Brett Sher's Profile

Despite their success with the iPod, I doubt that Apple will ever dominate the market for smart phones, personal computers, and especially business computers. While they certainly stand to gain significantly in all three areas, market-share increases will stall at a point well shy of monopoly. Apple tends to limit features and configurations to those most commonly needed, and caters to upscale customers willing to pay for ease of use and elegance. Apple can't be all things to all people, nor should they try. There will always be customers who want complete flexibility, or have needs that Apple refuses to address. Some people will always resist a solution that relies on a single hardware supplier. Others are attracted to the cheapest cost products even if they have to add their own labor and expertise to get them working satisfactorily. And there is much inertia, as people tend to keep using the technology they are most familiar with regardless of the potential benefits of switching to Apple. Some people will simply avoid Apple out of principle as they perceive the company as arrogant and its users to be hoodwinked zealots. So while I don't fear Apple becoming the next Microsoft, I do look forward to Apple earning the respect and rewards they are entitled to.

The iPod Hi-Fi did a few things better than most competing "mini" sound systems: It played louder, deeper, and with less distortion and overall coloration. Apparently, this wasn't enough to offset its other shortcomings. Apple could have refined the design with a 2.0 product, but I think they didn't want to compete directly with the 3rd-party manufacturers who have since released systems with improved sound.

I strongly disagree. To call an iPhone a Mac is to create expectations that the iPhone can never fulfill. While the iPhone runs a form of OS-X, the user interface is different enough from the Mac's UI that it is absurd to call it a Mac. You can't load a standard Mac application on the iPhone, nor would it make sense to, as the mouseless/cursorless iPhone UI is not suited for it.

Your article makes an excellent point. Most people won't be aware they don't own their music until it is too late. Unlike music subscription services, iTunes doesn't continuously "phone home" to enable downloaded tracks. Once a device is authorized for your account, it stays that way. If the iTunes store shut down tomorrow, your DRM'd tracks would continue to play on the authorized computers and iPods that they now do. But *only* those authorized devices... and there's the rub. iTunes users should already be backing up their purchased music library in case their hard disc fails. But the backed up files are still tied to the authorized devices. In order to fully preserve their investment, people should be using iTunes to burn plain audio CDs of all their purchased music. It's a lot of work, but if the worst comes to happen, these CDs could be re-ripped and loaded onto other devices without restriction (albeit with some audio degradation from recompression). Keep in mind that iTunes provides no similar capability for backing up non-DRM'd versions of purchased videos. By the way, call me old-school, but I don't buy digital downloads (with or without DRM). I prefer purchasing physical media which is full-fidelity, tangible, collectable, and resalable. Perhaps if the price dropped by a factor of 10, I'd consider downloads a reasonable value.