News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
NBC will be withdrawing its video products from the iTunes store, and Universal has refused to sign a long-term contract for its music. At the heart of it all is Apple’s pricing scheme—with the producers wanting higher prices.
Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…
UPDATE: Ars Technica has some more information on this topic, including a rumor that Apple wants to decrease the price of videos.
Apple has announced a $200 price cut on its iPhones, as well as a revamped line of iPods. If you bought an iPhone within the last two weeks, you can get the price difference refunded. If you’re not eligible for the refund, however, it looks like Apple is giving out a $100 store credit.
Link: http://ap.google.com/…
(via Kim Komando)
Apple has now sold over 3 billion songs from its iTunes store (which has only been in business since 2003). That’s pretty impressive.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
I’ve seen some pretty good “Will It Blend” videos, but this one takes the cake. Who would have thought an iPhone could be reduced to a few metal scraps and some black powder. (Here’s an alternate link if the video on the web site doesn’t work.)
Link: http://www.willitblend.com/…
(via Slashdot)
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the bane of all music-lovers and has caused its share of problems with Sony. But two recent news items indicate that DRM may soon be a thing of the past. First, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has publicly stated that he is willing to consider an iTunes price increase, but only if the labels agree to drop copy protection. Second, Amazon.com has signed a deal with EMI (one of the major labels) to sell their music online without DRM. These are good signs and may mark the beginning of the end of music copy protection.
On May 16th, Engadget posted a blog entry stating there would be significant delays for upcoming Apple products. Seven minutes later, massive sell-offs caused Apple’s stock to drop by over $4 a share, reducing its market capitalization by $4 billion. Here at Chad’s News, we monitor Engadget on a weekly basis for stories of interest, but I had no idea they were –that– influential. What’s worse, however, is that their source (an email from inside Apple) turned out to be a hoax. The email was from within Apple’s mail system, but the facts were incorrect.
Note that the two stories below differ in their facts by about a dollar of stock price drop, so you be the judge.
Link #1: http://www.techcrunch.com/…
(via digg)
Link #2: http://www.washingtonpost.com/…
(via Kim Komando)
Apple has officially announced the (horrendously overpriced but revolutionary) iPhone. From the article, the iPhone “allows users to listen to music, make phone calls, send text messages and e-mail, surf the Web, and take and upload photos, all using a wide touch screen and a single button.”
Link: http://news.com.com/…
In the first week or so after making 75 of its movies available on iTunes, Disney sold an impressive 125,000 copies. Total revenue was $1 million.
Letterman’s take on the exploding laptop batteries manufactured by Sony (and used by Apple/Dell, among others). Watch this through to the end.
This is the story of an ex-contractor at Apple who sneaked into the building every day and continued to work on a cancelled project for months. The finished product was eventually included as part of the Mac OS. It’s amazing what you can get away with when they can’t fire you (because you’re not an employee).
Recently Apple shocked the world by announcing they were switching over to Intel processors. Now they’ve released software, dubbed “Boot Camp,” allowing users to run both Windows and OS X on Apple hardware, in dual-boot mode. So we can have the best of both worlds. What would really be nice, though, is if they ported OS X so it could run on regular PCs.
“Everything you wanted to know about installing Windows and running it on a Mac is right here.”
Looking to buy one of those hot, new iPod Nanos? You may want to wait, as there have been some problems with the initial batch. First and foremost is that the screen is ridiculously easy to scratch (to the point of unreadability). Second, Apple has admitted that some of the screens are flawed and will easily crack.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
Update: Here is a better link for the scratching problem.
