What a romantic view of Apple John Gruber has! The fact is that new Mactel computers will have some internal hardware dongle to force Mac OS X to run only on Apple hardware. This already has to raise an eyebrow. For example, what guarantee do we have that Apple won't tie an OS CD to a particular machine? They would be within their right to do that. They haven't in the past because they had no need. It would be a nightmare to multi-computer users as myself, but not something we haven't seen before (except before it was in software) from Windows and the like.

The main argument John wants us to swallow is that Apple will not allow other developers to access the TPM chip. Why won't it? because Apple is good? After all "Apple went to bat for users[base '] rights with the ITMS, getting better rights and lower pricing (for hit singles at least) than what the record labels wanted to offer." Do you have prove of that, John? I bet Apple simply went in and negotiate the best deal it could using its strengths, just like any other company would do. The fact that it got the first deal, doesn't mean it got the better deal.

But what really strikes as odd is why Apple would understand its own needs for TPM and DRM and not understand someone else need for the same. Once you have a dongle in the machine its uses are multiple, including some that John say are impossible just because he can't imagine anyone doing them. John, look around you. Our rights are being trample through DRM all the time. While in software we can always defeat it with a hardware dongle everything changes. It gets harder to defeat it. It is easy to see that Apple will have to encode some codes of the TPM it uses into Mac OS X in order to avoid someone doing a machine with the same type of chips. Hence, Mac OS X will have to be tied with one or several machines. One thing Apple could do is to forbid new versions of Mac OS X running on unsupported Macs! Don't you think that's a terrible prospect, John? Are you willing to sell us insurance it won't happen?

9:44:47 AM  What do you think? ( Thoughts) Who linked? []