Data Circle

iRack (including bloopers) – hilarious satire sending up both Apple product announcements and the American Administration’s attitude to the war in Iraq.

In a move which has surprised many people within the music and IT industries, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has launched an attack on record companies which insist on including DRM software on their music downloads offered through services such as iTunes. It’s interesting to see the dominant player in the music download market (a statistic that Apple likes to boast about at every opportunity) coming out so strongly against DRM, because usually it’s the smaller players who complain about any practice which they see as anti-competitive.

So why would Apple want to remove this restriction on music sold through its online store? First of all, it would make it much easier to play songs purchased from iTunes on devices other than iPods, which could significantly extend the number of potential customers for Apple. DRM may also put many people off buying music online and its removal could lead to faster growth in digital music sales, a situation which Apple, as the major player in the market, would be well poised to take advantage of. Finally, it would save Apple the significant costs that are currently involved in updating the protection each time some wiley geek manages to crack it.

One of the reasons why I don’t purchase music from iTunes is because of the DRM that comes with it—I believe that you should have the right to play music on any device you want (obviously in a private context such as on an MP3 player or your home stereo system) once you’ve purchased it in one format. If DRM protection was dropped then I’d be much more inclined to go online to get my music, particularly because I often only like a few songs on a CD so buying a whole album is an expensive way to acquire music.

Further coverage

• Apple seeks online music shake-up
• Apple boss calls for end to music download restrictions
• Will Apple pick music’s digital locks?

Apple has finally released some adverts targetted at a UK audience, so hopefully some of us will actually be able to recognise the actors in them. I particularly like the pie chart video, but all the adverts are good at getting Apple’s message across. I’m not sure how effective they will be at converting users from PCs to Macs because a lot of people have significant amounts of money, time and effort invested in the PC platform and won’t necessarily switch to another platform just because it’s perceived as being a little bit more reliable.

One thing I have noticed is how Apple equates PCs with Windows, and therefore all the problems that they relate with the PC platform are actually issues with Windows software and not with the hardware. I know that this doesn’t really matter to most people because the vast majority of PCs run Windows in some form, but it annoys me a little bit that Apple implies that all PCs are unreliable because of the software that a lot of the machines run. They can hardly claim no knowledge of *nix given that they are always showing off how OS X is based on BSD. I suppose that if they mentioned Windows by name in the adverts then Microsoft might have their lawyers breathing down Steve Jobs’ turtleneck, although I doubt that would worry Apple too much.

You can watch all the videos at Get a Mac on Apple’s web site.

New Mac ads poke fun at Windows at Niall Kennedy’s Weblog

I think the new Apple Get a Mac campaign is rather amusing. They include a variety of television advertisements featuring a guy in a suit (representing Windows) and someone in casual dress who is presumably meant to show that Macs are “cool”, highlighting issues such as the number of viruses that affect Windows as opposed to OS X. It’s all clearly Windows-bashing on Apple’s part, but a good laugh nevertheless.

Triple Boot on MacBooks Working at Slashdot

The OnMac.net chaps, who shot to fame recently by getting Windows XP to boot on the new Intel Macs, have managed to get triple booting working via BootCamp. In other words, you can now install OS X, Windows XP and Gentoo Linux (other distributions may work, but Gentoo is the one used in the wiki article) on your MacBook and switch between them. At the moment you have to use the NT bootloader to actually boot Linux, but it’s an interesting achievement nevertheless.

Apple have released version 10.4.6 of the OS X operating system for both Intel and PowerPC models. There’s a lot of issues addressed in the update, although none that I’ve noticed affecting my system. The main change appears to be the inclusion of iSync 2.2, and there’s an important document that you should read before, during and after updating.

PowerPC users should also be aware that your machine will restart twice after installing the update, instead of the one time you might expect. I’m not sure why this is the case, but don’t panic if it happens to you.

Further coverage

• Apple Releases Mac OS X 10.4.6 at Beta News
• Mac OS X 10.4.6 Released at Forever Geek

Apple Discontinues 15” Powerbooks via Forever Geek

The 15” Powerbook range, on one of which this entry is being composed, has now been removed from the online Apple store, although you can still find the product details on the Powerbook section of the Apple web site for the time being. Presumably this is the first step in Apple’s deprecation of the old PowerPC range of machines as it moves towards placing Intel chips within all of its products.

One of the sites that I read on a regular basis, Business Logs, has just posted a list of predictions for 2006. Here’s my commentary on what I think of the predictions and what I believe will be happening in 2006.

Apple comes out with widescreen & Intel-powered iBooks in Q1, Mac minis and Powerbooks in Q2, and Powermacs (named G5 still) in Q3.

Whilst it’s fairly obvious that Apple is planning on moving its product lines to Intel processors instead of the IBM-supplied Power PC ones, I think Mike’s timescale here is a little optimistic. I don’t think we’ll see any Intel-powered Apple devices until the spring at the earliest, as I don’t think Apple will have got to the stage where the new offerings are ready for general release, although having said that I am wondering if they’ve been working behind the scenes in order to get something ready for Macworld in January. Perhaps we’ll see a new iBook model then, but personally I doubt it will have a widescreen – that feature will be left to the Powerbooks.

Pricing for iTunes Music Store songs will change based on the popularity of the song.

I’m not entirely sure about this one, as the $0.99 model for iTunes seems to have worked very well for Apple so far, and it’s much easier to charge one price for every song than to start varying based on popularity – it makes the payment system that bit more complicated and a lot of iTunes customers will be used to the “one price fits all” model by now. I suspect that if Apple does change its pricing policy, it will probably be more down to pressure from the music industry, who really are pushing for variable pricing, than a independent decision by the iTunes management.

The major purchaser of budding companies will be C|Net, and they will make a purchase of a 1-2 well-known “web 2.0” companies prior to the start of Q3.

I’ve never been quite sure what to make of C|Net over the past few years, as they haven’t really made much of a name for themselves. I think they’ve been largely overshadowed by the likes of Google and Yahoo, but also when I look at their sites with large Flash ads, lots of nested tables interleaved with absolute positioning using CSS and the sheer amount of material on their home page, I feel that they haven’t really kept up with the way things are going on the web. Looking at their past press releases, they don’t seem to be buying everyone in sight like Yahoo has been doing, and they haven’t made any big name acquisitions recently. I can’t see them buying any “web 2.0” (I hate that phrase) sites in the near future, unless they feel compelled to in order to remain competitive with other large portal/search sites.

Digg will be purchased by C|Net for $5-8M.

As I’ve already explained, I don’t expect C|Net to make any major purchases in the next year, and $5-8 million seems a rather large price tag for Digg. On the other hand, if C|Net turns out to be in the acquistion market then I can see Digg being fairly high on its hit list. I’m not quite sure how it would integrate with the rest of C|Net’s news and services though.

Meebo will not be purchased by anyone this year

I think I agree with Mike and Om on this one – I honestly don’t see Meebo being bought out any time soon. For starters, it brings together the services of four of the biggest web companies (Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft/MSN), and none of those are likely to want to buy a site that promotes their competitors as much as it does them. Not only that, but if one of the big four was to purchase Meebo, the others could easily block users from connecting to their services via the site, rendering it useless. Meebo has also received a fair amount of venture capital recently, so it looks like the site owners are looking to develop and expand rather than aim for a quick sell.

37signals will come out with 3-4 new web applications, effectively doubling their current revenues but only expanding their user base by 25% since current 37s customers are more likely to use future 37s products.

I think 37signals will certainly have another killer web application for us in 2006, although I don’t believe they’ll release 3-4 brand new applications. My prediction is that there will be one genuinely new and innovative application, and an abundance of new features for the existing applications, with perhaps a better version of Writeboard that requires a subscription.

A brand-new web publishing application will launch, take on MovableType and Wordpress, and will be successful. Wordpress will continue its rise, and will eventually be used on all major weblogs that used to use MovableType.

Given that the vast majority of blogs run either MT or WP, and there’s already Textpattern creeping up behind both of those, I can’t see another brand-new application arriving and being successful. It would have to offer features that the existing ones don’t, and an easy method of converting all your comments, posts etc. otherwise who is going to switch to using it? With regards to the rise of Wordpress, I think it will continue to do well and take market share from MovableType, especially if version 2 (which I expect to see some time in the new year) lives up to expectations. I don’t think it will necessarily be used on all major weblogs that currently use MT - that might be a little bit too optimistic – but I expect several of the well known ones to convert at some point in 2006.

Skype’s popularity doesn’t grow as sharply as in 2005, the user base graph flattens off. eBay uses Skype to introduce new auction and community-based services to connect buyers to sellers.

Given how the fuss and publicity surrounding Skype has died down over the past couple of months, I suspect that growth in 2006 won’t be quite as rosy as it has been this year. A lot of people who want Skype accounts now have one, and I imagine that this will mean a much slower rate of signups over the next twelve months.

Skype’s continuing growth also depends in part on how well the new Jabber VoIP(Voice over IP) protocol is received. Google Talk already has support for this protocol, and Google has already released some source code to enable third party clients to interact with users of their software. I suspect that this will encourage a lot of developers (hopefully including the people working on Gaim) to add such functionality to their software and, depending on how hard Google pushes this and how fast take up grows at, this could provide a large base of competition to Skype.

A new weblog advertising model and platform is introduced, but not by any of the current players (WIN, FM Pub, Gawker, etc.). It will take on BlogAds and AdBrite and beat both at their own game.

I suspect, but don’t know for sure, that this is perhaps a plan for 9rules in 2006. If so, I expect Mike to talk it up somewhat, as he’s obviously got a vested interest in its success. I don’t know about beating existing competitors, but if 9rules did launch some form of advertising model/platform for blogs then I suspect it would do well, especially as it would probably have a “cool” factor associated with it. Personally I’ve never really gone in for that sort of stuff (I run Adsense on some of my blogs but don’t make much from it) and I’m not really a believer in what’s cool, hip and happening in the “blogosphere” (I hate that phrase as well). I’ll be keeping a close eye on how things develop in that area though, because even if I don’t jump into all the new stuff at the deep end I do like to keep my finger on the pulse.

Apple Sells Out of 1GB iPod Shuffle via Beta News

Apple’s stock of 1Gb iPod Shuffles has sold out just before Christmas, including at third party resellers and stores such as Amazon. At first this might not seem too unusual, after all such products make popular Christmas presents and I’m sure Apple shareholders will be happy to see them flying off the shelves so quickly. However, it appears that no extra 1Gb shuffles will be available until January, which just happens to coincide with the Macworld show in San Francisco. Apple generally uses Macworld to make new product announcements, amongst other things, and for the last couple of years the headline grabber has been something new to do with iPods. Could it be that there is another variation of the best selling MP3 player just around the corner?

Personally I’m not too sure whether this shortage in supply is a good indicator that an iPod product announcement is imminent. It’s not uncommon for popular electronic goods to sell out in the run up to Christmas, and there’s rarely time to manufacture and ship more if demand happens to exceed supply. In many ways, it’s often in the interests of businesses for product supply to fall a bit short of demand, because that generates a lot of hype about the product and also, in theory at least, creates a rise in price (I knew that A level in Economics would come in handy some day). The fact that Macworld happens to be around the corner might not be as significant as the Apple fans would like to make out – most industries supplying consumer products suffer a quiet period in January and February, so Macworld could be just a way of keeping customers interested when they find themselves with empty wallets after Christmas.

On the other hand, it does seem a bit too much of a coincidence that the two events will be occurring within such a short space of time. It’s a year since the iPod Shuffle was released and in terms of age it’s the model that’s gone the longest without a product refresh (in the meantime we’ve had the Video iPod and the Nano), so perhaps Apple has something new in the works. As with any potential Apple product release/update, there are a lot of rumours doing the rounds, but the only ones that I see as having any substance are the option of different colours for the shuffle (presumably this wouldn’t be too hard to implement on the manufacturing side) or a reduction in the form factor to produce an even smaller iPod. I can’t see the capacity being increased, because that would mean the shuffle was competing with the 2Gb nano.

Macworld 2006 is going to be held on the 9th-13th of January, so we shall see then what Steve Jobs has in store for us. Unfortunately I can’t afford to go to San Francisco to watch the event, nor do I qualify as a media analyst for the purposes of getting in that way, so I’ll probably be watching the live webcast with most other people.

Found via Forever Geek: iDoom, a part of the classic Doom game by id Software to the iPodLinux platform.

I don’t own an iPod myself so I can’t really say how well the game plays, but judging from the screenshots it looks pretty damn cool and seeing as Doom doesn’t really stretch the graphics capabilities of modern machines I’m not surprised that someone has managed to get it on a portable device like the iPod. You can also watch videos of the game running on several different iPod models, and it seems to be fairly smooth. Unfortunately there’s no sound support at the moment but I think the original Doom used proprietory libraries that weren’t released with the rest of the source code so that may be contributing to the problem (update: it appears that the copyrighted sound library was only used for the DOS version of the code, not the Linux one).

Anyway, if you have an iPod with iPodLinux already installed (be careful about installing if it not, as it comes with no warranty), you might want to give Doom a whirl and take yourself back to the good old days when a 486DX was a top of the range machine and everything was measured in 256 colours.