On Tuesday, in an open letter Thoughts on Music, Steve Jobs responded (accidentally ;-) to my prior post calling on Apple to license FairPlay to other device makers. It’s a brilliant piece of writing, as all the best propaganda is, covering a lot of ground concisely and persuasively. Other people have analysed Thoughts on Music in more detail than I care to; I’ll confine myself to three points.

I agree with everything he wrote

That doesn’t change my conclusion that I won’t buy any more content from the iTunes Store until I can play it on my Sonos and TiVo systems. I don’t care if the source of the issue is Apple or the record companies, I only care that I can’t play it on devices I own and enjoy using.

If Steve is serious about offering non-DRM-wrapped content on the iTunes Store, there should be non-DRM-wrapped content on the iTunes Store

There are non-big four labels ready to do away with DRM yesterday, including those behind artists like Sarah McLachlan, Barenaked Ladies, and Avril Lavigne. Steve’s letter is currently undermined by the lack of any unprotected content on the iTunes Store. If he’s serious, that should change. That would put additional pressure on the big four labels to think about dropping DRM, as well as reduce pressure from the groups that are currently after Apple to open up FairPlay, redirecting it at the same big four. That seems like such a big win for Apple, I expect it to be their next move in this particular game.

The “big four” have to change something

The heart of Steve’s argument goes basically like this: (a) All DRM systems rely on secrets. (b) Once the secrets are known, it is possible, common, inevitable that the DRM will be broken, worldwide. ( c) If the DRM is broken, Apple is required by contract to rapidly fix it, or lose the ability to sell the majority of the music in the iTunes Store. (d) Licensing FairPlay means more people have the FairPlay secrets, which increases the risk of the secrets escaping. (e) The increase in risk is not acceptable, which is why Apple won’t license FairPlay.

That’s a pretty strong argument. It’s hard to suggest that Apple should significantly increase their business risk to assist their competitors, by licensing Apple technology to let those competitors improve their products. Yeah, it would be good for customers too, but the current situation, as Steve points out, only causes problems for 3% of people’s content. It’s a trade-off, and it’s reasonable for Apple to come down on the side of Apple.

The big four record companies are already suggesting that Apple is wrong and should work to license FairPlay. Fine. All they need to do is take ( c) above out of the equation. That’s something totally under their control, and if they are serious about wanting to see interoperability, instead of dropping DRM entirely as Steve suggests, then they need to put their lawyers were their mouthpieces are.

As Roman Strauss said in Dead Again, I think this is all very far from over.

Rochelle and I ate lunch today at a new restaurant called Medicine. The food is Japanese Zen monk vegan, called “new-shojin.” The flavors are delicate, subtle, and quite good once your brain and palate adjust.

What’s kind of funny is the weird visual sensation I had while eating. The restaurant has an Asian-style glyph, which the staff all wear on their black shirts (photo at right). The glyph, rendered in white, has shape elements to it — most of a cross-hatch, loop-ish strokes at three corners — that it looks, out of the corner of your eye, like the Macintosh Command symbol: ⌘

So, the effect — of the clean lines of the restaurant’s brightly-lit interior, and of the couple dozen staff whizzing around in their black pants and black shirts with the Command symbol on it — is that you’re eating in the Apple Store.

Zen vegetarian food, beautifully prepared and presented, served in a clean, simple environment. I think Steve Jobs would be a fan.

Since I write about Mac OS X so often, it seems mandatory to post something about Apple’s announcement this week that they would be moving the Macintosh platform to use Intel microprocessors. Most of the insights and big ideas about this have already been written, so my thoughts are mostly about, well, me.

I currently have a PowerBook G4 that’s running at 1.5GHz. The system it replaced was a three year old QuickSilver G4 with dual 800MHz processors, so in terms of raw megahertz, the PowerBook is actually a slight step down. Overall it feels faster, probably a combination of the much faster graphics chip and a single fast processor beating two somewhat slower ones. But, even with three years of progress, the PowerBook barely beats the older desktop system.

Certainly, for most of what I do, the PowerBook is fast enough, and I’ve been thrilled with the mobility. But recently I started doing occasional work in iDVD, and I definitely notice that it’s sluggish. I’ve wanted to start using Final Cut Express, but I know that it’s going to be slow. And when I view high definition video streams in QuickTime 7’s H.264 format, I get 12 frames-per-second (the Fantastic Four HD trailer in 720p) or 15-25 frames-per-second (the Aimee Man concert video in 480p), well below the optimum/peak frame rate.

If I was willing to give up the mobility of the PowerBook, I could have gotten a dual G5 system that would be plenty fast to run iDVD, Final Cut, and H.264 at full speed. So on the desktop side, there’s progress, and it looks good. But on the laptop side, things are not moving fast. In the year since I bought what was the fastest laptop Apple made, the current high end is about 8% faster. That’s not even close to keeping pace with Moore’s Law.

So, from my personal perspective, I just want to see faster PowerBooks. I’d like to see PowerBooks get a lot faster, and by the time I’m ready to replace my current hardware, roughly a year and a half from now. If that could happen with a low-power G5 processor, that would be great. If it takes switching to Intel to get it, that’s great, too. I just want to go faster.

Looking at the bigger picture, I don’t think that would ever have happened with the G5 chips coming from IBM. Certainly, in thinking about it now (in the wake of the announcement), it’s easy to see how the switch was almost inevitable.

When you look at the microprocessor business for IBM (of which Apple is only a part), it barely registers, 2-3% of revenue. Lose that business, and IBM is still profitable. Innovating in microprocessors takes multi-billion dollar investments these days. For IBM, it’s not smart business to make the investments it would require to aggressively advance the microprocessor lines upon which Apple depends.

When you look at Intel’s revenue, and the percentage of revenue which comes from desktop and laptop microprocessors, you can see that those are the core of their business. Lose microprocessors, and Intel is not just not profitable, Intel is dead. They are motivated, in a way that IBM cannot ever be, to innovate, advance, produce, and sell their microprocessor lines.

So, while some may lament the end of an elegant instruction set architecture, and some may react virulently to what they see as some sort of betrayal, I’m thrilled to see Apple teamed up with the company best positioned and best incented to making products which will make Macs faster.

As a last bit of analysis, Apple is delivering three key elements for this transition:

• OS X running on Intel (available to developers as part of the Developer Transition Kit)
• XCode 2.1 with checkboxes to produce Universal Binaries (available for download today)
• Rosetta for translating legacy code (available to developers as part of the Developer Transition Kit)

These three components, implemented well, should make the transition from PowerPC to Intel far smoother, for both end users and developers, than the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. Far smoother, so smooth that it may rival or exceed Apple’s prior microprocessor transition from 680×0 to PowerPC. Apple’s done this before, they know what needs to be done, I’m excited to watch them do it.

On a final note, and one I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere, did you notice during his WWDC keynote presentation that Steve Jobs was not wearing his trademark black mock turtleneck or jeans, but was a bit more spiffed up? For a guy who had surgery for cancer less than a year ago, Steve looks better, sharper, more focused than ever. I think he’s fired up and dialed to 11. Look out competitors!

Like a lot of other Mac aficionados, I followed yesterday’s announcements by Apple quite closely. A lot of people are writing about them, so I’m just going to jot down a couple of thoughts I’ve had that I haven’t seen elsewhere.

But first: I think the Mac mini is a grand-slam; I expect Apple to sell a million units a quarter through the rest of this year (assuming they can make that many), with only a modest impact (cannibalization) of sales of existing products. Most of these will be to first-time Mac owners. The price point and the packaging are both trying to suggest that the Mac mini is an impulse buy (even if the idea of switching platforms on an impulse is ridiculous).

My one surprise and concern is that the unit is so small. Normally a good thing, but small means it’s using more expensive laptop-style components (photos on the Mac mini Design page seem to confirm this). Making the device a little bigger, say the size of a dictionary, would have allowed them to use full-size hard disk and optical drives, and a less miniaturized logic board, which I think would have taken $50 off the manufacturing cost, without making the device unattractive. Seems like that $50 could have been a nice extra discount, or a nice extra profit.

On the other hand, a switcher doesn’t have to find room for the Mac mini at its current size; finding a spot on your desk, or even setting atop an existing beige box, should be child’s play. That might turn out to be important.

I think the iPod shuffle is also a home run product.

There are already people — analysts, competitors, and other “experts” — who are already comparing it to other products, and describing its flaws. And there are flaws, the iPod shuffle will not please everyone. But the comparisons and complaints of flaws miss the point. For the people it works for, and there are a lot of them, it is a nearly perfect device. Stupendous design, great sound, great size, great battery life, great price point, and more-than-good enough controls.

Two things I haven’t read elsewhere about the iPod shuffle. First, don’t underestimate the value of having rechargeable batteries. They allow you to always leave the house with a full charge in the unit. With the standard batteries most flash players use, because they cost money and are toxic waste when spent, you want to eke out the last remaining ergs of juice before disposing of them. With the Otis flash player I inherited from Rochelle when she got her iPod mini, I ran out of batteries in the middle of my commute — when I cannot change them, because I’m driving — several times. Incredibly aggravating. Rechargables, while they take time to recharge (instead of an instant swap with disposables), let you juice up when you’ve still got half a charge in the unit, so you can be confident it’s not going to die unexpectedly on you.

Second, and far more important, comparing the iPod shuffle to other devices with the same capacity or at the same price point, or complaining about the lack of a screen, is leaving out a major part of the story. The unit itself is only half the experience. The other half is iTunes, the software which runs on your desktop computer to push audio onto the device. And iTunes stands head and shoulders (and full torso) above its competitors, both in general use, as well as providing ways to work with the lack of a screen on the iPod shuffle itself:

iTunes lets you manage the contents of your iPod shuffle, in such a way that not having a screen is not a major liability for most uses of a music player.

Personally, I think Steve Jobs should have sent the CEOs and marketing executives of Apple’s competitors some clean underwear, set to arrive the morning of his keynote. They may not admit it in public, but I know they needed it.