Sunday, October 19, 2003
The trouble with Apple
Since I had been reading about Apple's new Itunes for Windows, I decided to try it out yesterday and downloaded about 11 songs. First, the good news. With a great interface etc, Itunes is extremely user-friendly software. I could authorise a transaction and download a song, all in about 15 seconds over my broadband connection. Now, the bad news. Apple uses a standard caled M4P, which is a variant of MPEG-4 with embedded DRM. Thanks to DRM, you cannot really convert to any other format like MP3, WMA etc. And M4P doesn't play on any player other than the Ipod.
Effectively, it seems like a strategy to sell Ipods, which are good machines, but are hopelessly over-priced -- $100 to $200 more expensive than similar players like the Creative Nomad Zen and so on. So, if you dont own an Ipod, I would not recommend the Itunes service. Of course, one can always hope that Apple comes to its senses (or some hacker in eastern europe breaks the M4P DRM) and makes it an open standard. Else, they will always remain a fringe player, the way it has been in the computer market for long. That would be a pity since I think Itunes is rather impressive but for this major snafu. For now, Apple had lost my business and I am going to head to Buymusic, Napster, Musicmatchor some such to get my music.
Effectively, it seems like a strategy to sell Ipods, which are good machines, but are hopelessly over-priced -- $100 to $200 more expensive than similar players like the Creative Nomad Zen and so on. So, if you dont own an Ipod, I would not recommend the Itunes service. Of course, one can always hope that Apple comes to its senses (or some hacker in eastern europe breaks the M4P DRM) and makes it an open standard. Else, they will always remain a fringe player, the way it has been in the computer market for long. That would be a pity since I think Itunes is rather impressive but for this major snafu. For now, Apple had lost my business and I am going to head to Buymusic, Napster, Musicmatchor some such to get my music.
