sydneystephen's Profile

I'm not sure iTunes is about selling Macs - its perhaps fairer to say that it is just one of the ways Apple has to hook you into the Apple experience. iTunes is really about selling iPods, and now Apple TV, and even iPhone. But iTunes is also about selling music, at a profit - especially now with AAC tracks at a 30% premium... You could say that iTunes is Apple's content warrior. For some years now the IT world has been focused on content - Microsoft and others have been buying up all sorts of content providers with the view that owning the content meant owning the customer. Apple have approached this another way. They have become a retailer. iTunes is as much about retailing other people's content as the Apple stores are about retailing Apple's own stuff. So, instead of owning the content, Apple just delivers it. And in so doing Apple owns the market. It will be interesting to see if Apple can hold on to this market. But the iTunes store has such a huge market share in music, and is heading that way in TV and film, that it is probably nigh on impossible for anyone else to really get a competitive system off the ground. Look at Microsoft's problems with Zune - if Microsoft, with all that money, can't compete with the iTunes store then who can? In the meantime, the iPod halo effect is definitely working. I think that what most people have not realised is that consumers just don't change their PC's every 2-3 years. I was an early halo-effect-switcher, but it is only now that most of my friends are starting to switch to Mac. And they are - at a rate approaching 100%. I imagine Apple realise this. Mac growth is steady, even accelerating. And for Apple, the Mac is just one element (albeit a vital element) in a strategy which integrates the whole Apple experience. It doesn't matter how you engage with Apple - be it iPod, iTunes, Apple TV, Safari or Mac. In the end, Apple hope you will fully embrace the Apple approach. And you probably will.

Well you have to be optimistic, and you have to be in it for the long-term. As it so happens, Mac market share has finally got some oomph behind it and it seems it won't be long before Apple is in double digits... Of course, market share percentage is not the whole story. If you look at the personal user marketplace, Apple's market share has been rising rapidly. I am sure everyone has stories about friends who are buying a Mac for the first time, but here in Sydney, Mac fever is in full flight... Everyone, seemingly, is buying a Mac... When I first started reading this site 2 years ago, as an Apple newbie, most readers seemed oblivious to the trend. Now, with Apple's shareprice hitting new highs nearly every trading day, Applephiles are perhaps a bit more relaxed. Hats off to Steve for maintaining the faith. Its been a long hard road since 2002 - but, hey, its party time now! :-)

Ah yes. But you haven't experienced You Sychronise have you!! I synch a directory with all my documents, photos and other valuable bits to my servers so that they get backed up to tape. Yesterday, for no apparent reason, "You Sychronise" turned into "I delete" and deleted EVERY SINGLE F***ING FILE in my sych folder. All 3.4GB of it... Thankfully it realised its mistake and copied everything back down at 5pm - or started to... I saw it was copying in "the wrong direction" and cancelled it... Extra thankfully everything was in the trash. Every tried to restore 7,867 files from the trash? If Apple every want to get serious about corporate use of Macs they are going to have to provide tools to synch reliably to Windows servers. And if they havent got synch working to their own servers, that is truly a worry...

"I believe Apple has nothing to lose if it opens up Fairplay." Except the integrity of Fairplay. Lets face it, it wouldn't really make any difference to what people will buy. The iPod will still be the best seller it has been for years. But Apple will have a lot more difficulty maintaining the integrity of Fairplay. On at least one occasion, Apple had to do some fancy footwork to alter Fairplay when it was reverse-engineered. Easy to do if you control the whole kaboodle - much harder to do if you have to get 50 partners to re=engineer and then force download a firmware update to change the encryption algorithms. And why should they?

@Beeblebrox "Apple wraps ALL songs purchased in the iTunes store in DRM, even if the labels or artists don’t want them to or haven’t asked them to." Really? I would like to see examples of this with appropriate links for verification.

@WAWA Brilliant... I think... Or mad... Well, one or the other...

Damn. I use Indesign...