Two days after Apple (AAPL) began cutting the price of its DRM-free music for new customers, from $1.29 a song to 99¢, the company is still charging the higher price for existing customers.
The fact of the 30¢ price cut was confirmed yesterday by Steve Jobs, although the company denied that the move was in response to competition from Amazon (AMZN), which charges 89¢ to 99¢ per song, or Wal-Mart (WMT), which charges 94¢. “It’s been very popular with our customers, and we’re making it even more affordable,” both Jobs and spokesperson Natalie Kerris insisted.
But the price cut was not applied across the board. The discrepancy arises in the Upgrade My Library feature, which is still charging existing customers 30% extra for DRM-free songs.
For example: 
A new customer who buys Norah Jones’ Feels Like Home on iTunes pays $12.99 for a 256 kbps, DRM-free version of album. That’s the same price existing customers paid for a 128 kbps, DRMed version when the album first came out. To get the higher-quality, iTunes Plus version through Upgrade My Library, those customers have to shell out an extra $3.86.
Of course, there is no competition for Apple’s Upgrade My Library feature. It’s the one thing you can’t do at Wal-Mart or Amazon.
However, Amazon sells a DRM-free, 256 kbps MP3 version of Feels Like Home for $8.99. They also sell the “Enhanced” CD for $12.97 new and $6.47 used.
Written by Philip Elmer-DeWitt on October 17th, 2007 with no comments.
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Apple (AAPL) today confirmed what the analysts and rumor sites had already divined: OS X Leopard, the sixth major release of the company’s flagship operating system, will go on sale Oct. 26. Apple’s retail stores will start selling it at 6 p.m., local time. Its online store is already accepting pre-orders at $129 apiece.
Much of what the new OS does is already known, thanks to the lengthy previews Steve Jobs has given over the past year and a half and to leaks from developers working with pre-release builds. (See, for example, Prince McLean’s Road to Leopard series at AppleInsider.) But the order in which the company’s press release ticks off the new features telegraphs which features it thinks will be Leopard’s key sellings points:
- Redesigned 3D Dock with Stacks, a new way to organize files with one-click access
- Updated Finder with CoverFlow, so you can flip through files as you do album covers in iTunes
- Spotlight search of content from any computer on a local network
- Back to My Mac, which lets you grab files from remote Macs over the Internet
- QuickLook, which displays the contents of files without having to open the app that created them
- Spaces, a new way to organize files by project and to flip from one project to another
- Time Machine, the much-touted back-up system*
- A new version of Mail wih 3-D stationary designs
- Notes and To Dos that can be synced across multiple Macs and stored in Smart Mailboxes
- Data detectors that recognize e-mail addresses and RSS feeds
- iChat Theater, which adds slides and movies and Photo Booth effects to iChat video
- Improved parental controls
- The complete Boot Camp release (it’s not disappearing as some had feared)
- Web Clip for bringing widgets to the Dashboard
- New PhotoBooth features, such as adding backdrops
- An enhanced Dictionary with Wikipedia built in
- A new iCal that supports the CalDAV standard
- An updated Frontrow for watching movies and TV shows at a distance with Apple Remote
The biggest surprise in this list may be the relatively short shrift Apple gave Time Machine, the feature that generated the most buzz at Macworld. The reason for this may be hidden in the footnote at the bottom of the press release:
*Requires an additional hard drive sold separately.
Backups are the bane of every power user’s existence. Time Machine is a worthy attempt to solve this perennial problem, but because it requires advance planning and a big exernal hard drive, most users probably still won’t bother.
Written by Philip Elmer-DeWitt on October 16th, 2007 with no comments.
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Steve Jobs must have known this was in the works.
Asked again last month why he hadn’t built a 3G iPhone, Apple’s (AAPL) CEO replied that he was waiting for a chipset that would allow him to deliver 3G speeds with something close to the eight hour talk time the slower EDGE-based iPhone gets now. “Hopefully we’ll see that late next year,” he said.
He may not have to wait that long. In what could be a preview of the next-generation iPhone, chipmaker Broadcom (BRCM) announced yesterday that it had begun sending manufacturers samples of an integrated device it’s calling a “3G Phone On a Chip.” The chipset’s features read like an iPhone hold-out’s wishlist. They include:
- a 3G baseband transceiver supporting download speeds of up to 7.2 megabits per second
- Bluetooth 2.1
- an FM radio receiver
- an FM radio transmitter (for car stereo playback)
- multimedia support for a 5 megapixal camera
- 30 frames per second video with “TV out”
- support for EDGE, HSUPA, HSDPA, and WCDMA
It doesn’t do GPS, Wi-Fi or windows.
While Broadcom did not offer battery life estimates, it does describe the chip as “extremely low power.”
The BCM21551 was delivered to manufacturers in small quantities yesterday will be available in bulk for $23 apiece. This is one chip Jobs may be tempted to hoard, because if Apple doesn’t buy it, its competitors surely will.
Or not. In an oddly time piece, Blackfriar’s Carl Howe, who is usually pretty well plugged in to Apple, today published his five reasons why Apple’s iPhone Doesn’t Need 3G. Latency, he says, is more important than bandwidth. Besides, he adds, high bandwidth radio networks are more error prone. Hmmm.
For more on the Broadcom chipset, see Eric Bangeman’s piece in Ars Technica.
Written by Philip Elmer-DeWitt on October 16th, 2007 with no comments.
Read more articles on 3G and AAPL and BRCM and Broadcom and Steve Jobs and iPhone.
That green glow around Apple (AAPL) didn’t last long. Only three days after the company gave over the front page of its website to proclaim itself “bursting with pride” over boardmember Al Gore’s Nobel, the environmental activists at Greenpeace have attacked Steve Jobs for failing to make his cellphone as green as his competitors’.
In a slick video posted on YouTube (and pasted below the fold), the organization paints Jobs as a hypocrite for promising a “greener Apple” but failing to take the minimal steps that Nokia and Sony Erikson took to earn a higher rating in Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics. After earning cheers from Greenpeace last May, the company has actually slipped a few notches on the organization’s green meter.
It’s difficult for nonscientists to judge how benign or dangerous the traces of brominated fire retardants in the iPhone’s antenna or the phthalate plasticisers in the white headset really are. But by failing to perform the due diligence that would have told the company what its competitors were doing about those components — or to match the “take back” recycling programs that have earned Nokia and Sony Erikson high marks with European greens — Apple has left itself open for another round of negative environmental agitprop.
Written by Philip Elmer-DeWitt on October 15th, 2007 with no comments.
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With only two weeks to go before the release of OS X Leopard, the fifth major revision of Apple’s (AAPL) flagship Macintosh operating system, AppleInsider today published the sixth entry in its comprehensive Road to Leopard series — and at Apple’s insistence pulled two earlier posts offline.
Written by Prince McLean, the nom de plume of a systems programmer who clearly knows his stuff, the series not only describes with text and screen shots the key innovations coming in Leopard, but it takes pains to place them in the history of graphical user interfaces as they evolved from Xerox Parc, through Lisa and the first Macs, Systems 8 and 9, Next and the previous versions of OS X. The Commodore Amiga even makes a cameo appearance.
The series is so good that Apple’s legal staff has stepped in, demanding through cease-and-desist orders that parts of the first two entries be removed. AppleInsider has taken them temporarily offline while they are being redacted.
[UPDATE: The first two posts are back up in heavily redacted form.]
If you’re interested in what’s in store for you when Leopard finally arrives, you might want to archive the other posts before key sections disappear. Here are the links:
Written by Philip Elmer-DeWitt on October 12th, 2007 with no comments.
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