mbdrake76

jeffharris said:

mbdrake76 said:

It's pity they're not putting storage capacities in the terabytes on these things to allow you to download all your iTunes movie purchases - because if you don't download them, and the content provider pulls it from the iTunes store - you're screwed.  Just had a title removed from my library that I bought in 2015 for this reason.  As I have 1.75Tb worth of movies and that Apple storage is incredibly expensive, keeping them in the "cloud" seems the only reasonable way of doing it.  But no. 

Buy an NAS RAID and plug it into your home network. 

I have a Synology DiskStation DS218+ with 2 workstation class Seagate 8TB drives for about $800 total.

It was a little tricky to setup, but now all my media files are stored on it and use it for wireless Time Machine backups for my wife’s and my MacBook Pros. 

PLUS, all my stuff is safe at home, not floating around somewhere to disappear if somehow the wires get cut.

Absolutely agree a NAS would be one way of backing up, but this makes a couple of assumptions:

1) You have a computer that can connect to the NAS - not sure whether NAS devices come with an iPad app that can connect to share files, but then again, if you download from iTunes to an iPad, the file isn't exposed to the iPad filesystem.

2) Your average consumer shouldn't need to do this.  The beauty of the Apple iTunes/Apple TV experience (which they're prompting heavily) is that you buy the movie or TV show and enjoy it across all devices easily - e.g. you don't need to download the file, keep it, and if the copyright owner decides to pull the title from iTunes, fiddle with streaming it to the Apple TV (which should be possible still with AirPlay, but it makes the assumption you have another Apple device to do that, and again, it depends on what devices you have in your possession do this).

3) You can't download 4K/HDR content (to the best of my knowledge).

The big problem in all this is it's a bit of a hangover from the days in which you'd have to download the file from iTunes before you can play it - rather than it being stored in Apple's cloud (not iCloud) and streamed from there.

This affects other digital services, BTW (such as Prime which absolutely stipulates that you can't stream purchased titles again if the content is no longer available on their store), but Apple's terms are somewhat murky due to the language being used.  But blog posts from over 7 years ago indicate that this has been going on for a significant amount of time.

And again, what's to stop Warner Bros. from pulling the title from iTunes entirely later down the line (without notice), preventing any "redownloads" or future streaming? Apple needs to do more to ensure that (a) if this does happen, customers are notified in advance and (b) put a stop to the practice entirely (if you sell content to iTunes, they get to keep a copy in perpetuity for those people who have bought it, even if it's no longer being offered for sale).

It's pity they're not putting storage capacities in the terabytes on these things to allow you to download all your iTunes movie purchases - because if you don't download them, and the content provider pulls it from the iTunes store - you're screwed.  Just had a title removed from my library that I bought in 2015 for this reason.  As I have 1.75Tb worth of movies and that Apple storage is incredibly expensive, keeping them in the "cloud" seems the only reasonable way of doing it.  But no. 

And you don't get any recompense or any notification whatsoever from Apple prior to the title being withdrawn.  It makes buying movies from them a massive risk (even worse with other digital stores such as Amazon or Google Play as you don't get to download them as a file as you do with iTunes - assuming one has a computer, of course).  Subscriptions to Apple TV+, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, etc. are fine - you know what you're getting and you're willing to accept that you'd lose access to them if you stopped subscribing or if their licensing no longer permits them to stream the title. 

So for me, the Apple TV has lost its appeal somewhat.

I don't think people who are chomping at the bit to move to ARM Macs have really thought out the whole process. 

seanismorris said:

mbdrake76 said:

I'd still say they are going to be moving to custom-designed AMD chipsets instead.  Probably based around the Zen 2 architecture.  It'll retain x86 compatibility and provide better performance for the power.  The move to an all ARM platform seems a little too early.  Yes, they could if they wanted to, but I still think there needs to be considerable work done before Windows on ARM becomes a proper, mass-embraced thing.

A Mac running ARM Windows makes no sense (I think we agree on that).  I don’t think Apple will go AMD besides using their discrete graphics ...until they develop their own.  I remember reading Intel gives Apple amazing prices for their chips.  It’s possible AMD could match it, but Intel and Apple collaborate elsewhere.  Eventually Apple will do everything in-house, but until then switching to AMD seems like a needless complication.

Oh goodness - certainly not at the moment.  Microsoft was certainly brave to release the Surface Pro X, but realistically it's not much use to most people given how little support there is for ARM-based Windows applications at the moment.  That may grow, but I don't see it happening for a very long while - if that.  Apple does already have its own discrete graphics based off of the PowerVR graphics found in iPhones and iPad Pro.  But whether that's going to be good enough for the Mac and will continue to use AMD for that, I don't know.

It's all rumours and guesses at this stage.  If they go ARM on the Mac, I'd expect to see a development kit rolled out a good 6-12 months before any consumer kit is released.  And I'd hope that Apple will continue to support Intel Macs for another 4-5 years after the last Intel hardware is released to ensure plenty of time for people to take advantage of hardware they've just purchased.