archives/2005/06/15/where_does_the_music_come_from.html.
I think it’s also important to keep in mind that 13M of those iPod’s are less than a year old and so the owners haven’t had that much time to accumulate songs from iTMS. Broad averages don’t necessarily tell you much about a dynamic and varied population.
That said, I’ve had my iPod about 18 months, and I have 47 songs i”ve purchased from iTMS. In that time, i’ve probably purchased 2-4x more tracks on CD. There are a couple reasons for this. First off, i’m not entirely satisfied with 128kbps AAC tracks. Lately I’ve been ripping at 160kbps. Secondly, the discount for buying via iTunes isn’t quite enough to make me feel good about being stuck with a compressed copy of the song and, on a related note, I don’t feel the loss in flexibility that comes with DRM is compensated by the discounted iTMS rate in many cases. Basically, if I just want one or two tracks off an album, I’ll buy off iTMS, but if I think I want most of the album, I put up with the added expense and hassle of buying a CD from a local store or online retailer.
This is kind of wacky.
bq. “Mac OS Rumors :: The Original Mac Rumor Site”:http://www.macosrumors.com/20050523B.php
Because cellular network carriers have essentially all of the power in the equation, _Apple has been exploring the possibility of becoming one itself *by erecting towers at or near its retail store locations* and making an alliance with one or more carriers to “piggyback” on their networks._
p. Errecting towers at or near its retail store locations? What kind of crazy idea is that? If they were Starbucks, that might actually provide reasonable coverage, but even the Mac faithful are going to have a problem limiting their mobile calling to the tiny number of Apple Stores within the US.
On the other hand, Apple becoming a virtual carrier, reselling service on other networks makes a lot of sense, at least from the point of view of bootstrapping iPod phones and mobile sales from the iTunes Music Store without giving the carriers an exhorbitant cut.
Of course, if having some towers put Apple in a better negotiating position with respect to renting infrastructure from the major carriers, then that would makes sense
It will be interesting to see what happens.