And here I bet you Macintosh owners thought you were going to be able to get away with shouting “just buy a Mac” in my last entry about Vista’s new DRM model.
Compared to Apple good old Microsoft is just starting to catch up on the whole issue of oppressive DRM schemes with the upcoming release of Vista. Apple has been perfecting DRM on its hardware for years now. I do own an iPod, but that’s only because it was given to me for free by a company I was working for. I have purchased exactly one album from iTunes (Dan Reeder’s CD because it was cheap) and was quite annoyed when it turned out I couldn’t play it outside of iTunes without burning it to a CD first. Which I did, and then promptly ripped the CD into MP3 files so I could listen to it on my PC using WinAMP.
Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing refers to Apple’s love of DRM as the “roach motel of business models.”
Randall Stross has a great op-ed in today’s New York Times about how Apple’s iPhone comes chock-full of DRM that will restrict your freedom and your consumer choice. He makes the great point that although Apple claims it adds its DRM (which locks you into buying Apple products) at the behest of the music industry, that many of the copyright holders whose work Apple sells in the music store have asked it to switch off the DRM. An Apple lawyer has gone on record saying that Apple would use DRM even if the music industry didn’t want it.
It’s ironic that a company whose name is synonymous with “Switch” has built its entire product strategy around lock-in. The iTunes/iPhone/iPod combo is a roach-motel: customers check in, but they can’t check out.
And it doesn’t stop with the iTunes DRM. Apple and Cingular have been trumpeting the technical prowess they’ve deployed in locking iPhone to the Cingular network, to be sure that no one can switch carriers with their iPhones. Even the Copyright Office has recognized that locking handsets to carriers is bad for competition and bad for the public.
There’s another thing you can’t switch with the iPhone: the software it runs. You can’t install third-party apps on handset. Steve Jobs claims that this is because running your own code on a phone could crash the phone network, which must be news to all those Treo owners running around on Cingular’s own network without causing a telecoms meltdown.
Here’s a snippet from Randall Stross’s op-ed:
Apple pretends that the decision to use copy protection is out of its hands. In defending itself against Ms. Tucker’s lawsuit, Apple’s lawyers noted in passing that digital-rights-management software is required by the major record companies as a condition of permitting their music to be sold online: “Without D.R.M., legal online music stores would not exist.”
In other words, however irksome customers may find the limitations imposed by copy protection, the fault is the music companies’, not Apple’s.
This claim requires willful blindness to the presence of online music stores that eschew copy protection. For example, one online store, eMusic, offers two million tracks from independent labels that represent about 30 percent of worldwide music sales.
Unlike the four major labels — Universal, Warner Music Group, EMI and Sony BMG — the independents provide eMusic with permission to distribute the music in plain MP3 format. There is no copy protection, no customer lock-in, no restrictions on what kind of music player or media center a customer chooses to use — the MP3 standard is accommodated by all players.
EMusic recently celebrated the sale of its 100 millionth download; it trails only iTunes as the largest online seller of digital music. (Of course, iTunes, with 2 billion downloads, has a substantial lead.)
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Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, agreed, saying copy protection “just locks people into Apple.” He said he had recently asked Apple when the company would remove copy protection and was told, “We see no need to do so.”
There’s been a number of predictions around the web over the last few weeks that DRM is slowly dying a painful death and that 2007 may very well be the year it finally kicks the bucket such as in this article by Antony Bruno:
In 2007, the majors will get the message, and the DRM wall will begin to crumble. Why? Because they’ll no longer be able to point to a growing digital marketplace as justification that DRM works. Revenue from digital downloads and mobile content is expected to be flat or, in some cases, decline next year. If the digital market does in fact stall, alternatives to DRM will look much more attractive.
Revenue from digital music has yet to offset losses from still-declining CD sales, and digital track sales remain a cause for concern. Month-over-month download figures were largely flat through 2006, even in the face of year-over-year gains. If the expected post-holiday spike in download numbers that has occurred in the past two years is weak, look for the glass on the panic button to break.
“People in the industry will have a very different conversation in January when the dust clears and they realize just how bad this year really was,” says Eric Garland, CEO of peer-to-peer (P2P) tracking firm BigChampagne.
But before you start celebrating the death of DRM there is one company that may yet be its savior: Apple, Inc. Here’s why from an article on ArsTechnica.com:
Content owners may not like this, but it’s the situation that they are faced with in 2007. With iPods commanding such a large part of the player market, and iTunes integration so complete that it’s the easiest option for new iPod owners in search of more music, Apple can present the best case for DRM to the industry: the success of the iTunes Store. Given that iTunes is now the #5 music retailer in the US and rising, the Apple mantra isn’t pro-DRM or anti-DRM, but that “the experience is king.” If Apple opens its DRM, that walled-garden experience could be degraded as customers migrate to other stores with lower prices but more technical problems. This creates a scenario in which we think Apple can work its influence to keep DRM alive and well in the face of labels showing doubts—and we’re not at all sure that the labels’ doubts are that strong.
Apart from independent labels, no serious, sustained experiment in offering unprotected files has been made by any of the major players in the film, television, or movie businesses. In fact, Hollywood has spent the last several years drawing up two new draconian forms of DRM (AACS and BD+) to protect next-generation video content. They have also been lobbying like mad for Congressional action on broadcast flags, and they’ve gone paranoid about putting CableCARDs in home-built Vista PCs (it won’t be possible). The content owners want to be in control.
No, what the content industry and the consumer electronics industry alike want is not the end of DRM, but a truly interoperable, robust DRM that puts them in control of their content without ceding too much power to one player (Apple). But now that PlaysForSure has gone bust in all but name and Apple steadfastly refuses to license Fairplay, that’s not going to happen in the music industry. And Apple’s toehold in the movie and TV business is rapidly becoming a beachhead. The only way to bypass Apple and still reach the massive iPod demographic is to throw open the digital gates and begin offering content in open MP3 and MPEG-4 formats that can still be played on Apple’s devices—but losing control this way is just as scary to content owners as losing control to Apple.
DRM is dying? Not while Apple lives.
All of this is a shame because Apple really does make some pretty cool products. The iPod is surprisingly easy to use and it works well, though the standard earbuds that it ships with suck balls. The Mac is a very easy to use computer and OS X is damned nifty in many ways. And I have to admit that the new iPhone they just announced makes all other cell phones look like pocket calculators. I was unconvinced that watching movies/TV on a cellphone could ever possibly catch on until I saw the iPhone in action. For that matter, my current cellphone has a calendar and alarm clock in it that I never use because it’s just too much of a pain to drill down through the menu system to get to them, but the iPhone looks like it’d be an excellent PDA as well as phone—but I still won’t buy one. Not so long as it contains the crippleware Apple has put into it.
Posted on 01/16/2007 at 04:17 PM 
Les, I missed some of the spec’s on the Dell when I was trying to do that comparison. Let me do it again being careful this time.
The Dell 710 came out to $3754 (no monitor, I don’t know about you, but I have way too many monitors here as it is. It’s why I don’t want an iMac. I don’t need a 3rd LCD monitor), and the Mac came out to $3354. I don’t price speakers as well because I have a crap load of those too.
The video card is a bit of an issue. Apple doesn’t have that many it supports, so finding a card is limiting. However, I suspect that the Radeon X1900 is somewhat comparable to the Dell offering except for the onboard RAM.
On the other side, the FSB for the Mac is 1.333GHz. They use fully buffered RAM and a 256bit wide memory architecture. I can’t find much info about the RAM on the Dell, so I can only assume that they have a FSB of 667MHz. Unless you can find something that I couldn’t, I’m giving this one to the Mac.
The CD offerings for the Mac, the SuperDrives, if you would have clicked on the “learn more” link, you would have seen:
* Read: DVD up to 16x and CD up to 32x
* Write: DVD±R up to 16x, double-layer DVD+R up to 8x, CD-R up to 32x and CD-RW up to 24x
I’m pretty sure that covers just about anything Dell offers.
So, OK, the savings isn’t what I originally found, but the system isn’t priced at a “premium”.
One thing I really like about the Mac is that when I “look under the hood” and open up the side to get to the innerds, I don’t see a tangle of wires hanging around. The only wires are in a box that holds the optical drive. The HD’s are slid into a bay that has all the connectors waiting for it on a circuit board. That may explain why there is a limited amount of video cards since some video cards require power from the power supply. There would be no way to set that up on a Mac.
One thing that isn’t mentioned in the prices here is users time. I have had a Mac for just over 6 months now and my Mac Pro 5 months. I have only had to deal with one issue that was a problem with a piece of software from Cisco. My parents still call me with issues and I can get them back up and running in less than 5 minutes usually. The last call was about the fact that a window had become so big that it went off the screen. Not really sure how they got it that way. So I told them how to use the little buttons on the top left of the window and they were back in business.
I can’t count on any number of extremities I have had to go over to their house and clean up this virus or attempt to remove that spyware. I had them running Firefox, but Windows software doesn’t always honor the “default browser” setting and launches IE anyway. My parents don’t really know the difference and presto, more crap on their system.
The Mac Mini runs rings around the 2 year old $500 Dell they bought and best of all, they can have separate accounts and something my dad does will not affect my mothers account.
Maybe Vista would clear that up, but from what I have seen from the Beta and RC’s, I would have to spend some serious time changing default settings so that they would not be overwhelmed by screens and panes they don’t need to see.
Getting back to the “premium” label that Apple has acquired. Yes, not long ago, Apple sold their equipment at a premium. I can’t deny that at all. It’s what kept me away from them for so long. When they switched to Intel, the prices came down as well. I don’t know if this was due to the Intel switch or sales of the Mac Mini telling them that lower cost systems would sell better, but they have priced their newer systems way better than they ever have.
Let me address some of the other points you mentioned:
I did forget about the optical cable issues that were scaring the music industry long before Napster hit the scene. There were attempts to disable the optical connections when connecting to a recording device so that a digital copy couldn’t be made, but back then, it wasn’t convenient to do so.
This is true for now. There are two things happening right not that might change that. One is that Apple is being looked at by legal folks to determine if they have a monopoly on music. If they go to court and lose, then Apple will have to either sell or give out FairPlay to others.
The other “thing” is that DVD-Jon is working on a FairPlay clone that he would license to others. If he get’s away with that, then other players would be capable of playing iTunes stuff. This one would be harder to keep up with since, as you said, Apple changes their FairPlay with every update to Quicktime.
Also, just about every DRM has been hacked to remove the DRM. It’s putting Apple and Microsoft to work to stay one step ahead of the hackers. Sooner or later, they might figure it’s not worth it. I can’t speak for them, but it must be taking quite a few full time people to stay on top of it.
Well, I have figures based on figures that came out claiming that the iTunes Store was not doing as well as before. They claim that there are only about 10 iTunes Store purchases per iPod. I can’t believe that there are that many iPods out there with only 10 songs on them. We all have CD libraries. Some more than others. My library is over 300 CD’s. I know folks that have 10,000 CD. Really, I have seen them and they are real. We all know that if they have an MP3 player, that they are ripping their CD’s to their players. So, yes, I believe that everyone has MP3’s on their players. Apple, and only Apple, removing the ability to play MP3’s would be the biggest business blunder of the century. iPod owners would flock to the Zune and Creative’s offerings in seconds. I know I would. I would probably jump to Creative since Microsoft could do the same thing. Creative seems a safer company in that reguard. However, which ever device then becomes the market leader would have incentive to put together a similar system to lock folks in. It’s the way business works. Or at least seems the way business works. Just look at Microsoft locking the Zune to a specific store and dropping all the other stores that popped up with “Plays For Sure”.
I wasn’t aware that this was the case. It’s good to know.
As far as Apple staying with Cingular/ATT exclusively, that would not be in the best interest of Apple. They want to get the iPhone into as many hands as possible. That’s why they went with Cingular/ATT in the first place. They wanted to have access to the biggest customer base. They will spread to other carriers. Will I buy one when it comes out? Most definitely not! I’m not about to pay $600 for a phone and then have to pay data charges on top of that. I’ll be happy to wait for the price to come down to something more reasonable. If it doesn’t, then I suspect that they won’t see their “1%” of the cell phone industry.
Yeah, I’m not sure where that came from. Job’s isn’t really a techy. So I suspect that the Cingular folks told him a load of bullshit. Microsoft based cell phones probably crash all the time. A simple reboot and your back in business. Hell, the iPod locks up several times a year. I have had to reboot my iPod at least 3-5 times a year myself. I did a reboot just recently. So, I’m sure the iPhone will lock up or crash a bunch of times, and it will be rebooted and nothing bad will come of it.
Look, you have heard it a million times before. Apple is not a software company. It’s true. Apple wasn’t able to create an OS that was multi-tasking, so they went out and bought NeXTstep. If they can’t come up with a decent OS on their own, I can’t imaging them trying to keep up with the industry when it comes to graphics cards, sound cards, and the billions of other peripherals that are out there and are coming.
Web:
It came from pricing out parts vrs. the price of a Dell system a the time I was looking to get a new system. That’s it. I don’t know hardware well enough to go out and build a system.
Plus, I don’t want a Windows system anymore. I’m sick of dealing with all the crap that Windows users have to deal with. The day Apple and OS X start having the same problem, then I’ll switch to Linux (heaven forbid!). I don’t see that day coming during my lifetime. Which is getting to be less and less years.