Status-Q

Fred von Lohmann of the EFF:

Once again, thanks to DRM, a new product ends up less useful than the one it replaces. This time, it’s the new family of Apple Macbook laptop computers that gets the downgrade.

When it launched the new Macbooks, Apple announced that they would sport a new digital video output connector, known as Mini DisplayPort. What Apple failed to mention, however, is that those connectors allow movies studios to force the computer to authenticate any external monitor before allowing playback of programs purchased or rented from the iTunes Store (Microsoft’s Windows Vista does something similar). In other words, the HDTV monitor or projector that worked for you yesterday, won’t work with your new computer tomorrow if Hollywood has embedded a flag in the iTunes content you paid for.

This is a remarkably short-sighted move for both Apple and Hollywood. This punishes existing iTunes customers: several have reported that iTunes purchases that played on external monitors on their old Macbooks no longer will play on their new Macbooks. In other words, thanks to the Macbook “upgrade,” Apple just “downgraded” everyone’s previous investment in iTunes content (if we’ve told you once, we’ve told you a dozen times — when you buy DRMd content, the vendor can snatch your investment from you at any time).

Full post here.

No, this is nothing to do with politics. It only needs much smaller things to make me happy… like the fact that I have a new hard disk in my laptop.

When I bought my MacBook Pro – two or three years ago, now, just after they first came out – I thought that a 100G drive equalled lots of space. Since then, I have gradually moved my video-editing stuff onto external drives, then my music, then my photos, and then quite a few of the larger applications.

But, despite regular cleanups, I kept finding myself running out of space. It’s never really a good idea to run a filesystem with less than about 5-10% free, and I was regularly hovering around the 1% mark. So this week I called up the local Apple dealer, handed over a couple of hundred quid, and I now have 320GB to play with!

That doesn’t give me enough space to put everything back on the internal drive, but it’s a lot better than it was, and I can stop worrying about data corruption as my applications run out of swap space!

Aaaaah.

A tip, though – I has the OS installed on the new drive and used Apple’s excellent Migration Assistant to copy stuff from the old drive to the new system – this brings across your user accounts and data, applications, network settings etc – all very smoothly.

However, it’s really intended for those setting up a new machine and copying their data from an old one. As such, it doesn’t assume that you have a licence on the new machine for any Apple pro apps – Final Cut, Aperture, Logic Pro etc. It copies the apps, but not the licences. So if you use this system to migrate to a new drive, remember that you’ll need those serial numbers handy afterwards!