sydneystephen's Profile

  • Aug 27, 2007
  • 124
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Latest comments made by: sydneystephen

  • @Thomas This product strengthens Apple in at least the following ways: - $500million extra revenue in a weekend - An impressive debut in a new, and very large, market - 6 months of free publicity has made Apple "THE" brand to desire - Steve Jobs is now the man to watch: business leaders everywhere are looking at Apple to see how they achieve such success The activation issues were minor, and if there have been reports about bugs or security gaps, they have been buried in the rave reviews of this product. iPhone has been a masterful stroke. One can only wonder what Apple can possibly do next. Whatever it is, you can be sure that Steve Jobs has still more tricks up his sleeve...
    sydneystephen had this to say on Jul 07, 2007 Posts: 124
    Review Part 1 of 2: The iPhone
  • I'm not sure iTunes is about selling Macs - its perhaps fairer to say that it is just one of the ways Apple has to hook you into the Apple experience. iTunes is really about selling iPods, and now Apple TV, and even iPhone. But iTunes is also about selling music, at a profit - especially now with AAC tracks at a 30% premium... You could say that iTunes is Apple's content warrior. For some years now the IT world has been focused on content - Microsoft and others have been buying up all sorts of content providers with the view that owning the content meant owning the customer. Apple have approached this another way. They have become a retailer. iTunes is as much about retailing other people's content as the Apple stores are about retailing Apple's own stuff. So, instead of owning the content, Apple just delivers it. And in so doing Apple owns the market. It will be interesting to see if Apple can hold on to this market. But the iTunes store has such a huge market share in music, and is heading that way in TV and film, that it is probably nigh on impossible for anyone else to really get a competitive system off the ground. Look at Microsoft's problems with Zune - if Microsoft, with all that money, can't compete with the iTunes store then who can? In the meantime, the iPod halo effect is definitely working. I think that what most people have not realised is that consumers just don't change their PC's every 2-3 years. I was an early halo-effect-switcher, but it is only now that most of my friends are starting to switch to Mac. And they are - at a rate approaching 100%. I imagine Apple realise this. Mac growth is steady, even accelerating. And for Apple, the Mac is just one element (albeit a vital element) in a strategy which integrates the whole Apple experience. It doesn't matter how you engage with Apple - be it iPod, iTunes, Apple TV, Safari or Mac. In the end, Apple hope you will fully embrace the Apple approach. And you probably will.
    sydneystephen had this to say on Jun 13, 2007 Posts: 124
    How iTunes is Paving the Way For Switchers
  • Linux, or any other command driven interface, is fine for those who use their systems, and more or less every feature, every day. For the rest of us who dive into their computer systems in between other tasks, command line interfaces are hell on earth. Not only can I never remember the format of any command, but i spend half my life trying to figure out why a command doesn't work - inevitably because of a simple typo. I well understand that, for a user who has his or her head buried in the operating system day in, day out, it is probably second nature to type: svn import . file:///Users/myself/Development/svn/svn_exactly -m "initial import" --username myself ... but I leave out a slash, or miss a dash, or use single quotes instead of double quotes... And half an hour later i am still peering at the command wondering what the inevitable incomprehensible error message means. To add a new user, or install a new software package, I don't want to sit with a manual and type long-winded complex commands. I want to sit in front of an intuitive interface and follow the on-screen prompts. And since we're on the car analogy, i guess if Linux were a car, it would be an open wheeler racer with a crash gearbox, no mirrors, no carpet or soundproofing, and no mudguards... Fast perhaps. But not something you want to take the family out in...
    sydneystephen had this to say on Jun 13, 2007 Posts: 124
    The Problem of Staying Updated
  • Well you have to be optimistic, and you have to be in it for the long-term. As it so happens, Mac market share has finally got some oomph behind it and it seems it won't be long before Apple is in double digits... Of course, market share percentage is not the whole story. If you look at the personal user marketplace, Apple's market share has been rising rapidly. I am sure everyone has stories about friends who are buying a Mac for the first time, but here in Sydney, Mac fever is in full flight... Everyone, seemingly, is buying a Mac... When I first started reading this site 2 years ago, as an Apple newbie, most readers seemed oblivious to the trend. Now, with Apple's shareprice hitting new highs nearly every trading day, Applephiles are perhaps a bit more relaxed. Hats off to Steve for maintaining the faith. Its been a long hard road since 2002 - but, hey, its party time now! :-)
    sydneystephen had this to say on May 29, 2007 Posts: 124
    May 28, 2002: Mac Market Share Could Double!
  • Entourage is not a solution if you need to be able to archive your mail. not that archiving in outlook is any great shake but it is better than nothing. i still log into a windows machine to archive my mail and if i need to check one of my mail archives. if anyone has an alternate solution i would love to know of it...
    sydneystephen had this to say on Apr 27, 2007 Posts: 124
    The Macintosh Way: At Work
  • Ah yes. But you haven't experienced You Sychronise have you!! I synch a directory with all my documents, photos and other valuable bits to my servers so that they get backed up to tape. Yesterday, for no apparent reason, "You Sychronise" turned into "I delete" and deleted EVERY SINGLE F***ING FILE in my sych folder. All 3.4GB of it... Thankfully it realised its mistake and copied everything back down at 5pm - or started to... I saw it was copying in "the wrong direction" and cancelled it... Extra thankfully everything was in the trash. Every tried to restore 7,867 files from the trash? If Apple every want to get serious about corporate use of Macs they are going to have to provide tools to synch reliably to Windows servers. And if they havent got synch working to their own servers, that is truly a worry...
    sydneystephen had this to say on Apr 03, 2007 Posts: 124
    Is There TRUTH in Sync Services?
  • Ok, can somebody tell me, how any iPod owner is really better off with DRM-free music? I mean, how the f*** can you tell the difference until you want to do something vaguely illegal with the tracks you bought? And I don't want to hear the "But I have 37 computers (one in each room) and I want to play my music everywhere..." sort of excuse... Even then there is only the minor inconvenience of ripping a playlist... The iPod has apparently been driving iTunes sales - not the other way around. And, according to Apple (who have done studies - I know, I participated in one with a zillion questions about music purchases) 99.999999% of the music on our iPods is actually ripped from CD's we own (true enough in my case). So DRM really is a quick wank in the toilet block sort of issue - unless, again, you are determined to do something naughty with the tracks you purchase from iTunes... So it will be very interesting to see how many people pay the 30% premium for DRM-free music. I mean, really, for 99.999999% of the music on iTunes, will the extra bit-rate be any more noticeable than the absence of DRM? Perhaps it is just a big case of "let's call your bluff!". I mean, what will the Euro parliament be able to complain about if music is offered DRM-free and NOBODY BUYS IT. Now if you had a Zune that deleted all your music unless you connected it to a Windows Vista machine every 27 minutes...
    sydneystephen had this to say on Apr 03, 2007 Posts: 124
    Apple To Sell DRM Music? Say It Ain't So!
  • "I believe Apple has nothing to lose if it opens up Fairplay." Except the integrity of Fairplay. Lets face it, it wouldn't really make any difference to what people will buy. The iPod will still be the best seller it has been for years. But Apple will have a lot more difficulty maintaining the integrity of Fairplay. On at least one occasion, Apple had to do some fancy footwork to alter Fairplay when it was reverse-engineered. Easy to do if you control the whole kaboodle - much harder to do if you have to get 50 partners to re=engineer and then force download a firmware update to change the encryption algorithms. And why should they?
    sydneystephen had this to say on Feb 26, 2007 Posts: 124
    Why Apple Doesn't Need the iTunes Store
  • @Beeblebrox "It also harms consumers by raising the cost of switching to another brand of player by $1 for every song purchased either in a music store." Just exactly how many users have switched from iPod to, well, what else is there exactly??? And what percentage of these users had more than 1 CD load of purchased tracks? And why couldn't these users just burn their playlists to CD and upload them to their Zune or whatever? It is always the same - the arguments are always specious. Really Beeblebrox. I haven't been here for a while and I had really hoped you would have grown up in my absence...
    sydneystephen had this to say on Feb 26, 2007 Posts: 124
    Why Apple Doesn't Need the iTunes Store
  • @Beeblebrox "Apple wraps ALL songs purchased in the iTunes store in DRM, even if the labels or artists don’t want them to or haven’t asked them to." Really? I would like to see examples of this with appropriate links for verification.
    sydneystephen had this to say on Feb 26, 2007 Posts: 124
    Why Apple Doesn't Need the iTunes Store
  • @Ben Hall "selling songs with DRM that locks them into one brand of player is unethical" Hey Ben. Have to disagree with you matey. There are lots ofg download sites - hell you can even buy music from WalMart. If you don't have an Apple iPod, don't buy your music from Apple. And, hey, you can always buy a CD. Apple iTunes supports the iPod: Remember that Apple have a client base of 80% of US mp3 players that they need to support. iTunes does that job superbly well. And no-one else was doing it very well... In order to provide downloads Apple had to commit to DRM. The rest is in Steve's letter... Apple is not obliged to support people who dont use iPods. Why should they? Those people can use another download site or buy a CD. It surely is a case of there being the old ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM. The people who complain the loudest are the ones with the most dishonest motives.
    sydneystephen had this to say on Feb 26, 2007 Posts: 124
    Why Apple Doesn't Need the iTunes Store
  • @WAWA Brilliant... I think... Or mad... Well, one or the other...
    sydneystephen had this to say on Feb 26, 2007 Posts: 124
    Why Apple Doesn't Need the iTunes Store
  • Ahem. Would someone persuade me that there is actually a valid reason for the average iTunes customer to be in the least bit inconvenienced by Fairplay? I hear all the noise - but I suspect that, apart from a desire to cheat the copyright holders of their rightful due, Apple's implementation is invisible to Joe Blow. And, my dear friend Beeblebrox, who started off so rationally - I see you are up to your old tricks matey... "n your brainwashed brain" indeed. What sort of language is that?
    sydneystephen had this to say on Feb 26, 2007 Posts: 124
    Why Apple Doesn't Need the iTunes Store
  • Damn. I use Indesign...
    sydneystephen had this to say on Feb 19, 2007 Posts: 124
    Tangerine Color Management is a Designer's Dream
  • Check out the link http://www.macnn.com/blogs/?p=182 that our friend schininis (above) has brought to our attention. This won't replace a keyboard for keyboard-intensive applications, but it would make a great extra input device. Essentially, one device with various attachments, connected by USB. Maybe. Looks expensive. And I don't think we are ready for a keyboard-free notebook just yet...
    sydneystephen had this to say on Jan 18, 2007 Posts: 124
    The New 12" MacBook Will Have an iPhone-like Interface