9 posts tagged “apple”
To follow up:
- With stories like this, I really really hope what Walt (I think) pointed out is right, and they announce a new iPod Touch in a month or two. After all, they did it with the original iPod Touch, announcing it in September after the iPhone came out in June. OTOH maybe “we fixed all the design bugs with the iPhone!” includes fixing the need for a phoneless iPod Touch.
- Jesse Gardner posted directions and an awesome icon for doing the Fluid menu extra thing with the iMT app for Movable Type. Nice! I found how to fix the icon problem I had by digging around inside a generated FluidInstance. You can also set whether the FluidInstance defaults to a regular SSB or a menu extra, which I was hoping to do to make a distributable FluidInstance for an iPhone app... but the developer asks that you not do that, which makes me rather less excited about Fluid when wearing my web app developer hat.
Jonathan Gitlin at Ars Technica's Infinite Loop mentions what I've been mulling since Monday: the iPod Touch is now a pretty bad deal. The price is higher but the TCO is lower... as long as you don't have a cell phone. I'm not so hot on the new AT&T deal, so I would definitely probably maybe order a 16 GB iPod Touch with GPS at $300. But $410, with no GPS? I hope there's another shoe to drop.
In other Mac news, I had ignored Fluid, but read about it today when I thought it was something else. The Menu Extra feature looks great for iPhone apps like Blog It.
Barry Ritholz elaborates on the recent WSJ article about Apple as tastemaker:
I cannot remember the last song that "broke" on the radio for me. I've actually discovered more music on Apple's commercials than I have on FM over the past 5 years. The Original iTunes commercial featured The Propellerhead's "Take California" (on Decksandrumsandrockandroll). It is funny to look at that original commercial, only a few years old now, and think back as to how groundbreaking the concept of "1000 songs, in your pocket" actually was; today, its a gimme.
In my neighborhood Randy pointed out there's an open letter from Steve Jobs on apple.com about the future of the iTunes Store's DRM. It's probably of interest to Emusic customers.
The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.
I have to admit that, if for some reason this came to pass, I would have to think hard about whether to continue with Emusic. The lack of DRM is a big draw for me.
You may have heard that Apple has dumped Justin Long, the guy who played the Mac to John Hodgman's PC in their tv ads. At long last, now you can see the new Mac ads that don't have Justin Long in them!
This was less entertaining when it crashed again on the same file.
So, after my bitching about Apple's decision to kill the iTunes 5 DRM loophole, I sold that gift code to somebody and upgraded to iTunes 7 with a new resolution not to buy music from the iTunes Store. (I needed iTunes 7 to update my Windows-formatted iPod.) The best way to start tilting at this windmill, I figured, was with a free trial at eMusic. I got 25 free mp3s on the trial, which was all this music:
plus "I Eat Cannibals," that 80s new wave song by Total Coelo; Of Montreal's "Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games" from The Sunlandic Twins (and the end of an episode of Weeds), which I'll probably buy the rest of; and a few samplers I downloaded for free. Now I've bought the most expensive monthly account they have, which is $20 for 90 downloads. After that I can buy "booster packs" of 10, 25, or 50 more songs at 50¢, 40¢, or 30¢ per song respectively.
So we'll see how long I can go without the iTunes Store. I intentionally didn't get an annual account, because I'm not sure how quickly I'll exhaust what I actually want to buy. (I'm the dude who thought, "Oh, I'll just get Netflix for a few months until I've seen everything I really want to see," too.) After eMusic there's also Warp Records' Bleep service, if I want to get much electronic music.
Glad I didn't use that $67 gift card from Coinstar yet. I guess I could wait and buy season 3 of Lost with it, but—anybody want to buy it?
