Apple: Upgrade or else!
p2pnet.net News Opinion:- Music fans with a particular interest in the pomp-rock experimentation of U2, one of those bands who formed the background to my early adulthood without ever persuading me that I wanted to purchase any of their albums, are salivating at the news that Bono and The Edge will be appearing with Apple’s Steve Jobs at a PR event in California on October 26.
The latest rumour to reach me, via my ultrawired friend Simon, is that we will be able to purchase a special edition black iPod preloaded with some of the band’s back catalogue and their newest album. Presumably the black buttons on the case will light up black to show they’ve been pressed, for that ultra-cool look.
Other rumours range from a colour-screen iPod that can show photos, to a low-cost version using flash memory instead of an expensive hard drive.
It’s all clear evidence that Apple can feel the competition breathing down their neck.
Dell, Archos, Sony and many others are coming up with devices that can match the iPod’s performance and looks, but have better battery life and support a wider range of music file formats.
And iRiver continues to appeal to the open source community, with support for Ogg Vorbis and more flexibility. They constantly surprise me with the imagination that goes into their products. If I hadn’t already bought my shiny toy from Apple, I’d be shopping for one of their high-end players by now.
But I do like my iPod.
I like it because it is a well-designed, functional piece of technology that has given me access to my entire music collection whenever I want it, with a simple user interface and good sound quality.
I like it because it lets me listen to Evanescence as I write this on the train – my daughter introduced me to the band but the iPod has given me the chance to listen to them a lot, and discover how good they are.
The other day I was humming an old pop song as I walked to a meeting, and I found to my delight that I had inadvertently copied it as part of a greatest hits compilation, a form of serendipity that I’ve named ‘serenpodity’. (It was, I’m embarrassed to admit, ‘Baby I Don’t Care’ by Transvision Vamp).
Yet there are signs that Apple may be in the process of doing the same sort of damage to its reputation and market share with the iPod and iTunes Music Store as it did with the Apple II and Mac back in the 1980’s when it refused to license its technology and left the field open for the IBM PC and Microsoft to take over.
US users of iTunes software who connect to the music store are being told that they must upgrade to the latest version, 4.6, or they will no longer be able to buy songs. And newer versions of both the software and of the music store service are expected imminently.
This sort of forced upgrade is not in itself a problem. New functions require new software, and sometimes it doesn’t make sense to support old versions. MSN Messenger, for example, was upgraded earlier this year to fix a raft of security holes.
If the new iTunes offers improved usability and new options then that would be great. But in the past Apple has ‘upgraded’ iTunes in order to make the system work less well, limiting the number of times a playlist can be burned to CD, or restricting what can be done with copy-protected files.
Far from offering a better service to users, these changes were made to keep the record companies happy, reflecting the music business creed that everyone who listens to recorded music is a potential thief who has to be stopped.
Yet unsigned bands like The Burns Unit seem to have realised that making their music freely available is a way to build a following and even generate CD sales.
It seems very likely that one of the changes that will be made in the new version of iTunes will stop files that have been bought from Real’s Harmony service from playing.
Real caused a stir back in July when they announced that you could buy copy-protected files from them and convert them to Apples’s Fairplay digital rights management system so that iTunes would recognise them.
Apple threatened legal action, but went quiet when it was pointed out that adding digital rights management isn’t actually a breach of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They then threatened to take their ball away by changing iTunes and the iPod software so that it no longer worked with Harmony, and it looks like they’ll use next week’s forced update to do this.
The only possible reason for Apple to break Harmony is to damage the competition and stop iPod users from having a service that they might find useful. There are, as far as I can see, no technical reasons for this – it is just about damaging the user experience in order to hold on to a market advantage.
When Microsoft do this sort of stuff with Web browsers they get roundly criticised for seeking to lock in their customers and remove freedom of choice. Apple deserves to be criticised on exactly the same grounds.
It won’t affect me, as I don’t buy DRM-protected music from anywhere, preferring low-cost CDs that I can copy myself, but Apple’s anti-competitive behaviour is bad for the market, bad for the future of digital music and – I suspect – bad for Apple too. Maybe The Edge can have a word with Steve Jobs.
Bill Thompson – andfinally.com
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See:-
The Burns Unit – sample clips
October 30th, 2004 at 8:30 pm
Let me ask you a question. When you’ve copied music to your iPod, can you copy it off again back to your PC/Mac?
Bceause every other portable MP3 music player can do this. IN fact most of the newer ones look like a USB hard drive so it’s as easy as drag n drop and doesn’t require any device drivers.
So you might want to ask why the 4.7 iTunes upgrade disables iPod Download, a popular plugin that does exactly that.
http://www.engadget.com/entry/4071088231142865/
October 31st, 2004 at 12:06 am
I think people are seeing this from the wrong point of view. Many people critizize about apple not give the end user a “choice”. People do have a choice, they can not buy an ipod, and not use itoons. Simple.
November 2nd, 2004 at 12:01 am
Are you really asking this question or are you totally out of the touch? This is all a part of the FairPlay DRM and it was a condition of the record companies long ago when Apple was the first to get all of them to agree to a standard set of user rights. The fear was the iPod would become a tool to trade music. Now really all Apple did was make the music folder invisible which is why there are, and will continue to be, utilities that can take the songs off the iPod. However all you need to do is attach your iPod to an authorized computer and drag your music from the iPod library to the computer’s iTunes library. It WILL copy them. Of course iTunes does not hide the music so once there you can do what you want. As for some plug-in that now fails…well…ok? So?