Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion

Rockbox ipod development in retrospect

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g00ey:
Seriously, if I was a vendor trying to counteract firmware hacks, the first thing I would do is to check communities such as this and ipodlinux, which have in recent times attracted a lot of publicity.

But let's turn the question; if they didn't care, why have they put so much effort into firmware encryption and development of secret hardware?

soap:
Perhaps they have been required to by the manufacturer of their new chips?
Perhaps an encrypted binary is the default output of the development tools they received with their new chips.  (You don't suppose they are doing it from scratch do you?)

I can speculate counters as fast as you can speculate conspiracies.
Fact is neither of us know.

GodEater:
I'll come up with one more speculation though :

Having people attempt to install firmwares like Rockbox and then screwing it up somehow (nigh on impossible to do this badly enough to make an iPod unusable, but some of our more technically challenged users give up at some point) leads to a lot of returns to the local Apple Store - which of course then means Apple incurs a cost through no fault of their own. That would be my reason.

g00ey:
To me, the market scheme of the iPODs looks quite similar to those of the XBoxes and Playstations. It's not the sales of the sold units of the consoles that generates the substantial profits, its the games. They are considerably underpriced and used as "market leveraging vehicles" so as to boost sales in the markets they are designed for.

I think Apple just try to weed out all discrepancies which they believe could pose a threat to their DRM scheme, iTunes sales, Accessories market, and of course; customer service.

This is not a conspiracy, it's nothing personal, no hard feelings, it is plain business.

GodEater:
Except your theory falls down now in the face of the fact that iTunes is now selling non-DRM encumbered tunes, which are outselling the ones which *are* DRM encumbered.

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