Sunday, June 05, 2005
Apple moving to the Pentium to sell movie downloads is the most insane thing I've ever heard
The notion of Apple moving the Mac to Intel Pentium processors sounds insane enough on its own, right? Well, just wait to you hear the supposed reason why:
Wired Magazine seems to think that not only will Apple start shipping all Macs with Pentium processors, but it will do so because it wants to sell movie downloads and Hollywood will only allow it to happen if Apple switches to Pentium processors with Digital Rights Management embedded into them.
I'll give you a good twenty minutes or so to stop laughing.
Leander Kahney has a track record of writing some pretty good Mac-related stuff for Wired over the years, but this most recent article of his is simply the most insane thing I've ever heard in all the years that I've been following the Macintosh universe. Not stupid, mind you, but insane.
But I don't have to tell you that. An "iTunes Movie Store" would be a niche that would, at best, be worth only a fraction of the iTunes Music Store. Why? No video iPod. And that's because a video iPod would, at best, be an even smaller niche than the movie store would. So what we're talking about here, if we're to believe this hooey, is that Apple is going to drag its entire Macintosh lineup, which is still responsible for the majority of the company's revenue, through the muck of a transition to a whole different kind of processor just so Apple can then sell movie downloads to Mac users. In contrast, Apple would have no trouble selling movie downloads to Windows users, of course, because Windows users are all already using the Hollywood-approved Pentium-D processors.
Except that they aren't. Or at least ninety-nine percent of them aren't, anyway. How many Windows computers with Pentium-D chips have been sold so far? How many in the next year or two? How many hundreds of millions would have to be sold before even, let's say, a fourth of all the Windows computers out there had Pentium-D chips in them?
And we're supposed to believe that only those folks would be "allowed" to buy movie downloads? I guess everyone else out there would be left with no choice but to steal them. Let's not forget that unlike illegal music downloads, the idea of illegally downloading a movie is still an extremely rarified concept among the general populace (if you're the type who "everyone you know" is currently downloading movies, then you really need to get out more, because you've insulated yourself so thoroughly with the geekiest of geeks that you should probably just stop reading now).
Hollywood can't be stupid enough to go and popularize the idea of movie downloads, only to then limit the market to such a tiny fraction of the public that everyone else, upon finding out that they've been shut out of legal downloads, would then naturally look into the concept of illegal downloads, thus popularizing them to the point where Hollywood would finally have a piracy problem to the level that it currently only pretends to have.
An Apple-backed movie download service that was limited to people with Pentium-D processors in their computers would do Hollywood far more harm than good. And for Apple's part, it would be taking a small niche market and then limiting the market to even smaller niche within that niche. So the idea of a "Pentium-D only" movie store would just be stupid all around for everyone involved. But the idea of Apple moving to Intel just to be allowed to make the above mistake would just surreal.
For all we know, Apple might announce tomorrow that it's moving to Pentium processors, and there might even be actual, legitimate reasons out there for the move. If Steve decides he's making such a move, then I'll certainly listen to what he has to say about it before trying to send him down a river, as most other Mac users will likely want to. It's not necessarily an automatic mistake, like the Mac mini was. But when it comes to possible legitimate reasons for such a move, this movie download nonsense certainly isn't one of them. Apple moving all Macs to Pentuim chips just to sell movie downloads would be not unlike walking fifteen miles in the rain, past three other stores that sell the same item, just to buy something that you didn't even really want in the first place. If that's not the definition of insanity, I don't know what is.
Oh, and one more thing...even if Apple were to switch to the Pentium-D just so Macs would have processors with Digital Rights Management built into them, and even if over the next several years there are in fact enough new computers sold to the point where the Pentium-D became commonplace, what would happen to someone who bought a new Windows PC that contained a processor from, say, AMD?
I suppose AMD could just add Digital Rights Management to their current processor designs. But come to think of it, wouldn't that same trick work for Apple and its current processors as well?
The notion of Apple moving the Mac to Intel Pentium processors sounds insane enough on its own, right? Well, just wait to you hear the supposed reason why:
Wired Magazine seems to think that not only will Apple start shipping all Macs with Pentium processors, but it will do so because it wants to sell movie downloads and Hollywood will only allow it to happen if Apple switches to Pentium processors with Digital Rights Management embedded into them.
I'll give you a good twenty minutes or so to stop laughing.
Leander Kahney has a track record of writing some pretty good Mac-related stuff for Wired over the years, but this most recent article of his is simply the most insane thing I've ever heard in all the years that I've been following the Macintosh universe. Not stupid, mind you, but insane.
But I don't have to tell you that. An "iTunes Movie Store" would be a niche that would, at best, be worth only a fraction of the iTunes Music Store. Why? No video iPod. And that's because a video iPod would, at best, be an even smaller niche than the movie store would. So what we're talking about here, if we're to believe this hooey, is that Apple is going to drag its entire Macintosh lineup, which is still responsible for the majority of the company's revenue, through the muck of a transition to a whole different kind of processor just so Apple can then sell movie downloads to Mac users. In contrast, Apple would have no trouble selling movie downloads to Windows users, of course, because Windows users are all already using the Hollywood-approved Pentium-D processors.
Except that they aren't. Or at least ninety-nine percent of them aren't, anyway. How many Windows computers with Pentium-D chips have been sold so far? How many in the next year or two? How many hundreds of millions would have to be sold before even, let's say, a fourth of all the Windows computers out there had Pentium-D chips in them?
And we're supposed to believe that only those folks would be "allowed" to buy movie downloads? I guess everyone else out there would be left with no choice but to steal them. Let's not forget that unlike illegal music downloads, the idea of illegally downloading a movie is still an extremely rarified concept among the general populace (if you're the type who "everyone you know" is currently downloading movies, then you really need to get out more, because you've insulated yourself so thoroughly with the geekiest of geeks that you should probably just stop reading now).
Hollywood can't be stupid enough to go and popularize the idea of movie downloads, only to then limit the market to such a tiny fraction of the public that everyone else, upon finding out that they've been shut out of legal downloads, would then naturally look into the concept of illegal downloads, thus popularizing them to the point where Hollywood would finally have a piracy problem to the level that it currently only pretends to have.
An Apple-backed movie download service that was limited to people with Pentium-D processors in their computers would do Hollywood far more harm than good. And for Apple's part, it would be taking a small niche market and then limiting the market to even smaller niche within that niche. So the idea of a "Pentium-D only" movie store would just be stupid all around for everyone involved. But the idea of Apple moving to Intel just to be allowed to make the above mistake would just surreal.
For all we know, Apple might announce tomorrow that it's moving to Pentium processors, and there might even be actual, legitimate reasons out there for the move. If Steve decides he's making such a move, then I'll certainly listen to what he has to say about it before trying to send him down a river, as most other Mac users will likely want to. It's not necessarily an automatic mistake, like the Mac mini was. But when it comes to possible legitimate reasons for such a move, this movie download nonsense certainly isn't one of them. Apple moving all Macs to Pentuim chips just to sell movie downloads would be not unlike walking fifteen miles in the rain, past three other stores that sell the same item, just to buy something that you didn't even really want in the first place. If that's not the definition of insanity, I don't know what is.
Oh, and one more thing...even if Apple were to switch to the Pentium-D just so Macs would have processors with Digital Rights Management built into them, and even if over the next several years there are in fact enough new computers sold to the point where the Pentium-D became commonplace, what would happen to someone who bought a new Windows PC that contained a processor from, say, AMD?
I suppose AMD could just add Digital Rights Management to their current processor designs. But come to think of it, wouldn't that same trick work for Apple and its current processors as well?
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