Apple, iTunes Match, and Piracy
System-wide versioning in Lion was announced today. That’s awesome. I’ve been wanting that in every application I’ve used (in particular working on my book). To have it across all of them is just flat out cool. And the resume feature really reinforces the truth that Macs just get the hell out of the way and let you get stuff done.
iCloud is kinda interesting for an individual. It’s amazing across a group though – small enterprise, but more practically, a geographically distributed family. Photostream would be great for grandparents who just want a steady, well, stream of their growing grandkids. Shared documents, calendars, etc.
Sidenote: It was a very lame move on Jobs’ part to embed Twitter (who the hell needs that?) but steamroll over a small business like Instapaper with its ‘read it later’ feature.
Anyway, today was as much about anti-piracy measures as anything else.
- Lion is only available via the Mac App store. No more serial-number-less CDs.
- iTunes Match. Apple will scan your hard drive (charging you $25 to do so), and match any songs (unlimited) it sells in iTunes across all your Apple devices. (256 kbps is lame though.)
Not altogether different from when a government asks insurgents to give up their arms in an amnesty agreement. ‘Certifiying’ a black market activity is a classic approach to countering its harms. This is pretty cool to see couched in ‘for your convenience’ language, and also positioned as a benefit that you pay for.
-Shlok
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