Tech Goes Boom

Apple's Response to French DRM Law

As you may know, France is close to passing a law which makes it legal to break DRM to ensure interoperability with other devices. Here's Apple's response:

If this happens, legal music sales will plummet just when legitimate alternatives to piracy are winning over customers.

Of course, this is negative speculation on Apple's part. It's hard to see how legal music sales would decline simply because DRM can be removed from the files. Apple already has a built in circumvention in iTunes in the form of burning CDs which can be ripped back to MP3. There are also a number of programs for removing the DRM from tracks that already exist. And of course, this is just like saying "if people can rip music from their CDs, they'll stop buying music". DRM has never been proven a hinderance to piracy. It's about controlling markets, not preventing piracy.

iPod sales will likely increase as users freely load their iPods with "interoperable" music which cannot be adequately protected. Free movies for iPods should not be far behind in what will rapidly become a state-sponsored culture of piracy

Considering that when iPods were introduced, Apple built the product and brand on the ability of users to pull music from their CDs, this is a red herring. As Apple itself has said time and again, they don't make money off of the music, the iTunes music store is there to drive iPod sales. Apple is trying to come off here as a disinterested 3rd party arguing for the protection of rights holders, but it's clear that the closed iTunes/iPod ecosystem is something they want to protect if for nothing else than to assure the music industry that they are a safe online partner for music sales.

Macbook Pro Short Battery Life

Looks like Jason O'Grady over at the Powerpage has gotten his hands on a MacBook Pro, and tested out the battery life. End Result? About the same as the G4 powerbook: 2 hours 51 minutes. But does it burn your legs?! Link

Genesys based IDE to USB 2 Cable

Yesterday while at Fry's Electronics, I picked up what looked like a very useful little gadget, an IDE to USB 2 cable. The packaging is really generic but looks pretty much like this one. While it didn't have any stated Mac support, I figured it must just be using USB mass storage, and the OS would support it. For $21 it was worth experimenting with given that it would be a great alternative to an external case.

Turns out it needs a driver on Macs, and unfortunately the driver on the Disc doesn't work in 10.3 or 10.4. I searched around for updated drivers, but couldn't find anything. I almost went for the return, but decided to look into it more closely.

Turns out there's a little Genesys bridge in the cable, but they don't supply drivers that I could find on their website. After digging around online for a while looking for anything related to Genesys and Mac OS X, I found the updated 2.3 version of the driver that works with 10.4. Here's a copy in case any googlers are looking for it. GeneIOUSBIDE 2.3

This allows the cable to function as you would expect. Jumper the drive as a master, plug it into power and into your USB port an it mounts as one would expect. Benchmarking the drive turning in a pretty anemic 7MB/Sec, vs my older USB drive case that turns in 10MB/sec. That same case also has firewire, and clocks in 30MB/sec over that interface.

So the cost of convenience in this case is a pretty hefty loss in speed. Worth it in many cases depending on how much information you have to transfer.

Some people report speeds in the 20MB/sec range on cables of this sort, but this one is obviously not capable of that. But I still consider it a good buy for $21.

Update: Found it! Here's the real linkage.

MacWorld 2006 Reactions

Here's my take on the new Intel Macs:

MacBook Pro:

Bigger Brighter Screen - Always welcome.

ExpressCard - this looks like a big plus, but people with legacy PCMCIA cards are going to bummed.

No Firewire 800 - Yikes!

Faster - Real world speed is probably not going to be anywhere near 4x as fast, but it's going to be a huge leap from the G4 powerbooks.

Trackpad - Looks like they're using the trackpad from the 17“ powerbook on this guy. I don't like the wider trackpad myself, but I guess it keeps with the aspect ratio of the display better.

New Power Adapter - This is a big step forward. No more broken power adapter tips!

Built in iSight - Not sure how good the quality is, but this is a cool feature.

Remote - Another nice addition, especially if the remote will work with Keynote or Powerpoint. I can definitely see some 3rd party applications for remote controlling.

Video Card - 256MB of video ram in a laptop is a dream. This should really make dealing with pro apps a lot better.

The MacBook seems like a stopgap intel powerbook aimed mostly at mobile power users. I think there's a case change coming that will include a smaller replacement for the 12” and a revised 15“ and 17” at that time. That's my only explanation for why they wouldn't release a 12“ and 17” at the same time. Oh, and MacBook is a stupid name. I can't believe Apple's marketing group couldn't come up with something better. Was this a decision on the part of his Steveness?

Intel iMac:
Not a lot of new features here except for the new intel chips and new video chipset. I guess I'm surprised by how little performance has improved with the new chips. One has to wonder how the Intel Core Dual fares against a Dual Core G5. To be sure, the new iMac will be a lot faster than the G5 iMac, but most of that difference seems to come from the dual core more than the speed of the intel chip itself.

Given that observation, one has to wonder if the reason the G5 desktops haven't been replaced is because the Quad G5 currently smokes a dual Core Dual (say that 3 times fast) system, heat be damned.

Going forward, a lot is going to depend on how well applications take advantage of dual processors, and threading in general. Also, a lot of vendors are going to have to get their applications ported over to universal binaries to see those excellent speed benefits.

Over-all, it's a decent, if small start. I'm looking forward to seeing revised desktop machines this summer.

Great Gmail Tip

Kevin Gunn has a great tip to help you filter your incoming gmail. Simply at a tag to your e-mail with a + after your address such as johndoe+ebay@gmail.com. The e-mail will still be delivered to johndoe@gmail.com and now you can filter based on that address.

Use this to easily filter email for specific purposes like paying bills, or to track down who's selling your e-mail address to spammers.

Lawsuits and Listening to Customers

So Apple is now silently including a case with the iPod nano. This is undoubtedly a reaction to the class action lawsuits being brought against them for how easily the nano scratches.

Apple's constant stonewalling of customers has been a frustration of mine for quite some time. In the past, Apple could safely deny issues because customers had no real way of getting a hold of one another. Apple would call it a few isolated instances, blow it off, and for the most part get away with it. There were lawsuits, but they were few and far between, and usually were brought years after the original issue surfaced.

Well, no more. The power of blogs, which Apple really really hates, has connected their dissatisfied customers and those customers are making Apple listen. Now we have a class action suit because Apple didn't think it was a big deal, and refused to listen to customers who obviously thought it was a big deal. Walt freakin' Mossberg thought it was a big deal, but Apple still stonewalled.

Some may say a class action lawsuit is only going to benefit the lawyers, not the customers with scratched nanos. That may be the case in the short term, but in the long term, Apple is finally learning that they need to listen to their customer's problems and react to them in a way that makes the customer feel heard and respected instead of minimizing their issues and dismissing them as crazy.

Still Waiting for a nano Case?

Apple's still dragging their feet on delivering the nano Tubes, and most people won't be shipping cases for the nano until the end of October.

Tired of keeping my nano in a ziplock bag to prevent scratches, I did what any sane person would, I went to China. Well... figuratively speaking anyway.

On ebay, a search for “nano skin” will yield a great number of Chinese sellers who are already shipping cases for under $10.

I got mine in last week and it's a good quality product and came with a screen protector. If you're tired of waiting, I would definitely recommend checking these guys out.