Apple Computer has invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent its customers from burning DVDs on external drives. At issue in the legal threat is Apple’s well-received iDVD application, which permits users to burn DVDs only on internal drives manufactured by Apple. In unmodified form, it does not permit writing to external drives manufactured by third parties. That means Macintosh owners with older computers or laptop computers, or people who opted not to buy the “Superdrive”-equipped Macs, could not use iDVD to save movies.
Apple: Burn DVDs–and We’ll Burn You
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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gee, would a normal company turn on it’s customers?
hey this is the first time I have been moderated down… it almost makes me feel like a kid getting sent to the principal’s office he he
I don’t know why this is a problem. iDVD is the software portion of the SuperDrive package. You buy a Mac with a SuperDrive, you get iDVD. You buy a Mac without a SuperDrive, you don’t get iDVD. Want iDVD? Buy a Mac with a SuperDrive. Simple, no? iDVD isn’t a standalone product — it’s made exclusively for users of SuperDrive-equiped Macs. Asking Apple to give you iDVD standalone to use with any old DVD burner is like asking Pioneer to send you a burning laser so you can smash it in an old Toshiba CD-R drive using power tools. iDVD and SuperDrive are part of the same product, they aren’t separate entities.
Now if you think Apple should offer a separate, standalone version of iDVD that supports other DVD burners, fine, send them your feedback. But hacking the current iDVD to support this IS tampering with a product designed for a specific purpose. Apple has every right to protect their own product.
Jared
If I pay money for my Mac (including the nice iDVD software), I should have the right to do with that software as I see fit. What’s next, car dealers suing after-market parts dealers, because they don’t want people to put spoilers on their cars?
You could save your movie to an standalone Philips DVD Recorder, according to the Macfan magazine it was realtime and faster than a superdrive…
Way to go Apple…
Couldn’t have said it better myself!!!
Apple is just trying to cover up their butts so that the movie studios do not come out and sue them for copyright infringements.
Remember that Michael Eisner of Disney has already labeled Apple computers one of the pirates of digital copyrights in music. Now I think Apple is just making sure that no one comes knocking on the door for movie rights.
Makes perfect sense to me why Apple did this.
I hope people remember that Steve Jobs happily sold phreaker tools with Woz, which give people free phone calls. They’re hacks on the phone system. Now they’re calling the kettle black with the RIAA.
I’m in charge of a Mac port of a suite which runs better on newer Macs. A nice reason for our clients to upgrade. But I have a wide latitude in choosing priorities, and the Mac is now pretty far down that list for the next month.
Maybe their actions were good for them, but they’re not good for my profession. The only free software I’ll write for the Mac is to commoditize it.
>>I hope people remember that Steve Jobs happily sold phreaker tools with Woz, which give people free phone calls. They’re hacks on the phone system.<<
Oh come on, they were college kids for godsakes, and at that time, they were fighting the so called ‘Big Brother’… people change!
What a lame point to bring up!!!
Your car analogy is silly. No one’s stopping you from putting any other DVD software on your Mac, including DVD Studio Pro or anything else. You just can’t use iDVD with an external burner. That’s Apple’s choice as a company that wants to move SuperDrive-equipped Macs. Why does everyone always want to pin stupid conspiracy theory crap on Apple when all its doing is what any business with good financial sense would do? If I created a free product that came bundled with something I wanted to sell, and someone came along and hacked the free product so that it worked with other company’s products (leaving me with $0 profit), I’d try to stop that too! Duh!
“iDVD and SuperDrive are part of the same product, they aren’t separate entities”
Oh really, then can you tell me if Microsoft starts to sell software with a particular hardware, and they will sue you if you start to use it with different hardware, what would you tell. Will you still come up with this logic and defend them.
Bundling with software with hardware to force people buy their own hardware is not ethical, not it is reasonable.
I think I’ve read somewhere that Apple pays the MPEG2 encoding license in iDVD for every superdrive sold and not for every copy of the software shipping…
So it _would_ make sense that they’d try to stop people from using their software on other drives, simply to cover their rear ends in the licensing fee department…
Now if they sold iDVD on a CD for those who wanted an external superdrive, it’d be a different story altogether
Apple also sells DVD Studio Pro, which works with all kinds of internal and external DVD devices. Here is the compatibility list: http://www.apple.com/dvd/compatibility/. iDVD is a $20 product they sell to work with their specific internal drive, and in fact, it is probably a selling point for their hardware.
As to whether bundling software with hardware in order to sell a product is unethical, I don’t know. Somehow, despite my personal preferences as a consumer, it does not seem unethical to me.
Apple has a right to do this, but it is a pretty poor way to treat their customers. Apple wants you to buy their Superdrive rather than compete with commodity hardware (at commodity prices). Being a third party hardware supplier for Mac is looking like a dead-end business (kindof like being supplying an office productivity suite for Windows).
I think this is a really stupid move on Apple’s part. PR wise it is bad for Apple, this may end up reducing third party hardware support for the Mac, and it is really going to piss off some existing Mac customers. I just don’t see how this is worth it for a little extra revenue from Superdrive sales.
>>Bundling with software with hardware to force people buy their own hardware is not ethical, not it is reasonable.<<
That is exactly what Microsoft is doing now with the OEMs, and is trying to force the issue even further!
> Oh come on, they were college kids for godsakes, and at
> that time, they were fighting the so called ‘Big
> Brother’… people change!
I knew someone would bring this up. And to this, I say that I suppose you’re right. Once it becomes profitable to BE Big Brother instead of fighting him, there’s no question.
I’ve got friends in Apple. The fogey hasn’t changed much, it’s just that he and BillG rode the PC-making revolution to wealth, like IBM did a generation before. The good thing to say about the two is that they understand the industry pretty well, for being there when it happened.
Anyway, I’m not the wrinkled man Jobs is, so you’ll forgive me if I have fun subverting today’s multi-colored Big Brother for fun & profit. Everytime the DCMA is invoked, it’s further legitimized. The Apple is a general-purpose machine. If it’s really not, then don’t give people access to low-level APIs.
Hypothetical question: if Sony created a video editor for their VAIO computers that only worked with Sony video cameras, would that be a problem? Not for me. If Creative made a free audio jukebox that only worked with Creative hardware, would that be a problem? Oh wait, that already exists.
Grow up, people. Apple is a BUSINESS!!!
Good Business = create products or services, make money
Bad business = create products for free that can be used with other products robbing business of important revenue
The only PR problem here is with a bunch of whiners who like to play armchair CEO and think the world should revolve around them. The same with the whole .Mac thing: Apple charges for something they should have charged for all along, something that was costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars, and people throw a fit. Next, people will be asking Apple to stop charging for the OS entirely! “After all, I paid a bunch of money for my Mac! Why should I have to buy expensive OS upgrades later when I could use Linux for free?”
If cars could be hacked and pirated easily, I bet the automotive industry would sink like a stone.
Jared
Here’s the deal people. Sure, it is always bad PR for a company to associate themselves in anyway with the DMCA. The DMCA has earned its rightfully deserved evil reputation. However, Apple is not taking advantage of the large loop holes in the DMCA, it is using it in the *SPIRIT* in which it was intended.
See Apple wants jack and jane consumer to be able to burn DVD’s with their super drive equipped macs. If you couldn’t burn DVD’s what would be the point in buying a superdrive. That’s where iDVD comes in. iDVD is what marketing folks call a “loss leader”. Apple loses money on iDVD (paying people to develop it) but they recoup that money through sales of superdrives because no-one can use iDVD without buying a superdrive. This way apple can afford to develop this great piece of software.
The same concept applies to PC add in cards etc… For example, I purchased a Sony digital camera and it comes with some sort of pictureMaker software that sony makes. This version of this software only works with my sony camera, however I can buy a more feature rich version that works with any model sony camera + some others. Sony obviously can’t afford to give that software away because people with Olympus cameras would download it and rob them of the profits, but by the same token they couldn’t sell a camera without software to pull the pictures from it.
This is the same situation as iDVD and DVD Studio Pro.
This is perfectly ethical, and legal, and although I wish Apple could have found a way to stop these companies from selling these mods without invoking the DMCA, I perfectly understand the reasoning in doing so. (Thats right people were selling DVD Burners with iDVD update disks and a patch to hack iDVD to work with them)
-Jason Stiles
Jason, you seem to have a misconception of the situation. Apple is under no obligation to interop. However, someone wrote a patch for interop.
You argue that Apple needs to do this with iDVD, or it will go broke. However, the RIAA argues that Apple needs to stop supporting piracy, or it will go broke.
Today, I was in a very humorous situation. I needed my sysadmin to transplant a CD-R from a PC to my G4, so I could make a beautiful install CD. (My other mac was occupied.) I burnt it using Disc Copy, so it worked nice. Had Apple erected a purely legal method to stop me from using my own IDE-compatible machine as I saw fit, I would have been hindered.
Jared wrote:
Apple charges for something they should have charged for all along, something that was costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars, and people throw a fit.
Tell me that Apple won’t throw a fit if Motorola one day said, “We need to jack up the price of the processor by $5. It’s not an easy world…” If you do business, you get outraged when a supplier changes terms on you for the worse, especially when it was part of the reason you went with him. The consumer is no different. To say otherwise is to be a Jobs or Gates peon.
But do as you wish; it’s my policy to stop advocating Mac notebooks, on the basis of lockin and the fact that Apple will take a while to switch to IBM or Intel/AMD. The performance and restrictions aren’t worth it. At least until Intel/Microsoft invokes the DMCA. Let them eat Thinkpads.
Hmmm…. Maybe you should read software license agreements a little more closely.
this wouldn’t bother me so much if the DVD burner that came with the Mac’s didn’t suck so much. Terrible transfer rates with data, the discs I burn tend to be unreadable in a lot of the DVD players I try it in (and of course I can’t swap it out for a more capatible model and still use iDVD).
Is there another software package that can create DVD’s on the mac besides iDVD that would work?
Is there another software package that can create DVD’s on the mac besides iDVD that would work?
DVD Studio Pro from Apple. It supports the Apple SuperDrive, external FireWire DVD-R drives, as well as DLT tapes.
that if you have a Mac without a superdrive, you can’t just buy the superdrive (and iDVD) as an upgrade.
Maybe you can, but I can’t find it in the Apple Store.
So the problem is, you have your shiny G4 (without superdrive) sitting there, and if you get the money to buy a DVD burner, you can’t buy the superdrive as an add-on and have to get a 3rd party unit.
Again, correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s my understanding.
I think its fine that the software only works with their drive. That doesn’t bother me. But in order to use the software (with that drive) it seems you need to buy it with a brand new Mac attached.
It seems the classy thing to do would be to give it for free with superdrive, but have a pay version for aftermarket users. I mean, a lot of people who didn’t opt for the drive at purchase time aren’t doing it because they’re assembling dedicated NLE systems … they may not have had the need at the time. Those users wouldn’t know what to do with DVD Studio Pro … let them get iDVD for $20-30 bucks, big deal.
Why do some of you people feel that even though your Mac didn’t come with a SuperDrive, Apple should give you iDVD anyway and make it work with any 3rd party burner?
That logic makes no sense to me at all. Looking at the PC world for a minute, Windows doesn’t come with any DVD-authoring software, does it? And when you buy a DVD burner for your PC, it comes with some brand of authoring software (the quality of which I won’t get into here
, correct? Isn’t that exactly what is happening here with Apple? Buying an Apple without a SuperDrive gets you no authoring software, while buying one *with* a SuperDrive gets you the super-groovy iDVD.
If you want to use iDVD with 3rd party burners, why don’t you pressure the manufacturers of those drives to bundle higher quality authoring software or, better yet, they could license special versions of iDVD from Apple that support their hardware. That way, Apple makes money by licensing iDVD to the 3rd party manufacturers and the people who didn’t buy Macs with SuperDrives get to use iDVD. Everyone’s happy.
My 2 cents.
Steve Gates??
Anything sounding familiar yet guys?
Apple needs to really get a hold on it’s PR. Here’s another tidbit that MS could easily use against them.
“Sure, some Windows users are switching to OSX… Let’s hear what they have to say:
1. Now I can’t burn DVD’s unless I pay Apple their outrageous fees for their proprietary hardware. I miss my PC and it’s limitless supply of cheap, capable hardware.
2. I’m being forced to pay for still more upgrades after buying my new box because it didn’t have the latest OSX build. I miss my low cost, “does the job” Windows system. It did everything I wanted and cost less. At least Microsoft is up front about fees and costs!
3. There’s hardly any freeware available for OSX unless I learn to port and/or compile Linux software. I miss the miles of endless freeware and shareware that was available for Windows. Even little items such as icon switchers cost money. (http://www.macminute.com/redirect/iconfactory-11874)
4. I can’t connect my new Apple PC to my existing CRT monitor. Now I not only have to fork over exhorborant(SP?) amounts of money for hardware, pay for every tiny piece of software, but I now also have to pay money for an adapter (http://www.macminute.com/redirect/drbott-57253) or buy an entirely new monitor?? I miss the days of everything being compatible with basics like a VGA monitor, and a PS2 mouse and keyboard.
”
and so on…
There’s probably others out there as well, but come on. Apples just lending creedence to Microsofts claims by doing crap like this.
Whatever… We’ll see where they are in a year. I know they’re selling a lotta Jaguar now, but that’s largely the existing Mac users, with a few Unix and Linux users thrown in for measure.
By pulling these types of moves, Apples just going to alienate those who are considering jumping ship from Windows. At least we know Bills screwing us, but we also know there’s lots of cheap alternatives to enhance our experience with Windows.
OSX just seems to be a money pit to me at the moment. A big, bottomless money pit…
(Although if someone’s willing to give me one to change my opinion, I wouldn’t fight them on it!)
“What is exactly what Microsoft is doing now with the OEMs, and is trying to force the issue even further!”
What are you talkinga about? Are you claiming that Microsoft sells its own hardware, and actually it owns DELL and other manufacturers. What is this?
If Apple was the dominant company, we would have to buy all the hardware from them, and they would force us to buy more and more. Thanks to Microsoft we have a choice in hardware, and in software too. Microsoft’s only fault is being extremely good at programming and making the best programs around.
Take Netscape vs IE example.
.mac was a slap on the face of consumers. From the first time of those iTool offers, it was all about convincing users to buy macs. It was something that tells users to buy macs. Now people bought macs, they happily used iTools, it was all great. Now Apple changed the terms and made these tools available only to consumers who are willing to pay for it. Nobody can claim here that Apple should have charged before, or it is ok to charge, because then it means that you don’t care about consumer satisfaction at all. It means that you can cheat on people and tell lies about your products.
This simply means that, Apple will continue to be a niche player, and it will get as much money as possible from those rich guys.
Why do some of you people feel that even though your Mac didn’t come with a SuperDrive, Apple should give you iDVD anyway and make it work with any 3rd party burner?
Because you paided big bucks for your Apple and MacOSX upgrade already?
It seems that some Mac owners actually enjoy being screwed.
4. I can’t connect my new Apple PC to my existing CRT monitor. Now I not only have to fork over exhorborant(SP?) amounts of money for hardware, pay for every tiny piece of software, but I now also have to pay money for an adapter (http://www.macminute.com/redirect/drbott-57253) or buy an entirely new monitor?? I miss the days of everything being compatible with basics like a VGA monitor, and a PS2 mouse and keyboard.
The display part is highly incorrect. The last four generation PowerMac G4 systems come with video cards that have both ADC and VGA connectors. The new units come with cards that have ADC and DVI-I and *INCLUDE* a DVI to VGA adapter cable.
I’ve been following this article on Osnews and Slashdot. Apparently, people don’t support a company going after illegal use of their software. What is wrong with them going after people who sell patches that illegally modify their software? If people want a superdrive that bad or iDVd, talk to apple and tell them you want it as a third party add-on or something if you have a mac without one; if the demand is there I’m sure these options can be had for a reasonable cost. Another alternative would be to buy a third party drive, and some software, like most users on the pc side of things do when they buy a bare bones drive without software. Apple has to come down on people like this, because I am sure development costs are high as many other people have commented, and bundling the software with the drive makes good business sense. The DMCA was probably not the best way to invoke action against the store, but Apple (as with any other software/hardware developer), has to protect their intellectual property.
It appears to me that Apple technically has the right to do this. PR-wise though, having a paid edition of iDVD that supports other burners makes sense to me. Apple is getting bad PR about this and .Mac. Jobs, who should know better because he’s such a hype master, has consistently had a blind spot when it comes to certain areas of PR.
Mr. Cancelled, not only are you wrong about monitors, but there are tons of Mac freeware and shareware, for both OS 9 and OS X. Go to versiontracker.com. It sounds like you are just plain unhappy though and wish you had a Wintel puter.
I swear that if Microsoft were to try and pull something like this off, you Mac lovers would be all over it. But since it’s Apple, then it must be ok.
>>I swear that if Microsoft were to try and pull something like this off,<<
Microsoft done that a longtime ago, where have you been?!
I don’t own iDVD so I can’t confirm it. However, it has come up on some other site that the EULA explicitly mentions that the software can be used only with the superdrive. If that is true, then using the DMCA was a stupid move. Enforcing the EULA would have been better. Maybe it would also have been the first time that someone actually enforced a software license. Usually, we just click through…
When will you learn that Apple is a proprietary hardware manufacturer ! If you want real freedom, a stable kernel that runs on PPC, use linux instead of MacOS X.
This is the reason why I love Linux and all the open source software ! And DMCA is a typical american stupidity ! Where are the freedom that USA like to say it has ?
CDN:Enforcing the EULA would have been better.
Not having ever seen the EULA, I cannot say for sure, but it seems to me that with the EULA Apple would need to go after each user of the iDVD patch. By invoking the DMCA, they only need go after the patch’s authors. From Apple’s perspective, it’s a tremendous savings on legal bills.
Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier
“Because you paided big bucks for your Apple and MacOSX upgrade already?
It seems that some Mac owners actually enjoy being screwed.”
So what? Just because I “paided” for my Mac and OS X doesn’t mean that Apple now owes me a bunch of free software when I buy a piece of hardware from somebody else.
I don’t feel like I’m being screwed at all. My G4 doesn’t have a SuperDrive, so I don’t need iDVD anyway. If I decide down the road to buy an external burner, why would I expect Apple to give me a DVD-authoring program for it? That would be like a PC owner emailing Microsoft saying “I just bought a DVD burner for my computer, and since I’m running Windows, that means you owe me a program that allows me to make movies and put them on DVD.” The only person that owes you a DVD-authoring program is the manufacturer of the drive. And that might not even be the case. To save money and lower the price of the burner, they may only provide drivers but no software. Perhaps they’ll include a coupon for $20 off of a commercially available program. Whatever. The point is that it’s not Apple’s responsibility to give you free software just because you own a Mac.
Remember, OS X != iDVD. They are two separate pieces of software. Just because you bought OS X (or a Mac that came with OS X) doesn’t mean you are automatically entitled to any other Apple Software.
You know, my Mac didn’t come with an Apple scanner, either. Should I be bitching to Apple because they won’t give me free “iScan” software to use with the HP scanner I just bought?
Hey, I just bought a MIDI keyboard for my Mac. Shouldn’t Apple give me a free MIDI sequencing program now? After all, I “paided” for my Mac. They owe it to me!!
>>Bundling with software with hardware to force people buy their own hardware is not ethical, not it is reasonable. <<
Apple does this with every mac they sell, you are forced to buy both software and hardware to get the other can’t seperate, (buying OSX would be sensless if you hadn’t bought a mac).
Every day I seem to read something about Apple legal being complete a**holes, not to the competition only, but to the customers as well. I feel more and more anger toward them every time I look at OSAlert, Slashdot, or whatever. There are THREE reasons I am considering buying a Mac and switching from Windows (and the commercials aren’t one of them):
1. Microsoft are a bunch of draconian evil bastards.
2. I like the sound of OS X.
3. The TiBook looks cool.
So far, #1 is shot all to hell, and that’s the most important reason for me. Microsoft recently passed up an opportunity to use the DMCA to squash someone, they’re opening up their code and complying with the DoJ. Meanwhile, Jobs and company are displaying every single attribute that I hate about MS; they are draconian and stupidly selfish, as evidenced here, they shaft the customers financially (software and hardware both), they shut down the iPod TV remote control gizmo that looked so cool, they killed the GNU/Linux Aqua themes(how pitiful is that, everybody’s still got them – Apple made themselves look like greedy bastards for nothing), and every Mac dealer I go in to talk to complains about the way Apple treats them. Need I mention Watson? And that’s off the top of my head. Apple is NO BETTER than Microsoft, and I’m starting to think worse.
#2. I like the looks of OS X, but I hear as many complaints about it as I do praises. It’s too slow. My apps don’t run. It crashes and loses all my settings. It’s not any more open than Windows, so there’s no ethical attraction like Gnu/Linux has. It doesn’t have the apps Windows has, and like another guy said, everything has a price in Macville. And with Apple putting restrictions on it with every revision, it seems to be getting more closed rather than more open.
#3. The TiBook looks cool, but it’s insanely expensive, I have seen the pictures of paint peeling off, the DVD getting caught, the screen warping, the keys leaving marks on the screen, hundreds of dead pixel stories, and people bumping it and having it break because it’s so fragile. I would still risk it, if only because Doc Searls says they’re cool, but I could buy a kickass Alienware Area-51m, Winbook, IBM Thinkpad, or Dell for the same price or less – with better specs.
And there’s a number 4. The *mac zealots* who refuse to look at both sides of a Mac related issue hurt the platform more than help. They’re like trolls, only worse, because they think they’re helping. YOU’RE NOT. I’d rather have honest opinions than somebody’s propaganda. I don’t believe propaganda, and when I hear it, I immediately dismiss all that person’s posts for a long time. I’m trying to make a big financial decision here, and there are so many obvious lies and warpings of the truth by the Mac zealots that I’m better off sticking with Windows and hoping Linux gets better.
I want to love Apple. I know there are many of you who genuinely believe it is the best platform, and have reasons to back up your belief. But I’m not hearing any here. Tell me about Apple’s CHARACTER. Because right now, they don’t look so good in my eyes, and they’re losing ground on all my 3 points.
MM
Since Apple didn’t actually make the Superdrive, it’s Pioneer mechanism, does this mean that you can’t legally use iDVD on the “Apple” Superdrive?
Apple and Microsoft are no better than each other, IMO. Neither are their products. The most honest suggestion I can give you is to keep waiting on the computer industry to see what develops. It isn’t a good situation right now. Both companies are overbearing and unfriendly to their customers and partners. Both companies have products with plusses and minuses that never outweigh each other to any degree of distinction. Both companies are only interested in maximum profit at whatever costs (usually the cost is to sacrifice quality, design, customer satisfaction, etc).
There is no clear winner (just like when our last Presidential elections were going on here in the USA).
My advise: Don’t buy anything. From experience, I learned that between Microsoft or Apple, either choice may leave you feeling angry and abused.
good advice. (????)
Stay away from computers, ‘they will leave you angry and abused’.
??!!!
There is a lot of angst floating around the internet lately.
I don’t know if it’s a result of the economy or what.
But the negativity vibe sure is big on the net (especialy the anti mac vibe).
Remember that in the real world, folks like me are enjoying the computuing experience.
Apple just came out with it’s best OS ever, and all I read here and elsewhere is how much it sucks.
Whatever.. : (.
Let’s not buy anything from Microsoft or Apple.
‘Let’s not buy anything from Microsoft or Apple.’ That leaves us with a UNIX flavor running on x86 platforms…not a bad idea. I think I’ll go install FreeBSD right now.
Apple used a copyright law (there’s moe to the DMCA than the reverse engineering clause) to stop a company selling a patched version of Apples software.
Can anyone actually tell me what it wrong about that
…has always been suspect. I’ve had more than one long-time dedicated Mac user (of the not-too-zealous variety) say that they loved the Mac but hated Apple, and that was years ago. And anyone who’s been paying attention to the computer industry has known since the mid-’80s, if not earlier, that Steve Jobs is pretty much Bill Gates with charisma and turtlenecks. Really, being a megalomaniac eccentric seems to be a selective factor for success as a Silicon Valley CEO. Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy have made their bids for Evil World Leader in the past, and Ray Noorda tried desperately until Novell’s board decided it wasn’t a good business strategy.
But, hey, you’re right, there is always the open source movement, where you have quiet, modest people like… uh… Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman.
I like my TiBook and despite a lot of aggravation from the changes in the Unix underpinnings of Jaguar, I like Jaguar, too. I’ve always been more interested in usability experience than being on the cutting edge; I think Microsoft is concerned with usability, but they go in directions I don’t. (I think their “inductive user interface” concept is wonderful in some applications–I wanted to introduce it to the FreeBSD-based product I was working on–but it’s really not appropriate at an OS level.)
And for the record, I have a small case of the paint peeling problem, and that is a design flaw. On the flip side, I’ve never had permanent marks left on the screen by the keyboard, the screen hasn’t warped, DVDs and CDs have been fine playing, and–other than the lighter-colored paint!–the machine hasn’t proved particularly fragile. I have to wonder if people are subjecting theirs to excessive abuse. (I’m sure they’d say “no,” but a lot of people do very silly things with products and insist the product should have been designed to protect them from themselves. It’s good to design products to do that as much as possible, but let’s face it–if you put effort into bending a 13″ long, less-than-1/4″-thick LCD screen wrapped in thin metal, even unintentional effort, it’s going to bend for you.
(“Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” “Well, stop doing that.”)
From the Article: Other World Computing began bundling a product called DVD Enabler with its external Mercury Pro DVD-R/RW FireWire drive. DVD Enabler modified iDVD so the application would save completed DVDs to a FireWire-connected drive.
They are NOT selling a patched version of Apple’s software. When you buy a third-party DVD drive, the patch lets iDVD save data to the DVD. Apple’s iDVD unpatched ignores all DVD’s but the “official” Apple DVD in order to force sales of new Apple computers, rather than upgrading with an external add-on unit.
MM
From Xian:
The display part is highly incorrect. The last four generation PowerMac G4 systems come with video cards that have both ADC and VGA connectors. The new units come with cards that have ADC and DVI-I and *INCLUDE* a DVI to VGA adapter cable.
Well yes, they do. But that wasn’t really my point. My point was that not ALL Macs come w/VGA adapters (would there be a market for 3rd party adapters if so?), and that this is something that a company with a devious advertising campaign could capitalize on.
If someone buys a used Mac off ebay so that they can upgrade and play around w/this new wonder OSX they’re hearing so much about, are they guarenteed that their new/used Mac will output to VGA. Apparently not!
Thus a good commercial would highlight this. Or at least could… It’d be one customers testimonial, but it would be an effective one (potentially much more damaging than the commercials that Apple’s currently running wherein they’re showing how you can be like the dorks on camera and spend tons “just so it works” (rather than learn the basics of computer usage and making what you currently own work just as well for yourself).
From Jay:Mr. Cancelled, not only are you wrong about monitors, but there are tons of Mac freeware and shareware, for both OS 9 and OS X. Go to versiontracker.com. It sounds like you are just plain unhappy though and wish you had a Wintel puter.
Another monitor/VGA comment. Whoo! You guys have totally disproved all of my points by focusing on one small issue (and one which I stand by).
Good work guys!
My comment(s) were much more about Apples PR, their image, and how their more recent moves could be used against them. I’ll be sure to specifically spell out such comments in the future.
And Jay… There’s not nearly as much freeware for the Mac as there is for the PC. Largely, I believe, due to the fact that current purchasers of Macintosh typically have money to burn.
If I know that demographically Apple’s userbase is of a higher income bracket than say… Any other personal computer user, and I know that said userbase is tiny when compared to say… Windows, than I know there’s a much better chance of my being able to sell what I probably couldn’t give away for free on the PC (due to there being so many alternative choices on the PC, many of which are free).
Same with Linux…
I stand by my comments: Apple’s created a giant money pit for rich people to feel elitist with.
Do I want an OSX box to play with? Yes.
Will I buy one? Not while they cost as much as a decent used car, or a house downpayment. So for the foreseeable future, the answer’d be “no”. -Unless again, some rich Apple fan wants to give me a box to change my mind. (I could be a very nice PR machine with the right incentive…)
8)=
Do I want a wintel box (as per Jays comment)? No, I currently own several. I also have a Linux box, a BeOS machine, and a QNX setup… What was your point again?
that last post is… I don’t know..
??
where does one begin?
Nah, forget it.
CattBeMac: That is exactly what Microsoft is doing now with the OEMs, and is trying to force the issue even further!
It is quite different. You could use different hardware with Microsoft apps, as long you don’t take out one MS app and replace it with a competitor.