What will the iPad do for musicians?

[TristezaOrange]

Yea, Sony is pretty good when it comes to following in Apple's foot steps.

Yeah, bet they wish they'd invented and popularised the portable audio playback device.

[TristezaOrange]

Vaio tablet probably coming:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/04/sony ... #c25235217

Sony iBrick

That's not it, that's a tabletop... thing of some kind.

[robogone]

It's one thing to control internal costs of doing business, quite another to not license technology essential to producing competitive products.

They're pretty much the same thing, or at least they go hand in hand. You don't become a successful company by NOT doing this. No one here knows anything about the internal workings of Apple as a company, so all of this is pure speculation.

[spaceman]

But clearly they don't think too highly of Flash. They must have run the numbers and Flash didn't dent the equations.

Well of course not. Who can tolerate Flash once they have experienced the glory that is QuickTime?

QuickTime and Flash are completely unrelated.

[b-pole]

controller for Logic Pro

[jones-y]

Rather than license MP3 technology they invent their own format that's incompatible.

No they didn't. .m4a was invented by the MPEG Organization, the same people who invented .mp3. And they licensed it. And its audibly superior as a compression format. Only thing they did is add their branding (AAC), which keeps M$soft in the wma dark ages. Talk about inventing your own incompatible format.

Most of the time I let plain wrong facts slide... But come on, this is worse than the guy who thought Finder couldn't sort files by any other attribute besides filename...

only listen to music from iTunes on Apple products,

My car stereo plays .m4a files...

And oh yeah, iTunes plays mp3s.

[spaceman]

I'm not sure that Apple cares much about a relative small group of Flash developers.

I actually said content developers, not Flash developers, for a reason. Whether you like it or not, (or just want to brush it all off as porn) Flash is a mechanism for content delivery (eg Flash video) as well as content type itself.

TBH its interesting you make a distinction from 'web developers' as its a term that I'd personally say has included Flash developers since Flash first went into browsers.

Web developers, to me, develop in PHP, Ruby, XML, SQL, etc. Sometimes a project needs Flash but that's usually handed over to a graphic designer or a specialised company, the latter especially if the Flash requirements are much more complex. These days they often get into the hands of Flex developers then.

I guess you can call them both 'web developers', but in my opinion the Flash guys represent a much smaller part of the web developing world.

[spaceman]

Yea, Sony is pretty good when it comes to following in Apple's foot steps.

Yeah, bet they wish they'd invented and popularised the portable audio playback device.

I wouldn't brag too much about stuff like MD players though.

[jones-y]

Yea, Sony is pretty good when it comes to following in Apple's foot steps.

Yeah, bet they wish they'd invented and popularised the portable audio playback device.

Too bad they didn't have the wherewithal to capitalize... Too big and too slow. Now they're wannabes...

Its almost laughably sad: There's a Sony Style right next to the Apple store in the Pentagon City Mall in No. VA. The contrast is stark. Apple Store: full of both employees and customers/browser. Sony Style: devoid of both, save the obligatory cash register drone.

[tomg]

Here's my old HP T1100. It comes with a 1.1GHz processor, it's thin, light, runs XP and flash. It's almost 8 years old now. IMO it's still the coolest computer ever designed.

[zerocrossing]

Yea, Sony is pretty good when it comes to following in Apple's foot steps.

Yeah, bet they wish they'd invented and popularised the portable audio playback device.

Haha. Sony should fall on their katana for that one.

[TristezaOrange]

Yea, Sony is pretty good when it comes to following in Apple's foot steps.

Yeah, bet they wish they'd invented and popularised the portable audio playback device.

Too bad they didn't have the wherewithal to capitalize... Too big and too slow. Now they're wannabes...

Its almost laughably sad: There's a Sony Style right next to the Apple store in the Pentagon City Mall in No. VA. The contrast is stark. Apple Store: full of both employees and customers/browser. Sony Style: devoid of both, save the obligatory cash register drone.

To capitalize? On Walkmans? Are you serious? Because honestly I can't understand if you are or if this is a joke. Walkmans defined decades, iPods have been around, since what? 2001? Let's give it 20 more years and see what happens. We'll talk then.

On your second point: Sony may not be "cool" anymore but that has nothing to do with the quality of its products. Apple hypes everything to the sky and back (good for them too, since it seems to be working ) but Sony probably considers Apple a minor nuisance. Sony Style empty right? So Sony probably doesn't sell any Vaios, Bravia TVs, dancing robots , Cybershots, Handycams, PSPs, PS2/3s, Walkmans and I could go on of days. Yeah, that sounds about right. I never even saw a Bravia TV in the wild. Yeah, you must be right. Silly me.

[tomg]

BTW if you'd like the book shelf on your pc you can get it from Mobi. It looks great on my old T1000.

http://www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSo ... Reader.asP

[zerocrossing]

It's one thing to control internal costs of doing business, quite another to not license technology essential to producing competitive products. But it's the kind of thing Apple does. Think of music file compression. Rather than license MP3 technology they invent their own format that's incompatible. It obviously didn't bother those willing to only listen to music from iTunes on Apple products, but it was an issue for everyone else.

I'm not so sure Apple listens to customers. They may be betting that the list of things appealing to buyers will be more attractive than what isn't included with iPad. This strategy has worked before...for a while.

You're all still missing the point. Paying to license Flash isn't even an issue, I'm sure. It's all about driving people to Apple's app store for things like games. THE END. Good for iPhone devs, bad for Flash game devs. Since you need to go though Apple's store to get an iPhone app, there you have it. But the tail is wagging the dog and at this point it's clear to me just from looking at job postings that iPhone development is far outpacing Flash development except for it's use in Facebook games, and frankly I've yet to find a really good Facebook game and there are a lot of good iPhone games/apps. So maybe we'll never get Flash on an iProduct (they took it out of Quicktime which really pissed me off) but instead we'll get sweet apps like iSyn.

[TristezaOrange]

and frankly I've yet to find a really good Facebook game

Off-Road Velociraptor Safari. Not Flash (Unity, actually) but it's fantastic. Check it out.