[MacDV] Re: iDVD3- does it work w/ non-Apple superdrives?

[Michael Winter]

On Saturday, March 1, 2003, at 07:21  AM, Gerhard Kuhn wrote:

Not wanting to start a flame war on a Monday morning, but I keep 
wondering...

> On Saturday, March 1, 2003, at 03:23  AM, Charles Martin wrote:
>
>>
>>> I really, really wish Apple would get off this idiotic kick of 
>>> shutting out
>>> 'upgrade' customers.
>>
>> This is not the reason they do this. They do this because they have 
>> to pay a hardware-based licensing fee to the MPEGLA group to do 
>> MPEG-2 exporting. That's their deal with them.
>
> They could easily rectify this by providing a plug much like Quick 
> Time Pro that you get by paying the licensing fee, which is relatively 
> small.

How do you know this? Everyone assumes that Apple is allowed to do 
whatever they want, but there are several other interests involved, 
including the MPEGLA and the entertainment industry. I don't think some 
people understand the hoops Apple has to jump through to keep everyone 
happy. That includes trying to keep "digital rights management" 
software/hardware to a minimum. Yes, Apple may be able to add the 
capability for little $$, but the tradeoff could be worse.

> They choose not to because they make more money on new hardware rather 
> than upgrading loyal costumers.

I'm assuming your just guessing about this, or do you have any real 
evidence that that's the reason? I'm not saying you're wrong, I don't 
have any evidence to the contrary. It just seems that for everything 
Apple does, someone is there to say the only reason they're essentially 
"screwing" their loyal customers and trying to force them to upgrade to 
more expensive systems. In fact, there are still people who believe 
that the "new systems won't boot OS 9" line is because Apple wants to 
force people to upgrade to X. It couldn't possibly be for engineering 
reasons like the fact that its getting harder and harder to add new 
hardware support to an old OS.

On another note, I've always expected the manufacturer of any drive I 
purchase to provide the software to use the drive. From the time I 
bought my first 2x CDR drive, I didn't expect Apple to furnish the 
software. I clearly expected that the people I bought the drive from 
would provide at least a bare minimum of software to fully use the 
drive, and if I wanted advanced features, I'd have to purchase a 3rd 
party product to do so. Why is it we now expect Apple to cover this 
territory at no or little cost to the user?

-Mike