Apple always knows how to grab headlines for its sense of theater and savvy in rolling out new products, and the company’s last ever MacWorld presentation was no exception. Except in the sense that it was totally an exception, because the big news coming from San Fran is a variable track-pricing model in the iTunes store? (Now in three flavors: $0.69, $0.99, and $1.29.) That, and all its 10 million songs will be available in DRM-free format by March, which is great news if it was 1999 and also if you still pay for music (and if you do, we salute you because check out these deals). No fun gadgets, nothing that will significantly impact your music lifestyle unless it’s your dream for Garageband 09 to offer music lessons from Sting, John Fogerty, and Norah Jones for $4.99. That dream has finally come true, so nice work. There is a new 17″ MacBook Pro with environmentally friendly batteries, but I won’t mention it because this is a music blog. HOWEVER, there was one great thing to come out of this last MacWorld:
So getting one.
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Oh no, we are going to become cavemen again and computers will take over the world.
$411.70 to upgrade my library. Whoops. That’s what I get for being a lazy consumer these past 4 years.
1.29? Eff off.
The online music lesson thing by the stars has been going on for about a year now in England. This site:
http://www.nowplayit.com/
…has had lessons up by KT Tunstall, Supergrass, Blur and Paul McCartney. Hope Garageband can manage to get some teachers like these if they want to get kids to stop playing Guitar Hero.
jesus christ, i love apple but that wheel thing is one step closer to a retarded illiterate society
…its the onion
No kidding, apple is just stupid. And what about the one that is next with no screen? Are you kidding me? What do you have to do, buy it separately? OMG man!
It would seem we are already there.
I still buy some music…I guess I believe in supporting the artists I like. I would never want a music lesson from Norah Jones, though.
No way. That thing would totally and constantly piss me off. I hope they keep making normal keyboards.
don’t call it san fran.
Um, is that a joke?
It would take an unreasonable amount longer to write anything on that wheel, than on a normal keyboard…
Dammit, it’s from the Onion…
We do realize the wheel isn’t real?
The fact that people believe the video above is worrying…and hilarious.
No. Please. Are you all incredibly dumb or just super skilled at that irony thing.
Well, are you?
Judging from these comments that all took the wheel computer seriously, most of the stereogum readers are idiots.
how does no one realize that’s a joke?
well… I suppose it does look pretty realistic… but still?
it took me 45 minutes to write this comment using my ultra sleek macbook wheel.
I hope the new 69¢ pricing will apply to shorter songs. I recently bought Moondog’s Trees Against the Sky, and while it’s worth the dollar, it’s less than a minute long.
I love how they chose the new price for songs to be .69! “lol”. 4:20 anyone? 666?
lol
—————————-
Sent from a Macbook Wheel
the abortion went well.
It’s pretty hilarious that Apple is charging users 30 cents to upgrade their library from DRM to DRM-free. That’s why you either buy it from Amazon MP3 or just by the real CD and do whatever the hell you want with the songs.
Ok, I get the concept of trying to make things simplified. I would venture to say that after a week of spending hours to type out a document, people will gladly run down to the store to grab a USB keyboard. I admire Apple for trying to design something inventive, but this laptop looks about as useless as webtv.
Dear heavens. The woman ended the “report” with “…not just dicking around.” Does this not tell you something?
…and also reporting about the Sudoku Kiler’s next victims.
That…was…hi…larious. Gotta send it to my bro, who’s one of those “I’ll buy anything if it’s shiny and comes from Apple” disciples.
It’s not the last Macworld (note spelling, not MacWorld), it’s just Apple’s last appearance at the expo.
I would have cared about 4 month ago, but then I switched to Zune. Now I have a social life, a girlfriend, and hair!
‘That abortion went well’. classic.
Who still downloads music anyway? Haven’t you heard about this new thing called vinyl?
y’all got trolled.
Even though it was The Onion, I was “trolled” for the 1st minute cuz I thought they were giving THEIR review, just like they do for albums and movies in their weekly periodical. But the job title for the guy they interviewed, “Senior Product Innovator” and the display for the Predictive Sentence Technology @ 1:05 is just brilliant:
The aardvark asked for an aardvark.
The abortion went well.
The actor asked for an aardvark.
The amiable Althusserian scholar asked the aardvark for an absinthe.
The ass asked for a better absinthe.
The assumptive agricultural expert eyed our absinthe suspiciously.
The attrachtive rooster preened its feathers to attract absinthe.
The babbling baby asked the aardvark for some absinthe.
Its worth stopping @ 1:05 and playing tag with the play/pause button ’til 1:11.
this is why on reddit people put in quotes “not the onion.” in this case, there should be a dumbass alert: “this IS the onion, you tools.”
what makes a song worth over 1 dollar?!
if you ask me all these transitional tracks artists are sooo into including on their albums to make them look all artsy and conceptual should be bundled for free when you buy an actual song!
either way, I don’t buy from iTunes. There are other stores out there, you know.
I just wanna thank the onion for making these amazing videos… and thank all the people that are mad at apple for the no keyboard thing… you rock!
I like big buttons and I cannot lie.
everyone complained when they put no screen in the ipod shuffle, then everyone got one!! you should really try it before dismissing the idea; both of the macbook wheel and the next one with no screen. people at apple really know what the do you know…
This is proof of the stupidity of mac users.
“I’ll buy anything if it’s shiny and made by apple…
Never realized how much I hated keyboards till I tried this.”
No wonder macs are popular among college kids…
who would buy one of these?!?!?!?
Apple just lost a valued customer with this price gouge… When they charge 1700$ for a laptop they don’t needto be doing this to their customers it’s not fair… I have a microsoft computer looks like it’s about to have a zune friend… LOL I wrote this from my iPod touch later friends