If you ask Steve Jobs, he’ll tell you that people want to own their music. He can point to the fact that over a billion-and-a-half songs have been sold at the iTunes store, and that Apple holds over 80% of the legal music download market in the U.S.

However, Microsoft and the various partners they double-crossed with their PlaysForSure digital rights management scheme will claim that you prefer to rent. You really are delighted pay a fixed fee every month, and get a choice of millions of tunes to download to your PC or an “approved” music player. Of course, the iPod is not approved, nor can you make a CD compilation.

To be perfectly technical, of course, Apple really isn’t selling you a product so much as a license to use music and videos with a few restrictions, such as the number of computers, the number of times a single playlist can be burned onto a CD and so on. The restrictions aren’t bad enough to impact most regular people, but they are still there. You don’t own the thing outright, as you’d own a CD or a DVD. And even then there are restrictions, such as making copies of the latter.

Forget, for the moment, that you can get around many of these restrictions with unofficial methods. They aren’t sanctioned by the various music services, and the RIAA couldn’t wait to sue you if they catch you on their radar. But that’s how it is.

The real issue is how do you want to acquire your music. Is Apple right? Or Microsoft and the other companies who offer subscription music as an option?

The music rental model might seem to be reminiscent of renting movies. You go to your video store, or sign up with Netflix or Blockbuster. With monthly plans, you’re allotted a certain number of movies at one time, to keep as long as you want, and you get replacements, item-for-item, as the old ones are returned. With music subscription services, you can have it all at once, or most of it anyway. Some tracks are not licensed for subscription. You must buy them, and that’s it.

So even if you wanted to strictly rent, you are apt to run across selections now and then that aren’t part of the subscription program. And there are lots of other issues that aren’t so easily resolved. What happens if you forget to pay your bill on a particular month? And that can happen if you’re credit card reaches its limit, or is no longer active. When the music service attempts to charge the card, it doesn’t work and, after whatever grace period is involved, your music doesn’t work either.

If your music is downloaded to a player, how does it know you didn’t pay? Well, every so often, you must dock it with your PC to make sure everything is still authorized. If you’re off on an ocean cruise when all this transpires, that’s too bad. You have to stop listening till you get back home. Now why didn’t you take a notebook with you?

What do you do then? Well, I suppose you can update your credit card, have it charged, and download your library all over again. You want to put everything on a CD? Well, that’s a permanent copy. It can’t just stop working, so the subscription services don’t allow it. It’s the PC, the player, or just buy the songs you want.

Now when I interviewed industry analyst Rob Enderle about this for The Tech Night Owl LIVE, he said you really wanted to just pay a flat fee every month, rather than buy ala carte. Maybe he talks to different people than I do. I don’t know, but the marketplace has shown, so far, that most of you don’t really want to just rent music. This may be simply because Apple doesn’t offer that choice for its iconic music player, but I’m sure that if customers clamored for it, they’d make it available. Money is money, after all, and the music companies wouldn’t mind a bit if they could charge you for the same stuff forever, or until the service is discontinued.

And that’s another issue here. If a music service goes out of business, what happens then to all the songs you’ve downloaded, and all the monthly fees you paid? There’s no guarantee how long those music services will function, after all, or whether new players will be supported. Take the Zune, for example. All the songs you rented or bought from the previous Microsoft-sanctioned music systems are simply not supported. You have to start from scratch. Is that a user-friendly approach?

On the other hand, there’s one positive aspect to music rentals. If can give you a chance to sample new songs, play them a time or two, and then buy them if you choose. A 30-second clip is all right, I suppose, but sometimes it takes more to discover a particular artist. For this reason alone, I can see the logic behind subscription services for avid music lovers as an alternative. You don’t expect permanence, just a chance for discovery and possible purchase later on.

What do you think?

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When Apple’s momentous switch to Intel processors was announced in June 2005, Steve Jobs said that the migration would continue until the end of 2007. Now maybe that’s what Apple felt at the time, but, as most of you know, the entire process was completed 16 months early, in August.

At the same time, a number of tech writers said that the long, slow process of moving to another processor family would halt Mac sales big time. More and more customers wouldn’t want to buy existing models, knowing that they’d be obsolete real soon. Well, maybe that’s a large reason why Apple rushed to get its work done, although there were some hardware defects that may have resulted, as owners of the first MacBooks and MacBook Pros could tell you. Not that it happened to me, mind you. I suppose I am destined to always miss all the fun.

But there were still reasons to stick with the PowerPC. If you needed to use a Classic Mac OS application, you were out of luck with a MacIntel, since Classic no longer exists. Yes, there are third party possibilities under development, but they don’t appear to be good enough to use for real work. This remains a significant issue, unless you can find a Mac OS X variant that’ll get the job done.

Now none of this has affected me in any way, since I can’t remember launching the Classic environment in the past two years. I keep the Mac OS 9 System Folder around, probably out of inertia, on my remaining Power Mac. Maybe I’ll ditch it some day, when I feel I need the drive space.

Then there is Rosetta, the clever technology that lets you run PowerPC applications on an Intel-based Mac. Yes clever, but not terribly speedy. Apple doesn’t really quote real specs, except to say that you’ll get good performance with most of your legacy software. It all depends on what you consider to be good, and whether that’s acceptable to you.

If you depend on, for example, Adobe Photoshop to process large images, and you have a fairly recent Power Mac G5 at hand, you would expect a fairly decent speed hit at first. Over time, Rosetta’s speed has improved by roughly a third, according to various benchmarks. This has become a fairly significant matter. In fact, Photoshop runs about as fast on a Mac Pro as on any recent Power Mac G5, give or take a few percentage points. You wouldn’t notice the difference without a stop watch in most cases.

Rosetta really suffers most, however, when it comes to application launch times, where it still doesn’t always approach that of a PowerPC. On my MacPro, for example, Microsoft Entourage 2004 seems particularly lethargic proceeding from the opening screen to the mail window.

When it comes to older PowerPC games, you’ll probably get playable performance on the speediest Intel-based Mac. But you have to hope for Universal versions of the more recent titles that stretch the capabilities of your processor.

The situation becomes a little more debatable on the lower-cost Macs that use Intel’s integrated graphics. Here, anything that stresses the graphics hardware is apt to suffer, although playback of digital video seems to be fairly good, at least according to most test reports.

At this point, however, unless you are one of the few who buys a new Mac every year or so, any MacIntel will provide a huge performance boost. Universal applications launch a lot faster than you have a right to expect, and Mac OS X components, such as the Finder, seem to have taken a few huge doses of steroids.

Is it time to ditch the PowerPC? If you don’t need Classic, if you haven’t upgraded computers more frequently than once every two or three years — a fairly normal figure — the answer is yes. Even if you have a fairly recent Power Mac G5, you might want to start saving your spare change.

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