Apples And Oranges

I've been scanning the tech sites the last few days, searching in vain for a hint that Apple might cut the price of its high-end 60GB iPod (The precious! We wants it!). No such luck. In fact, the current season of Macexpo announcements has mostly served to pump up Steve Jobs' PR. But there's plenty of room for reallly ill-informed speculation about the Mac OS operating system, which is much less well understood than the iPod by business journalists.

Take this little snippet from a Business Week story:

"But Apple has an intriguing new possibility now - license Windows, and have it run in Macs alongside the Mac OS.

[snip]

'I think it would be a very smart move,' says Mike Kwatinetz, a venture capitalist with Azure Partners who was a highly regarded PC industry analyst during the 1990s. 'As it is, it would be very difficult for Apple to get double-digit market share. Having a dual-OS Mac might change that.'"

Sounds like this pundit has been out of the business for quite a while. For there exists a way for us Mac users to run PC programmes for some time. It's called Virtual PC, and it hogs system resources like a bastard and is a tad unstable. But it exists, and is just about enough for those people with niche windows applications or the need to connect to PC-based online work software.

On a related note, we've been following this iTunes ministore story vaguely closely. The nub of this is that there is this new iTunes music store that opens up with iTunes whether you ask it to or not. Quite freaked me out, since I don't want to use the store, it looks ugly, and codes my songs in a way restricts how I use them. It seems to be relatively easy to hide the store, but I think that the relentless, rather gaudy, and intrusive marketing is very un-Apple. And if it is telling a remote, faceless corporation (the data collector, not Apple), how exquisite my musical taste is, I will be very upset.