ApTel

As you might have heard, Apple are apparently going to start sourcing their chips from Intel who have traditionally built chips for Windows-based PCs. On the surface this is incredibly boring news unless you get excited about such things. As long as the damn thing works who cares what’s under the hood?

However, according to Leander Kahney at Wired’s Cult of Mac blog, it’s a little more interesting that it first appears. It seems Apple are interested in the new Pentium D chip which has copy protection built into it. With this in place Apple can approach Hollywood and develop an online movie store whereby people can download movies and watch them via their Macs, either directly off screen or piped through to the TV or however Apple decides to allow.

And even if the shift to this new chip is seamless (which it appears it might be) it’s mildly annoying because it means when you buy a new Mac it’ll be crippled at a fundamental level. You can see signs on this with the iTunes / iPod setup where it’s made difficult to copy music within it. Flatmate Andy can listen to my music over our network but he can’t access the original files from within iTunes. Similarly I can’t plug his iPod into my Mac and copy the music over. That said, I can give him direct access to my music directories and can use a third party piece of software to decode his iPod so it’s not the end of the world. iTunes might be crippled but it’s possible to bypass that. With this crippling build into the hardware itself there will be no bypass.

Now this is merely an annoyance and if you don’t like it then just don’t download the movies in question, but what’s worrying me is that future media software from Apple will be designed with this DRM crap as it’s priority. I wouldn’t be surprised if “iFlicks” or whatever doesn’t play AVI files, the predominant format for p2p sharing, rendering them pretty useless for anyone who doesn’t want their files crippled with DRM.

(Aside – I’d be quite happy to pay for unencrypted downloads of TV shows and movies. BitTorrent is great but it does tend to get choked and the choice available is pretty mainstream. If the TV studious could work out how much each viewer is worth in terms of advertising and set up a paypal-style honour system I’d be happy to stick a quid or so in for each episode of Lost I’ve watched, so there’s no reason I can see why a pay-per-view members only BitTorrent service run by the studios distributing DRM-free files wouldn’t work. Piracy will always happen to popular stuff but plenty of folk are willing to pay for it, as long as it’s not crippled with DRM)

More to the point, this marks a subtle shift in the nature of what a computer is. Currently you can do pretty much anything you want with a desktop computer if you have the skills and time to do so. This sort of hardware based copy protection turns the desktop computer into something resembling a microwave oven. Yes, you can program it, but not much. Certainly, most people using Apple products don’t have the desire to do pretty much anything with them, but taking away that potential just to please a industry that doesn’t understand that its future is changing is just dumb.

Apple kinda got it right with the iTunes / iPod setup. They never publicise that you can use it with all your existing CDs and all the music you downloaded from p2p systems but everyone figures that out pretty quickly. The iTunes Music Store, while relatively successful, it’s really just a trojan horse to stop the music industry complaining. The DRM is very weak (just burn a CDR and rip it back) and any crippling is pretty easy to circumvent. The record industry thinks everything is okay while the rest of us get on with our lives.

But this new hardware crippling, I just don’t like it. We’ll see to what level it does cripple the Mac and the influence it has on Apple’s software releases and hopefully it won’t be that huge, but I suspect it will prove that you can’t get into bed with these short-sighted fuckers without getting corrupted.