You can do that (and I have with the one song I bought from MusicMatch's service). But when you do that, you're taking a song that has already been compressed (i.e., has some stuff taken out of it) and compressing it again. I'm sure it would be fine most of the time, but I don't think we ought to have to do that.
That has nothing to do with the analogy I was commenting upon. The analogy he stated was that Apples : BMW as PC : Yugo. I was stating that "you get what you pay for" is one of the most overused and false cliches ever. Ok, thanks. This is really irrelevant to me because as I said, I rarely have computer hardware fail on me. I must be one lucky guy. Out of the box reliability ratings don't mean anything to me because my PC comes in several boxes. Hey, maybe my QC rocks. My reliability rating is just as good as Apple's! Sorry, but one of the few places you'll hear about "out of the box reliability" is in the Apple community. It's like JD Power & Associates' intitial quality survey. Few people buy based on it. But it's great for the marketing department to throw in the faces of their public. Yeah, all those Unix programmers that have been chomping at the bit for decades. The ones that have been trying to take on Microsoft since the dawn of Microsoft. Meanwhile Microsoft grows, sells, and gets massive market share while the Unix folks are bickering amongst each other about licensing issues. As for there are things that each blow the other away in, maybe. But only when you get to a niche/professional level. I personally don't think either one blows the other away in everyday usage patterns for the average user. To my knowledge Apple doesn't offer MP3's. They offer AAC-encoded files. You don't need an iPod to play AAC audio on a Windows PC anymore, but you do need an iPod to play it "on the go". I'm not much for listening to music on my PC. I do have an MP3 player that I use often for things like FM modulated broadcasting on long drives. Apple wouldn't cut it for me. As for your comment about the iPod being expensive because it has tons of storage space. Oh please. iPod was playing catch up to less expensive units that offered several gigs of hard drive space. It's not like they're the only ones with 20+ gig hard drive "mp3" players - almost every other company sells them cheaper, too. Companies such as Archos have multimedia players now, but I'm sure Apple will claim they're being inovative when they bring theirs out... and the sheep will believe. Just like their ads that stated they had the first 64-bit home computer when they didn't. AMD had a working machine before they did. It's all about the marketing and Apple does that extremely well. That being said... I want a Powerbook G5 - I wish they'd bring one out.
