AppleSoft and TED

So what's up with Apple? For a company with the public image of being the David versus Microsoft's Goliath, are they really that different?

Take iTunes and .mp3s; my fresh out of the box Nano skips when playing variable bit rate .mp3s. Ditto with the Shuffle. These are the same .mp3s that worked great on my previous Mini. After some extensive research, I've concluded that Apple has known about the problem for a long time, but has done nothing to correct it as a way to drive users towards it's proprietary AAC format. So, I've had to recode all of my songs into unprotected AACs, and now they work fine. However, this has been a horrible experience and makes me very leery of buying an iPod in the future. I love my iPod and iTunes is great, but this kind of explicit lock-in is stifling and claustrophobic. At least Microsoft's Zune can play my friggin .mp3s (and unprotected AACs for that matter).

Next case, iTunes for Linux. Why does this not exist? I'm been eyeballing Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com) for my next OS, but this may be a deal breaker. My theory is that Apple wants OSX to be seen as the only viable alternative to Windows and it's leveraging its killer ap to attract customers through a halo effect while locking out Linux. Ditto for the lack of Zune for Linux. Lame.

Lastly, Apple's new 'DRM free' iTunes tracks come with a watermark of your name and email address. This makes sense to a certain degree. DRM has been a complete failure and watermarking allows copyright holders to track the pirating of their material. However, Apple wasn't transparent about this technology with the public, and thus looks more and more like big brother than a hammer toting rebel.

Meanwhile, The Stranger (www.thestranger.com) linked me to TED (www.ted.com), the annual Technology, Entertainment, and Design conference in Monterey, CA. Their site is crammed full of fascinating speeches by bright minds including Chris Anderson (The Long Tail), Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), Bill Clinton (Oxford), Richard Dawkins (Oxford author of The God Delusion), Dan Gilbert (Stumbling on Happiness), Jane Goodall, Al Gore, Bjorn Lomborg (The Skeptical Environmentalist), Burt Ratan (XPrize), and of course Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google fame. I cannot plug this enough. These are some really thought provoking videos and a wonderful way to look a few years into the future.