and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

More news on the fruit front. An investment analyst has done some number crunching on iTunes sales:

Apple will have sold 1.365bn songs through the iTunes Music Store by the end of 2006, investment house Piper Jaffray calculates.

According to a note send by PJ analyst Gene Munster to investors this week, relayed to the rest of the world by iLounge.com, that's 55.6 per cent more than the company had previously forecast.

The revenue realised will account for five per cent of Apple's sales next year, Munster writes.

Which gives the slightest bit of creedance to my previous estimate of 4% revenue on it's thus-far sales of 500 million songs. This is not news, though, anyone can whip out their trusty old calculator and crunch the numbers, right? So why are all the iTMS articles always overstating how iTunes by itself is not a big money maker for Apple? In this day and age of bloated earnings statements, dot.com companies with millions in VC and nary a penny in revenue (let alone profits), and stock P/E ratios through the roof, I'd say the iTunes store is quite a success even if it isn't a "big money maker" yet. I say yet because I think there is a decent possibility that it develops into a solid revenue source in the future. You can't expect to open a restuarant and be profittable overnight, right? So why expect that out of your online music store?

Meanwhile, this nonsense about OS X being hacked to work on Intel boxes (Wired News) is getting a whole lotta hype. If you believe some of the rumors than Apple expected the TPM security would be broken :

The hackers suspect Apple wanted to demonstrate the weaknesses of TPM security, and may have plans to license its operating system to PC makers eventually.

Dvorak is probably one of the original instigators in this conspiracy theory:

I'm now convinced that this is all a publicity stunt and the Apple community is being used—once again—by the company's marketing department.

Whether you buy that or not, I'm with Dvorak on this one when he says that Apple would do well to release their OS X into the wild. The time is right and the fruit, as they say, is ripe for the picking:

I [think the OS getting out in the wild] would increase interest amongst developers, which should boost overall sales. Besides, I'm completely convinced that Apple could still get the same premium for its machines that it does today. People simply like the design of Apple gear. Just look at the sales of the overpriced iPod in a market glutted with MP3 players. Why does anyone buy one? How is this ga-ga mentality different with computers?

Right or wrong on the ga-ga front, Dvorak goes on to outline his prediction or, as people are calling it, his prophecy. Come on guys, was it that hard to imagine?:

Apple plays the game with some sort of trusted-computing lockdown. The source code for the exact mechanism is stolen or hacked or both. It's actually weak and meant to be cracked.
From the first Wired article: It seems like getting around the TPM wasn't that hard, according to a hacker nicknamed "parch," who said, "Apple could have made the lock heavier."
Soon the crack is on the Net, and with or without a hardware bypass, the code is shown working on a Dell.
From the first Wired article again:Now the hacked version of OSx86 is running on Dell laptops and other PCs with Intel and AMD microprocessors.
Apple protests and threatens to sue anyone caught running the code. This results in all sorts of publicity, as the average user wants to know what all the fuss is about.

What? Publicity? Good? Nahhh.. Really? I guess we're still waiting for Apple's protests at the moment but time will tell.

I'm just not convinced that you can keep people from doing what they will, hacking and tinkering away with the devices they buy - whether it be a kitcar or a computer - and if there is built security or copyright technology people are going to go ahead and break that too. Companies are just going to have to learn how unfruitful this direction of technological advancement is. It's stifling to innovation and research, it's narrow minded, and it's not very smart. At some point you just need to stop what you're doing and mutate. Gotta roll with the punches. Microsoft might still be able to exchange body blows with anyone in town but they won't be like that forever. Mark my words, this TPM garbage will hurt them if they're overly embracive of the technology.