Time magazine HORRIBLE typo!!!!

solrac

solrac

Mac Ninja
God, this is funny, for Time magazine. Of course everyone knows about the invention of the year thing for the iTunes Music Store, since Apple plastered it on their home page. So I read the article on time.com, and look at this paragraph!!!

Time Magazine Idiot Writer for [url said:
http://www.time.com/time/2003/inventions/invmusic.html][/url]
...
back in April when he launched the Music Store for Mac users, who represent only 3% of the computer world but promptly gobbled up a million tracks in the first week of business. By October he was ready to set the Music Store aloft in the 97% of the world that uses Windows PCs
...
Click to expand...

What kind of idiocracy is this? So mac users are 3% of the computer world and 97% of the world uses PCs? So there's no UNIX, no Linux, no BSD, no Amiga, no IRIX, no NeXT, no Yellowbox, no nothing? That paragraph is just ignorant.
 
Well, most people use Windows, and the target for the iTMS is the consumer who will buy lots of songs, not the Linux hacker or the IT geeks who use IRIX, etc. and aren't going to be using the iTMS on those platforms.

But yes, assuming that Mac and Windows is all there is, is ignorant indeed.
 
True, in the scope of the article, there is only mac and windows, because that's all iTunes is available for. But the guy said "of the world"... not "of the iTunes world" or something...
 
The intent, I would have to say, was something like:

"The original iTMS sold a million tracks in its first week, and it was only usable by 3% of the home-computer market! Imagine how many more tracks they could potentially sell now that Windows users can buy them."

The math was poor, but the intent was good.
 
Why? It's not exactly the target market. Sure, there are those who would potentially download tunes from iTunes and who swear by Linux, but those are they type who, on average, would rather download for free. The ethic of the situation isn't as important, as it is with most home consumers.
 
all a matter of perspective. ;-) one could argue that linux doesn't count as a 'commercial desktop os', since it's "free". also, if you _want_ to count the commercially available linux-distros, then you'd have to count them separately. still, it's certainly ignorant, because there are at least 1.5% 'other' desktop operating systems (if you count all the ataris, amigas, acorns, linuxes, free-bsds etc. together).
 
Much ado about nothing. Makes perfectly decent sense. Nitpicking for no reason. Guess that's what this site is for.
 
And lest it be forgotten (no danger of that though :)), what percentage of the 3% Mac users in the world can actually buy songs from iTMS?
 
kind of splitting hairs... not really a typo, more of an inaccurate statistic.

If the article read "only 3% of the users are on a mackintoshe.

Then that would be a typo. ;)
 
On a slightly different topic, the thing that shocked me was I saw recently that Apple was the #1 Unix in the world. I think it said that it was bigger than all the other Unix's combined. I've been working on BSD and AIX since '82. It just amazed me that when Apple released Mac OSX, over night, Sun, IBM, Apollo, etc, etc, etc, were all surpassed by Apple.

Sorta humbling to me.
 
Solrac, if your boss tells you have three lines to write about the imts, you won't tell the world about the yellowbox and about marginal systems. Same, as your boss is Time Magazine, you'll restrain your scope to North US.

That's press, that's American, generalist press. And those lines sound normal to me ! They wouldn't if published on Wired. They do in Time or any Newsweek equiv.
 
pedz said:
On a slightly different topic, the thing that shocked me was I saw recently that Apple was the #1 Unix in the world.
Click to expand...

It makes sense. Most UNIX machines were serving machines. There are more personal computers then there are servers in the world.

Apple simply introduced the personal market to UNIX. Kind of like what they did for the personal computer in the 80's. :D
 
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