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Re: Dumb iTunes Question
Brad Caviness wrote:
OS X and OS 9 (IX?) are completely different beasts, I understand. I
think OS X is Linux based, even.
Well, not quite. Let's just say "Unix"-based.
My thought, really, was (setting aside that the iTunes store is a
marketing device to sell more iPods, especially to windows users) that
Apple could make more money by formating some of their products to be
more cross-platform.
They really don't have much of an incentive. I think the numbers I saw
were something like a 70% share of the portable media market. The fact
is, most people who have these sorts of things have iPods.
And as somebody alluded to, nobody's making any money off downloadable
songs, at least not yet. It's solely to drive hardware sales. If iTunes
songs played on a competitor's product, they're out moola.
That's not to say that iTunes is really restrictive. I mean, if you're
going to be doing downloadable music for money, you pretty much have to
use a proprietary codec with DRM (Digital Rights Management) - in other
words, some sort of protection to make sure you don't just download a
song and then share it with the world. Apple went with their AAC (which
IIRC corretly is just a souped up version of MPEG-4), which is a dang
nice codec.
And let's not forget, iPods are *not* limited to iTunes songs. It'll
happily play any mp3s you have lying around from times past.
(Unfortunately, it won't play my geek-snob format, Ogg Vorbis, so I have
a Neuros).
Oh, and Apple recently partnered with HP to put out a HP-branded iPod
sometime soon. What with that and the iPod Mini (which they say they
have 100,000 orders for), they're in pretty good shape at the moment!
But hey, if you've got a non-iPod, there are plenty of other places to
check out for downloadable music (Napster 2.0, Rhapsody, etc).
Troy
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