Zorba the Hutt ([info]zorbathut) wrote,
2007-01-15 20:41:00
This is why I am starting to lean away from Apple again, without ever really having leaned entirely towards them.

I hate the recent DRM surge. DRM is awful, awful stuff as far as I'm concerned, and I'm saying this as someone who plans to make a living in content - the very thing DRM is supposed to protect.

Well, news flash, it doesn't. DRM does not and can not work - you'd have to destroy a good chunk of mathematics to make it function. (Yes, that's how fundamentally it's flawed.) It's the same thing that Microsoft has been attacked for repeatedly. The big companies don't want you to own anything, you see. They want you to lease your property, so you pay for it over and over again. They want to be able to modify it at will. (Oh, you liked having a car that goes more than 50mph? Well, yours doesn't anymore. Sorry. We changed it. But you can buy the new model if you want - it does!) They don't want you to be able to sell it, or give it away, or modify it to suit your needs, or even protect it from loss. They just want you to buy, over and over and over again.

For a while I thought Apple was going to avoid this. They had good technical reasons to lock down OSX to only work on their own hardware - drivers are hard, and much of Windows' instability is due to flaky third-party drivers. So I can understand that.

But then Apple came up with something called iTunes, and realized how much money was available in it, and now . . . well, now they're selling a phone for six hundred dollars that you fundamentally won't actually own.

(For the legal details: yes, you'll "own" the phone. And if you try installing any software on it that Apple hasn't provided, you can be thrown in jail. Yes, literally. Enjoy your new phone.)

I guess I'm just not that interested. If I could install my own software, that would be cool. If I could copy iTunes music, that would be quite neat. As it is . . . well, I buy music, but only if it's not sold by an RIAA member. I even buy downloadable music, but only if I can copy it to my other computers and systems without fighting with it. And I'm buying fewer and fewer PC games, because almost every one requires me to keep the CD in the drive even though it doesn't read any data from that CD, and many of them refuse to run entirely because they don't like the software I have installed.

Microsoft doesn't own my computer. Apple doesn't own my computer. Neither do the RIAA, the MPAA, or the US Government. And if any of those groups try to tell me what I'm allowed to do with it, they can go screw themselves.

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  • 9 comments

[info]slyfoot

January 16 2007, 05:30:51 UTC 5 years ago

Agreed!!

Ah, I think I will stick with Linux.

[info]janeoftrades

January 16 2007, 06:40:01 UTC 5 years ago

Free market capitalism. The public will speak with money. We can only hope that the public is smart enough to realize how much they'd be missing by buying that.

[info]supersat

January 16 2007, 08:09:35 UTC 5 years ago

Unfortunately, lots of people already buy locked-down phones and don't seem to care.

[info]lifftchi

January 16 2007, 08:28:31 UTC 5 years ago

Hmm. Well, I got the phone they were giving away with my cell plan. On the one hand, I approve of increased freedom. On the other, I don't want to give the cell people any more money than I have to.

So, really, which is better? If I paid more overall, they'd still be profiting, even if I got the dubious benefits of being able to do new things with my cell phone (and probably paying more for data transfer.)

[info]zorbathut

January 16 2007, 08:33:50 UTC 5 years ago

In my opinion, it all comes down to what you got the phone for. If you got it to make phone calls, it doesn't matter how hard it is to get ringtones, programs, and mp3s onto it, because you just plain don't care. If you got it to play music and act like a PDA I'd expect those features to be a lot more open.

Personally, I run Windows on my desktop computers and I use the cheapest cellphone I could get. On the other hand I absolutely refuse to install Vista, I haven't installed updates for about a year and a half since I don't want DRM, and I don't even know if my phone supports ringtones and mp3s to say nothing of how locked down they may or may not be. Also, my phone plan is essentially an ubercheap monthly one, because I have no interest in being locked in to anything.

If it has a feature that I don't care about, I don't care how it's set up. Computers and PDAs, on the other hand, I expect full control over because the feature I want is "a computer". (Possibly handheld.)

[info]lifftchi

January 16 2007, 10:45:43 UTC 5 years ago

Yeah, that's pretty much my take on it. But I don't know -- I think there are a couple of interesting issues buried there. Is it worth it, paying more to show support for openness? What if I never use it? What if they're all one monolithic evil, and the premium I pay goes to their evil causes?

I suppose it's more that, on a broader level, I don't subscribe to the theory that we can intelligently influence these things via our buying decisions. The system is too complex.

[info]zorbathut

January 16 2007, 16:54:03 UTC 5 years ago

Well, it clearly depends on the person ;) but personally I'd consider it worthwhile. I would cheerfully pay an extra $10 or $20 to be able to install arbitrary code on my cellphone, or to have a cellphone running Linux or something.

One person probably can't influence the system - but lots of people can. One at a time, really. :)

[info]doublefeh

January 16 2007, 17:20:22 UTC 5 years ago

When I realized that what really excited me about the iPod was the possibility of a real ultra-mobile computing platform, and then heard that it would be a mostly closed system... well, my excitement cooled pretty quickly.

So instead I got the new Nokia n800 internet tablet device, which is much more open and still very cool.

[info]janeoftrades

January 16 2007, 10:02:22 UTC 5 years ago

A) People are stupid. They (big huge generalization on populace level, but this is the way majorities work) tend to go for what looks "shiny". iPhone will, invariably, look "shiny". It will take time (unfortunately) for people at large to discover the drawbacks to the underlying corporate trends associated with this product. They may or may not discover and abhore those trends in time to make a difference about them rather than be apathetic and thus partially party to the continuing popularity (and incidentally the ability for the corporations to do more such restrictive shit). If the populace anger and retaliation level doesn't escalate at a quick enough pace (say, within a year to a year and a half), then shit like Apple and Cingular are doing with the iPhone will become a popular industry standard and an accepted way for companies to treat their potential consumers.

B) Other people do not care about advanced features; either because they simply have no interest in them (and only want something that "works") or because they aren't advanced/smart/tech/innovative/whatever enough to pursue the more complex features. There's also the "fashionable" contingent who are going to buy these things because they're the latest gadget. *shrug* There's no accounting for some taste.

C) As most of us know, the vast majority of people don't actually put their money where their mouth is, which is a real shame. Wish I could change that about "people". :/

D) It's 2am, I am rambly, and this probably all ran together and didn't make much sense. Apologies if it sounds like brain-added drivel. ;)
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