Rumors of boxed software leaving Apple Stores and Apple’s push of the Mac App Store shows the company doesn’t think we need to install software via optical media anymore. There’s even a rumor that Apple may be ditching optical drives in the next MacBook Pro refresh and moving to a disc-less model that allows for thinner casings and larger batteries.

There’s also the fact that not a single Mac or iOS device ships with a dial-up modem port and a growing number of Apple devices include Wi-Fi (not Ethernet) as the only connectivity option. If you don’t have a wireless router, you’re just not going to be able get online (without third-party peripherals).

Yet, two-thirds of Americans are not using actual broadband internet service. In fact, the FCC states that 31 percent of Americans who have access to broadband won’t adopt it due to lack of need or a general fear of technology. Pew Internet Research found that over half of Americans don’t think broadband is worth it. This discovery stands out:

The report also finds that the 21 percent of American adults who are not online have little interest in going online: about half (48 percent) don’t find online content relevant to their lives, and six out of ten non-users would need assistant using computer or the Internet. Only about one in ten expressed any interest in starting to use the Internet.

Apple is often at the cutting edge of tech trends, but that means there is a market of users who want Apple devices in their lives but can’t have them because they’re not on a broadband internet connection. I was on a part time dial-up connection (capped by the hour) until 2005 when I moved to an area that had broadband, and my life as a Mac owner included a weekly visit to the library to do software updates and upload photos. The average consumer will probably just opt for a Windows device with built-in dial-up connectivity instead of making the trek.

Readers may note that the Mac’s price range means that most users willing to spend $999+ for a laptop likely already have broadband access. Some, however, especially older consumers, just don’t need broadband access, but would love to be able to take advantage of Apple’s reputation for quality and excellent design.

Apple devices don’t show your connection speed or bother you much about router connection problems. That’s because Apple makes an assumption that if you’re using its devices, you have a connection that can handle it. But, for Americans (and those in international emerging markets) without broadband, the Apple experience won’t be nearly the same as for those who do have it. While Apple is eliminating optical drives on their Macs, removing boxed software from retail stores and assuming we buy all our music via iTunes, a large number of people are going to be left out of this party, wondering why their purchase of iLife ’11 is taking 5 days to complete.

Is Apple missing the boat by ignoring these customers, or is the fact that some are getting left behind just a necessary part of Apple’s forward-looking product design roadmap?

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Motorola Mobility will acquire startup Zecter to enable wireless synchronization and video streaming capabilities on Motorola’s Android phones. Zecter is the producer of ZumoDrive and ZumoCast, services that facilitate cloud storage and media streaming of stored content to mobile devices.

ZumoCast, introduced in beta earlier this year for the iPad and iPhone, makes it possible to stream audio and video content from the home PC to the mobile device over either Wi-Fi or 3G connections. It also allows synchronizing that content to the mobile device, and could soon turn Android phones into mobile media powerhouses through Motorola’s MotoBlur widget service,. This makes perfect sense given the expected release of a Motorola tablet early next year, with which the company has been teasing us of late with a promotional video. Tablets make good video players given the screens larger than those on phones, and Motorola’s upcoming tablet would be a very good player coupled with this new technology.

This new media technology delivered through MotoBlur could give Android handsets the ability to play video right on the home screen. Motorola Android owners will be able to take their audio and video libraries everywhere they go, and play them without opening another app. While Motorola’s customers will almost certainly continue using popular online services like YouTube for media consumption, there’s a lot to be said for having your own favorite shows one tap away on the home screen.

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“MacBook Air. The next generation of MacBooks.”

This is Apple’s tagline for the new MacBook Air. I believe it means everything that’s good about the Air will make its way into the MacBook and MacBook Pro within the next year. Let’s look at what’s next for Apple’s notebooks.

Battery Life

The older Air I own has a claimed battery life of five hours, but I never see more than three and a half with brightness all the way down and Wi-Fi off. The new Air claims seven hours of battery life in Apple’s “Web-test” which, according to the company’s performance page, “measures battery life by wirelessly browsing 25 popular websites with display brightness set to 50%.”

We can expect this new test to become the standard for how Apple measures battery life specs across the board going forward and I expect seven hours to be the new minimum standard for the rest of the lineup. Most Macs meet this now, in fact, so 10-12 hours may be a more realistic expectation from next year’s MacBook Pro, as long as Intel continues increasing the efficiency of its chips at the current rate.

SSD As a Standard

Solid State Drives (SSD) enable quick booting, instant on and faster launch times of applications. I believe every new MacBook Pro sold will come standard with an SSD, with an option to drop down to an HDD for $200 less if you just needs lots of storage (500GB+). For most users, 256GB is all they’ll ever need, and for huge media libraries, an external drive is always an option.

SSD is great, and it’s finally achieving a price point where Apple can include it as part of a base configuration. Remember, only a little over two years ago, a 128GB SSD add-on for the MacBook Air cost an additional $999. Now, the $1699 model comes with a 256GB drive standard.

Sorry, No Optical

I’ve talked to a lot of people in coffee shops, at conferences and even my less-techie friends and they all come to the same conclusion: Optical drives are kind of pointless. If all software manufacturers provided direct downloads or flash drives for physical installs, there’s be absolutely no issue.

The optical drive, as far as Apple is concerned, is dead. The company has the largest collection of digital media available for sale, and with the Mac App Store, Front Row and Apple TV, why would you ever need to burn content to a disc? The external Air Superdrive is still available, and it’ll probably gain compatibility with the rest of Apple’s notebooks as the internal drives disappear.

Thinner and Lighter

SSD and the lack of an optical drive will mean thinner cases across the board. The MacBook Air’s logic board in 2008 was a thing of beauty: smaller than the length of a pencil, and it powered the entire computer. I think the move to SSD flash storage that’s soldered to the logic board, paired with removing those gigantic optical drives, will mean most Mac laptops will slim down. We’ll see this in new revisions that come out in 2011.

Higher Resolution Displays

As I said in July’s post about iPhone 4′s Retina Display, Apple will be beefing up the resolution of all of its displays, starting with notebooks. The MacBook Air already has an improved display; the MacBook Pro is next. How high a resolution is too high? We’ll see how Apple navigates the line between display quality and the concerns of users with weaker vision or older eyes. Unlike on the iPhone, you can always change the resolution on your Mac if it makes for a better reading experience.

Conclusion

I’ve always been sure that the MacBook Air was a test bed for innovation, and a peek at what’s to come from Apple portables. Cupertino’s clearly gone “all in” techs like flash storage and battery improvements that it pioneered with the Air, and it’ll be genuinely exciting to see those developments trickle down to the rest of the line.

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Thinner, yes. But better?

I am one of the few, proud MacBook Air (MBA) owners in the world. Every article you’ve seen from me in the past was written on the petite beauty. In one last month, I wrote:

I’m only here to make a case that anyone that hasn’t used one should give it a shot and that Apple needs to throw some marketing dollars behind it so everyone else knows what we MacBook Air owners have known for a long time: It’s the best notebook Apple makes and it also happens to be the smallest.

This is exactly what Apple did yesterday, and yet, I was severely disappointed. It seems as if Apple is finally throwing marketing dollars behind the MBA, and I watched my Twitter stream as thousands of geeks’ heads exploded at how thin it is. But I felt a little weird reading this on my MacBook Air and thinking out loud, “I know. It’s been that way for years.” It’s thinner, yes, but not significantly. That’s the whole story in a nutshell.

Pricing & Marketing

On the whole, the reason Apple’s MacBook Air wasn’t a hit before now was price. Imagine the iPad started at $999. Fewer people would own one, and those that did and sang its praises it to friends would be immediately be greeted with the response that it was simply too expensive for a tablet. Basically, Apple just dropped the price. The MacBook Air of today is largely unchanged from what we had before, and that’s disappointing.

11.6″ Model Versus the Sony TZ (circa 2008)

Consider Engadget’s live-blog from Macworld 2008, when the Macbook Air was introduced. Steve initially compared the MacBook Air to Sony’s TZ series. His biggest gripe was that the processor speed maxed out at 1.2GHz Core 2 Duo, and the display was only 11 inches.

The 11.6-inch MacBook Air is “too cramped” and “too slow” according to the Steve of 2008. To be fair, the Air isn’t the same as the TZ in every way. I haven’t used the new keyboard, but Apple claims it’s full-size and the body is still a bit thinner.

Let’s Talk Speed

Current MacBook Air owners won’t see a significant speed bump if they own the Revision C model (1.8/2.13GHz) released last year. In fact, not much has changed about the machine at all.

MacBook Air Revision C (Jun. 2009)

• 1.86 ($1499) or 2.13GHz ($1799)
• 3.0 Pounds
• 6MB of L2 Cache w/ 1066Mhz Frontside Bus
• 120GB HDD or 128GB SSD
• 2GB RAM (DDR3-8500 at 1066Mhz)
• 13.3-inch screen w/ 1280×800 resolution
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400 w/ 256Mb of VRAM (shared with main memory)

MacBook Air Revision D (October,2010)

• 1.86Ghz ($1,299) or 2.13Ghz ($1699)
• 2.9 pounds
• 6MB of L2 Cache w/ 1066Mhz Frontside Bus
• 128GB SSD or 256GB SSD
• 2GB/4GB RAM (DDR3-8500 at 1066MHz)
• 13.13″ screen w/ 1440×900 resolution
• NVIDIA GeForce 320m w/ 256Mb of VRAM (shared with main memory)

Of course, I’m only comparing the 13-inch models, but you’re getting a machine that’s basically the same speed with an option to add more ram and more storage,  plus a high-resolution screen which isn’t something I’d recommend to everyone. Some (especially those over 50) will prefer a lower resolution. Even I had trouble using a 17-inch MacBook Pro and eventually sold it.

What you are getting is a drop in price. Last year, a 2.13GHz machine with 2GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD would cost $1799. Today, that same machine costs $1699 with double the storage, and it’s only $100 to upgrade to 4GB of RAM.

Real World Performance

Will HD Flash movies on YouTube perform better? No. Will Photoshop CS5 filters apply faster? Maybe with a RAM upgrade. Nothing about this upgrade is impressive if you’re a current MacBook Air owner looking for more speed.

Why can’t Apple squeeze more juice out of this machine? Apple didn’t talk speed at all. They didn’t throw their famous “2x Faster” graphic up on the “buy now” page. Apple does tout the 2.9x faster graphics card, but I can guarantee you the Air released yesterday is only marginally faster than last year’s model, despite the introduction of the 320M, because that’s a video card using shared RAM, meaning the graphics performance goes down as you open more applications.

I was underwhelmed by today’s announcement, but the MBA was already a good notebook. I was hoping Apple would make it even better. It didn’t. “One more thing” was simply a minor evolutionary product refresh, and that’s too bad.

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Previously, there was an option for a Core i7 processor running at 2.66GHz over the standard Core i5, clocked at 2.53 GHz, for an additional $200. That options remains, but for true power users, this may be a nice way to eliminate the need for that Core i7 iMac and simply add a 27-inch Apple Cinema Display to your home office if you’re often working from the road. My preferred configuration is to get a new MacBook Air and go with the Core i7 iMac, but the new Air may not meet your processing needs.

The $400 price is pretty steep for the upgrade, but that’s just a reminder that despite lower prices among its other offerings, Apple still caters very much to the high end of computing market.

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Anyone who hasn’t owned one simply doesn’t understand. They see a speed that tops out at 2.13Ghz, and an SSD at only 128GB of storage, and that’s before they nearly faint when finding out it has only 2GB of RAM and a single USB port. The next question is always, “How do I burn CDs?”

Back in the 90s, Apple had a program where it would give you one of its computers risk fee for around 30 days as long as you provided your credit card number (in case you don’t send it back). It was a genius program, because many people who’d heard Macs were terrible would try one and be hooked after only a few days. The same might have happened to the iPad if Apple hadn’t marketed the heck out of it leading up to release day. People knew it would be amazing, but the general consensus was, “What do I do with it?” That’s where the MacBook Air sits today. It’s a machine that most people want but simply don’t know where it fits into their workflow.

I’ve been a Mac user since early 2000, and back then, when working from a café or library, everyone would stop by my tangerine iBook and ask, “Are Macs really worth it?” After the success of the iPod and the Intel switch, people stopped asking, because many people were already Mac users. They already had one in their bag. The sale was made.

That didn’t start happening to me again until late 2009, when I purchased a MacBook Air. I was skeptical, but I had a 17” MacBook Pro at my desk and thought if I didn’t like the Air, I could send it back within two weeks. Two weeks later, I sold the 17” MacBook Pro and bought an iMac. Today, when I sit at a café, that same coolness of owning a Mac back in 2000 takes people over when they see the Air. Their first question, “Is it worth it?” Yes. Yes it is.

People at Apple know this. I know employees that are designers, product managers and retail workers at Apple who all tell me that they love the Air and that it’s the most underappreciated machine in the notebook lineup. If Apple knows it, why doesn’t it do something about it?

There’s a trend at Apple that I see repeatedly. The machine with the lowest sales remains stagnant until Apple gets around to fixing it up. The Mac mini was plagued with this problem, and sat dormant from a design perspective from 2005 to 2010. The Mac Pro has far worse sales than the mini, and it sees a minor speed bump once every 18 months, but if you own a PowerMac G5 manufactured in 2004 and sit it beside a Mac Pro that just arrived from Apple yesterday, they look strikingly similar. Just compare a PowerBook from 2003 to a MacBook Pro today and you’ll see where Apple spends most of its time innovating.

The MacBook Air’s design has remained unchanged since it was introduced in January 2008, when the SSD model cost close to $3,000. Apple continued dropping the price and enhancing the features, to where today’s high-end model can be had for just over $2,000 and can handle most everyday tasks. If a laptop is your only computer and you do any digital media creation, the Air isn’t for you. If you have a desktop computer and occasionally fly across country only working on spreadsheets, PowerPoint documents or watching movies, the Air is going to be your new best friend. I’m not a designer, and I’m not a digital magician. I’m just a guy that writes, emails, reads news and watches YouTube videos, and for that, the MacBook Air is the best machine money can buy.

I’m not going to speculate what the next Macbook Air should have. I’m only here to make a case that anyone that hasn’t used one should give it a shot and that Apple needs to throw some marketing dollars behind it so everyone else knows what we MacBook air owners have known for a long time: It’s the best notebook Apple makes and it also happens to be the smallest. It’s a machine for 75 percent of the portable Mac users out there, and too many people are buying more than they need when the MacBook Air fits in just nicely.

Since the iTunes Music Store was announced in 2003 with only 100,000 tracks available for purchase, press and bloggers have been asking, “when will Apple release a subscription model?” Each time a new music service pops up from Microsoft, RealNetworks and Sony, the question is asked again. Jobs repeatedly insists people want to own content, and a subscription plan doesn’t allow for that. The thing is, when he makes a claim like that, it suggests Apple has considered the idea and decided it will never go that route.

If you look back at Jobs’ past quotes about mobile phones, tablets and even cloud services, he shot those ideas down publicly to the point where the person asking feels like an idiot. “The iPod is not a good device for watching video,” he said in 2004, but the iPod Video came out a year later as a “revolutionary way to watch video on the go.” Actions speak louder than words, and in the case of the Netflix partnership, Apple has given us two directions to ponder for the rumored Apple iTunes Subscription Model.

Netflix is a subscription service. You pay a set dollar amount each month, and Netflix mails you a DVD that’s in your queue, as well as providing access to Netflix Instant, which allows anyone with an Internet connection and a computer or gaming device to watch streaming movies any time. The selection of videos available to stream isn’t great, but it’s steadily improving. Over the past two years, Netflix has grown the Instant accessibility by partnering with hardware makers like Sony televisions, Panasonic’s Blu-ray players and Microsoft’s Xbox to make streaming available via gaming devices.

The inclusion of Netflix on Apple’s latest television appliance was a surprise to me, mostly because it shut down any rumors that Apple may one day offer a subscription service. Including Netflix on a web-connected television appliance isn’t a lure for potential buyers, since most of Apple’s potential Apple TV customers have one or more devices in their home capable of using Netflix Instant (computer, iPad, Blu-ray player, Xbox, etc.).

Did Apple add Netflix simply to play catch-up, or was it only Jobs’ way of saying, “Here’s a subscription service. Trust us, we’re not going to do one”? What about movies Apple wants you to rent for 99 cents through iTunes that you can now get through Netflix?

My far-fetched theory is that Apple is keeping an eye on Netflix and how consumers use this subscription model. I’m pretty sure that Apple realizes that the selection of new releases available within Netflix Instant is mediocre, and this is only a strategic partnership to help sell Apple TV to the consumers who prefer to use one device for all television and movie viewing, and Apple fans who don’t mind having four devices that all include the same access.

The day that Apple realizes it’s losing sales to Netflix Instant or it finally sees a viable business model for offering a better subscription service than Netflix, we’ll see this feature yanked from Apple TV. Of course, it’s not like Netflix is a music subscription service. Those rumors about an Apple music subscription service can keep flowing no problem.

The rumors that Apple TV would be getting an App Store treatment excited a lot of people, myself included, because app developers like Netflix and Hulu could easily build apps in the SDK and circumvent Apple’s built-in features. We all know Apple can do whatever it wants with its store, but with both apps available on the iPhone and iPad, Apple shows it doesn’t really care that using these services is just as easy as renting a movie the Apple way.

Apple’s partnership with Netflix indicates the company isn’t interested in the subscription business right now, but as soon as this becomes a priority, you can bet that Netflix won’t be an Apple TV feature anymore.

The downside of this new plan is that if you go over your 2GB cap, you’ll be charged $10 for every GB you go over. Those of us already on AT&T data contracts were grandfathered in to unlimited plans for the foreseeable future as long as we didn’t cancel our plans.

I wasn’t in a current plan. When I left my job last month, they had taken over my iPhone bill into their contract so, when I left for a new job, I had to setup a new plan even though I could get my old number back. It didn’t hit me that I was screwed until the Apple employee showed me the screen saying, “Choose a data plan” and the two options were 250MB 200 MB or 2GB. I sighed and chose the larger plan but I didn’t get tethering because I already own an unlimited 3G data card from AT&T. Update: I also want to add that the previous “unlimited” plan was actually somewhere around 5GB The iPhone didn’t have a 5 GB limit, however most data cards do have a 5GB limit on “unlimited” plans. Most carriers that say their data is unlimited are lying to you. Don’t be surprised if you download 10 movies from iTunes on your “unlimited” 3G data card and Verizon calls you up with some harsh words.

Eight days later I received a text message from AT&T:

Oh dear. Well, there was nothing I could do except simply turn off 3G data via iPhone’s system settings, which basically makes my iPhone an iPod touch where Wi-Fi is the only option. I wasn’t going to do that. For the sake of our readers, I chose to wait it out. First, let’s talk about what I do on my iPhone.

The No. 1 thing I do is use Twitter for iPhone. In my three years on the service, I’ve tweeted over 60,000 times and sent nearly twice as many direct messages. The second thing I do is email sending, receiving and moving messages around all day on an average of once every 10 minutes from 7AM to midnight. After that, I use eight different location based services to check in and “share” my location anytime I go somewhere and finally, I use apps for weather, video, news and Safari to get information on the go. This month, I also bought and downloaded the new Pearl Jam album via iTunes on my iPhone over 3G.

This line of service was created on August 21 and as I’m writing this it’s September 5. In 16 days with my iPhone 4, here is my current data usage.

At this rate, I will have to pay the 2GB monthly plan price of $25 plus an addition $10 for each GB I go over. It looks like I’ll be paying $20 extra this month for being a data hog. AT&T’s choice to limit us to 2GB of data is simply ridiculous and I have to remind everyone reading that I did not opt for tethering, so my iPhone data would have been above and beyond what I’ve shown above if that was the case. I did a test and in the three hours I’ve been sitting in this café syncing Twitter, email, RSS and uploading images to this blog, I’ve used 75MB of data in and 22MB out. If I was doing that tethered to my iPhone and not on the café’s Wi-Fi connection, it would count against that 2GB cap. The completely lame part of AT&T’s iPhone tethering is that it charges you $20 more just to tether your iPhone but doesn’t allow you more data. You’re still capped at 2GB. I’d happily pay $50 for 5GB of data with tethering on an iPhone but this isn’t an option.

This is mostly a rant but it shows that the choice to limit data bandwidth at a time when mobile phones are demanding more was a poor choice on one of the nation’s largest carriers and I’m paying for it by being a “data hog.”

What are your data usage rates like?

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Right now, most of the content you own is stored locally on our Macs or iOS devices. This content includes apps, books, videos, music and documents. The cutting edge techies have embraced Gmail, Google Docs and cloud services like DropBox and Box.net. The only thing keeping you from storing movies in the cloud and viewing those on your iPad is Internet speed. What if I told you the copy of Finding Nemo you bought from iTunes can be streamed instantly to any Apple device no matter where you were in the world — a café, driving down the interstate or in the London tube? It’s almost here.

Our future is wireless at speeds that meet what we have in our homes. This may be a decade away and if carriers make wireless data truly unlimited this will be a reality, but it scares me for a few very obvious reasons that simply can’t be fixed by technology.

Corporate Control of Our Data

Control by a single entity is my main fear. Cloud storage isn’t democratized and it isn’t open. Currently, when you buy something, it’s stored, owned and managed by the company you purchased it from. Apple has maintained DRM in its iTunes Store since 2003. I’ve authorized files that I bought the day Apple’s store opened and they still play on any one of my Apple devices. If I lose that song, Apple can allow me to re-download it after some back and forth with its support team. My apps, movies, music and music videos are locked to its devices. The same goes with Amazon’s Kindle platform. Buying a book from Amazon’s Kindle Store means that file is locked to its software and hardware. If it ever abandons Kindle, your books are useless. There’s no reason for either of these companies to do this, but people who bought music from stores that are now defunct are in a bit of a pickle with the content.

An example of a failed system is Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM. A number of music stores and MP3 players adopted this, but most of those stores and hardware companies have shifted directions or gone out of business. The hundreds you spent on music may be playable right now but no one can guarantee you’ll be able to in 10 years.

Let’s simply alter my argument a bit and change the delivery of this content from DRMed files stored on your hard drive to music stored on the cloud operated by Napster or Real’s Rhapsody Store. If those services go away, the music you “own” is no longer playable…ever. Going all in on a service that is cloud based is risky business. The same goes for content stored on Google Docs, Flickr, MobileMe and YouTube. If you’re not keeping hard copies of your content uploaded to these services, you’re a fool. Hard drives are cheap. Store your content and don’t rely on these web services that have been around for less than a few years to store your content forever. Personally, I use Backupify.com to keep secondary backups of all my data from Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and WordPress. I download copies from Backupify once a month to my hard drive.

Remember when Amazon ironically pulled copies of 1984 from Kindle devices without warning? Cloud based companies can do this. They might give you a warning but no one can come into your house and take a book. Unless what you’re storing is illegal or your hard drives are compromised, the data in your home and on your computer is safe for years as long as you’re careful. Keeping a backup of your computers on an external drive at home and a duplicate at your office is good enough and I suggest anyone do that no matter how insignificant the data is. If you store photos, music and documents on your computer, back it up off-site — no exceptions.

Apple is playing it safe with its new Apple TV. Allowing us to stream rented movies and TV shows is a good way to get us comfortable with streaming content. You can still buy the same content on your iOS and Mac devices and stream those to the Apple TV but, if you’re on a TV browsing iTunes, the only option is to rent the content.

It won’t be like this forever. Soon, streaming will be offered as a more convenient and less expensive option for us. Apple and other companies will present products where you can hit play on anything you’ve ever purchased and it starts instantly as long as you have an Internet connection from your phone, tablet and computer. Invite a friend to borrow your copy of Braveheart and they can watch it as well. This convenience will not be without problems.

In Apple We Trust

Apple is on top right now. Its mobile devices are envied by every CE company, but this won’t be the reality forever. I own 300 iOS apps, 1,200 movies, 200 music videos and over 18,000 songs where over 5,000 of those songs were purchased in iTunes. I’ve invested thousands of dollars in Apple. Thanks to limited kindness of the music industry, my music is now DRM free in iTunes Plus format so it can be played on any other MP3 player, but the other content is stuck. When Apple’s devices aren’t the best and someone else takes over, I’ll be stuck to the Apple ecosystem. The same can be said for Mac software when you make the switch to Windows 7 (for whatever reason) but it’s a reality we all need to deal with.

When you want to switch to a cooler and better mobile platform, will you be okay with giving up the thousands spent on DRMed content that can’t be played on the new device? If Apple remains the dominant leader for the next 20 years, can we trust it to be kind to its loyal fans who trust when we buy a movie stored exclusively on Apple’s cloud to always be playable and never be pulled, removed or changed? Will my copy of Braveheart always work no matter where I am or will I be greeted with an error when I’m in China with, “this movie is not licensed to be played in your region.” Where the hard copy stored on my iPad would play just fine no matter where I was? We’ll see. Apple is not a movie studio so its hands are tied when it comes to content and how that content plays just as much as any other company when it comes to music and movies.

The White Album Argument

Maybe I’m not seeing the big picture. There’s another side to this where if you ask anyone over the age of 50 how many times they’ve bought The Beatles’ White Album and they won’t be able to keep count. There was record, 8-track, tape, cassette and maybe even mini-disk. They probably also bought it in CD form the first, second and third time it was remastered. You may have bought this album eight times since it was first available in record stores.

Perhaps that’s how it’s going to be when it comes to our digital music. Perhaps, you’ll buy the same content over and over again well into your old age because there would have been a few music services between 2000 and 2050. On my 70th birthday, I may lament to my grandkids that I spent thousands on music in iTunes and they’ll laugh because music is like $20 a song now and I shouldn’t be complaining that it cost 99 cents back then.

Planning for the Future

Whatever happens next, consumers are in control. We decide with our cold hard cash. We already voted that digital is the future since iTunes sales will pass the sales of physical CDs very soon, but if we go all-in on cloud content trusting in the corporations storing and delivering it, the world may shift immensely and when you take a vacation to the mountains with your family where there’s limited cell reception, the music, movies and important work documents will all be inaccessible stored in some server that’s unreachable and you’ll have to laugh because this was the future we all wanted that corporations gave us.

Maybe I’m skeptical, but the best content is physical (bookshelf) with a digital version (non-DRM) and a backup of that digital copy off-site. If your house burns down, you’ll still have the book or CD digitally but the world we’re entering into is all digital with single corporations holding the DRM keys and now they want to store the content as well. It’s unclear what’s going to happen next. Let’s hope we know what we’re doing.

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