Since I got my iPhone, I’ve been buying a lot of TV shows on iTunes, so I can carry them with me and watch them wherever I am. Most of the time that watching is done when I’m in my room, right before bed (I don’t have a TV in the bedroom right now). However, the freedom of watching a TV show or a movie when I’m out eating dinner (by myself, of course, that would just be rude in the face of other company), or waiting in line at some place, is quite priceless.

So I was a little disappointed when NBC decided to have a bit spat with iTunes, and decided to pull all of their shows off of iTunes by the end of the year. What really gets to me, is how senseless the arguments the media companies are raising against Apple. This doesn’t pertain to just NBC, but all media companies dealing with iTunes as a whole.

Think back to when Universal was negotiating with Apple for their new music agreement. Their argument was that they’re not making enough money from iTunes Music Store, they want more control over pricing. Similar arguments has been brought up over the years with Apple multiple times, and they’re all along the lines of more control over DRM, more control over pricing, more profit for the record labels. Time and time again they insist that they can’t make enough money from iTunes Music Store alone.

Yet, look what happened these past few months….

I know at least one person who’s not completely happy with the new iPod announcements. I have to agree at least in part, that the new iPods are not all that exciting. iPod Touch is really the only revolutionary product here, if you consider iPhone to be a completely different product category.

Here I think of all the announcements:

1. iPod Shuffle - Practically nothing new and worth mentioning at all.
2. iPod Nano - It’s FAT. I really don’t like the new look. Although I bet once I’ve held on in person, I’d be willing to put up with the new form factor. It is even slimmer and overall smaller than the current Nanos. The proportion of the click wheel to the width of the device is just… ugly. I wish they could’ve worked a little harder and done something else. I was really hoping for an iPod Nano-Touch type of device here. It’s still not a bad iPod, just underwhelming.
3. iPod Classic - Same ol’ same ol’ with bigger hard drive. I do find it funny that the iPod Classic’s hard drive is bigger than some of my friend’s computer hard drive. Nothing new, nothing exciting.
4. iPod Touch - Great device, but it’s not really that fresh since it’s just a stripped down iPhone. Like I said, I rather wished they would integrate Nano + Touch into some device that’s in between.

I’m sure Apple will still sell a ton of them, because no other MP3 player in the market has near the media…

This is the video clip from WWDC, so hilarious~

[youtube Bf5qZrFfQFg]

Enjoy!

When EMI announced that they were going to be offering DRM-free tracks on iTMS in May, I was pretty psyched to see that a major label has finally stepped forward and admitted that DRM doesn’t work. However, the month of May passed slowly, and I was somewhat paranoid that EMI would back out on the deal.

Finally, on the last day of May, iTunes has been updated to version 7.2 along with the arrival of “iTunes Plus”. DRM-less, 256kbps AAC files at last. I was excited enough to hop on right away and purchase 2 albums that has been sitting in my Amazon shopping cart for months (in their CD form, no less).

I’ve always been a very discerning audiophile, which only recently finally succumbed to the fact that keeping all of my music in Apple Lossless is really just a waste of hard drive space for a small (although still perceivable) quality gain. I have over thousands of dollars invested in pretty good audio equipments, most of which I no longer listen to on even a monthly basis anymore.

My Super Audio CD player is completely useless, as the format has died a painful and slow death. Now it is nothing more than a glorified CD changer that I never, ever bother to change. I have racks of CD’s that I don’t really want to deal with on my next move, only half of which has been ripped into MP3’s.

Fact of the matter is, there are only so many hours of entertainment…

Apple announced today that Leopard is going to be delayed (via TUAW) until October because of the focused effort in getting iPhone out in time.

Personally, I think the delay doesn’t really mean much. As much as I love to see a new OS from Apple, there’s nothing obviously wrong and needs to be improved in MacOS X now. Unless Leopard has some insane, awesome unknown trick up its sleeve, there aren’t any feature that I have to have now. There certainly weren’t any new features introduced by Vista that makes me say, “I wish MacOS had this…”

Getting iPhone out on-time, and without bugs is probably the most important issue to Apple’s continued success at the moment. A bad iPhone launch could set back years of good will that Apple has built up. It’s funny how much it takes to rebuild a company (dating back to Steve Job’s return and the cute multi-color iMacs), and how easy it is to destroy it and see it crumple (the entire 1990’s for Apple).

Courtesy of Time Magazine online:

The iPhone breaks two basic axioms of consumer technology. One, when you take an application and put it on a phone, that application must be reduced to a crippled and annoying version of itself. Two, when you take two devices—such as an iPod and a phone—and squish them into one, both devices must necessarily become lamer versions of themselves. The iPhone is a phone, an iPod, and a mini-Internet computer all at once, and contrary to Newton—who knew a thing or two about apples—they all occupy the same space at the same time, but without taking a hit in performance. In a way iPhone is the wrong name for it. It’s a handheld computing platform that just happens to contain a phone.

Read the whole article here.

It’s not typical for CES and Macworld to happen on the same week. Usually CES occurs a week before Macworld, and it was due to the weird calendar dates following New Years this year, that both events were held at the same time.

Well, I hope CES learned their lesson and never do this again. Apple just blew everyone away with the iPhone, coverages are all over the web, so I won’t repeat any of them here. I’ll just provide a few useful links to read up on all the jazz:

News.com
Engadget
Gizmodo

Of course, not the least:

Apple

Despite month of speculations, including many accurate ones, Apple *still* managed to just BLOW EVERYONE AWAY. Even with all the expectations and hype, they outdone all of them. No one cares about anything that’s going on at CES now, we’re all just counting our bills and waiting ’til June 2007.

Now that Windows Vista is shipping to enterprises along with a planned consumer release in January of 2007, you would think that all the major magazines are conjuring up their mega-features and 80 page reports on a much-delayed and somewhat trimmed-down Windows release. So on the lookout for the mega-issues of PCWorld, PCMag, and whatever else tickles your tech-geek fancy coming just around the corner. Meanwhile, the SuperSite for Windows has a very through and detailed review of Windows Vista which will quench your thirst for the meanwhile (and likely much more complete than what you’ll get out of those 80/50/30/15-page features).

As much as I adore Paul Thurrot (and that’s no sarcasm, I really do admire how much time & effort he put into giving us accurate & detailed information), I can’t help but note the enthusiasm and appreciation he has towards one of the “most important Windows release in years.” I mean, if you only release one major OS revision ever fives years, are there anything less important? However the review eschews every possible comparison to other existing operating system and turns a blind eye towards the alternatives. There’s much to be said about judging an OS release on its own merit, but the whole mega-multi-part review just reminds me of how much Windows Vista is just playing catch-up.

The most apparent example of this, is the 3d-accelerated UI of Vista. The Aero/Glass (I’m still not sure exactly how it’s branded, Aero Glass, Glass Aero? Aero,…

As I’ve mentioned in the “Yes, I’m a ’switcher‘” post, I’m a very recent convert to the Mac. Although I can’t quite identify myself as a pure convert, since I’ve had plenty of experience with Mac since childhood, throughout college & professionally. I just haven’t owned a Mac at home for the past decade and a half.

There are a lot of fear in switching to a new platform. Although going from Windows to Mac really isn’t that hard, a bit of a learning curve is involved in acclimation to the slight differences in their UI. Honestly, Windows has always emulated Mac, and then Mac emulated some parts of Window, it’s really not that hard to get accustomed. What is a bigger problem though, is getting replacement software for what you’re used to in Windows.

Here’s the good news, there is a plethora of budget to free Mac software that can probably cover everything you do in Windows, and in many cases, do it even better.

Mail, Address & Calendar
Most people has seen plenty of iTunes, heard about iMovie and iDVD in the barrage of Apple TV ads. I’m surprised at how many people who don’t know about the other very useful, and powerful software that Mac comes with.

Mail (sometimes called Mail.app to not confuse it with… well, mail) is the default email program shipped with Mac. It does look extremely simple and straight forward at first, but it does have a good amount of hidden…

The very first time I fell in love with a computer, was my brother’s Macintosh. This was way before Microsoft even had Windows 1.0 up and running. It opened my eyes to what the computing experience should be like versus what it was. The concept of a GUI, the usage of this odd little device called “mouse”, the chime as the Mac booted up was all so intuitive to me; so much so, that my brother was concerned with me breaking the computer for the first time. It wasn’t so much that I would spill drinks on it, but I knew how to use the Mac enough to really cause some damage to it, where I would never be able to even navigate my own way through DOS without his guidance.

Even then, I still faded away from Mac in the 90’s. The mid-90’s was a dark period for Apple. Steve Jobs was gone, and Apple stopped innovating on new technology, instead focused heavily on marketing and diluting their own product line by introducing a seemingly endless number of models that catered to no particular segments (well, they were supposed to, just never did a very good job at it). The only memorable about Apple during those periods were the endless informercials I would see on Sundays about their line of Performa, Quadra, Classic… so on & so forth.

After many happy years with Windows (and I do stress, that I was in fact, happy with Windows), I finally made…