Apple Explosion!

I don't want to make this into a "ooh, look at what Apple is doing" blog, but today particularly (and the next few weeks) promise to be some of the coolest announcements this half of the year.

First of all, that "D: All Things Digital" conference I mentioned earlier is happening (look for an interesting discussion between Jobs and Gates tonight) and Steve Jobs took some time during an interview to let loose some noticable announcements (Engadget coverage via Digg). The most important thing he discussed was the introduction of iTunes Plus, which Mac Rumors reports, via Digg again, will have the new ability to strip the Digital Rights Management off of EMI owned music tracks and add about twice the bit rate. The long and short of this tech jargon is that music can now be purchased online from a major music label that is at least somewhat comparable to buying a CD and ripping it. Also, users who had previously bought EMI tracks can now upgrade those tracks for 30 cents each. This give you a new copy and allows you to keep the old file as well.

Interestingly, The Unofficial Apple Weblog shows that the new .m4a format carries the name of the user who purchased the track. This could prove interesting in the world of filesharing, as anyone who shares iTunes purchased music would be easily linked to tracks found on someone else's computer. I believe this type of coding is known as "watermarking."

This announcement follows up an article I wrote for the Broadside's Business and Tech section and can be read on my personal blog here. It is more concise than I will go into here.

Also, in lesser news from the Apple interview, Jobs mentioned that the AppleTV, Apple's computer-to-tv streaming box, will now have Youtube content integrated so one could view Youtube videos from the comfort of their living rooms.

I'll write another post for the Jobs v. Gates interview if anything interesting happens in it.

Edit: Nothing interesting happened :(

Edit Edit: Now that I've actually watched the video (instead summaries online) I think the interview was pretty awesome in its own right. While there are no staggering product announcements to make the geeks drool, I did like the really candid conversation with these two tech icons. I suggest you watch it for yourself (freely available on the iTunes podcast directory, but a warning: it's a 1gb file) and please comment if you too thought there could have been a better pair of moderators.

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