“As expected, Apple’s iPod music player dominated the spotlight at the MacWorld San Francisco Expo last week. CEO Steve Jobs unveiled a smaller, lighter, and slightly less expensive version of the wildly popular digital-music playback and storage device. He also trotted out impressive stats showing that iPods are getting about 55% of the gross revenues from sales of all digital-music players. Few anticipated, though, that the iPod would also steal the limelight at the much larger and broader Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas,” Alex Salkever writes for BusinessWeek.
“Jobs managed to accomplish this with an announcement that Apple would start shipping Hewlett-Packard-branded iPods at some point in the summer of 2004. Equally important, HP CEO Carly Fiorina said the No. 2 PC maker would install Apple’s iTunes Music Store software and put the shop’s icon on the home screen of HP’s (HPQ ) consumer machines,” Salkever writes. “The deal stipulates that Apple won’t co-brand iPods for any other PC company. But Apple will gain powerful distribution through HP’s extensive retail network, a development that likely will fuel a new wave of iPod purchases and a steady stream of people buying music through iTunes Music Store.”
Salkever then mistakenly states that, “Apple’s own format is known as known as Advanced Audio Coding, and it’s teamed with an antipiracy scheme dubbed FairPlay.” [MacDailyNews Note: Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) was developed by the MPEG group that includes Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony, and Nokia