Beat the 5 o’clock rush – Leave work at noon!
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hPod?January 8, 2004 - 5:26pm
From the “What in the hell is going on here?” files comes this doozy: HP and Apple Partner to Deliver Digital Music Player and iTunes to HP Customers HP is going to re-brand iPods as HP devices (paying Apple in cold cash, of course), and include iTunes on all new HPs to work with it and, perhaps, sell more. Listen up here, because I really think this is just hilariously important: Apple is entering the wonderful world of re-branding their hardware like a hardware company does. Just who do you think makes Microsoft mice and keyboards? Logitech does. For a curious twist on this, who made old Apple inkjets? HP and Canon. Now who makes HP’s music player? Apple does.You scratch my back and all that, I suppose. Making Apple’s computers a commodity with cloning was a really, really bad idea because it took the OS with it. The iPod? What was there to lose? iTunes was on both OSes already. The iPod worked on both OSes already. Windows (and HP) users bought it already. Now there’s just another market for it. Fabulous. Why would Apple do this? Remember when hell froze over the time before last and Dell sold iPods? The margin wasn’t high enough and so the same stupid businessmen that thought they’d make money on PDAs and printers decided they needed to make the DJ. They stopped selling iPods. So HP is shopping around for a music player and mysterious business deals happen and now they’re selling a re-branded iPod. Best deal in the world for that little company in Cupertino. “Very few people in this world would care to listen to the real defense of their own characters. The real defense, the defense which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy.” — Robert Browning, London: Macmillan, 1914, 188 – G. K. Chesterton |
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The main benefit I see is that it will increase acceptance and hopefully help the world to standardise on AAC instead of WMA. A few more of these and WMA could get pushed out of the market.
Let’s hope.
I agree with Lee’s comment — getting some competition out there for WMA. What’s very interesting is that Microsoft and HP have a very close relationship, but over the last few years HP has been sinking oodles of cash into Linux. HP is the only PC company big enough to break out of the Microsoft dependency and really strike out on its own. If they use Apple to help that cause, I don’t have a problem with it. I will have a problem if they market the thing in such a crappy manner that it gives the iPod a bad name. Hopefully this isn’t some evil, backroom plot devised by Bill Gates and Carly to sink Apple…no, I’m not paranoid!
hp’s relationship (historically) with apple is unique. many of apple’s laserwriters, for instance, were rebranded HP laserjets. but HP was making its laserjets using technology licensed from apple.
Don’t forget that HP will also install iTunes and Quicktime on every pc they sell. Though the iPod’s OS is provided by a 3rd party (Portalplayer), Apple did designed the actual UI. When you’ll start up a hPod it will display an Apple logo. All that to say this is an hardware AND software deal. So I don’t see Apple becoming any more of a hardware company. The hPod users will have the same Apple software experience with iTunes and the music store. As for Logitech, they made all the Mac mouses from the beginning until at least the ADB 2 version, actually I think they worked with Apple to produce the first commercial low-cost mouse in the original 1984 Macintosh if I remember correctly.
I never said more of a hardware company. I said it’s proof they are a hardware company. iTunes and the iTMS are only there to get people to buy and use the hardware. As such, anyone using the hardware must also use them. The software is just a piggyback thing out of neccessity. I’m sure bundling RealPlayer or WMP is much more lucrative to HP in the long run if it was a matter of software. No, this is 100% about the hardware, the iPod.
I think this will be a win-win for HP and Apple. It’s great for Apple because you have HP saying that they looked at all of the music services and players and that Apple’s technology was the best.
Lets not forget that HP is right behind Dell in total PC shipments. Yes, Apple is a hardware company and selling lots of iPods is going to be great for their bottom line. But having iTunes and QuickTime pre-installed on so many HP desktops and laptops is huge for Apple.
It’s very telling that both Microsoft and Dell were caught off-guard by this announcement.
The iPod is successfull in part because of the whole UI/iTunes integration. If it was just a micro-hd that happens to play music when you push a button, HP would have built one themselves. The iPod is sold as a hardware/software combination just like the Macintosh is. Anyway like many said, this is a battle about AAC vs WMA as the successor to MP3. Forget about DRM for a moment, as you can (still) rip your own cds or encode your own music in non-DRMed AAC or WMA files. Microsoft alone owns all things WMA, and the format is completely closed and undocumented and MS can use its quasi-monopoly to impose it to the industry. As for AAC, it’s owned by the some mp4 group wich represents many companies. That ensure a fairer treatment and the format is documented and open. You still have to pay royalities to sell an AAC player just like with mp3. But even with Apple (and MS) closed DRM (an open-source DRM? is that even possible?), the lesser of two evil is AAC, and its very possible that we see a fusion between all AAC DRMs in the near future (HP+Apple+Real+?). Again this is not (only) about a singing hard disk drive, its about what’s run on it, its UI and its codecs.
VoxelMan
Hooray for HP!
I think it will be wonderful synergy – HP has been one of my favorite companies for their printers for many years. I have found their HP Computers [vs. Compaq Computers] well engineered…
Going with Apple for the IPOD is another sign of their respect for well engineered hardware and software. Hopefully it will sell just as well as their printers do… I certainly will look at buying one, in the hope that it is even more easily compatible with my PCs than the IPODS...
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