Seeing as everybody else, their dog, and their dog's favourite chew toy are getting in on the HP/Apple alliance for the purposes of selling HP branded iPods, I thought it was worth putting my hand up, grabbing some of the attention (and maybe just maybe getting some search hits. Ok, I'm kidding on that one.)
What is it? HP will sell blue coloured, hp logged stamped on/over where the apple logo would be usually, iPods. They will in every other way be an iPod. Still have an Apple logo on 'startup', same UI, same everything. Perhaps they might come formatted for Windows by default. They will also bundle iTunes with their machines, and link to the store on the desktop.
What does it mean? Perhaps the biggest thing it will achieve is having the iTunes Music Store on more desktops. You get that in there and people use it first when looking for music. They then buy an HP music player, or an iPod. They buy more, copy into AAC, and buy more iPods. Presumably HP intends to sell lots of these, the question is will you start to see machines that include an HP iPod? I'm willing to bet their more expensive models may just offer that as an option (at a discounted price? Who knows.) at least. Perhaps the HP iPod will be an up-sell item in computer stores.
Who does it hurt? Well, so far the main baby crying over in the corner is little ol' Microsoft. Comments along the lines of 'Windows is about choice! You dare to choose other than us! You must be bad! Bad!". Oh, so they can't use one of those silly dime-a-dozen re-branded stores that offer consumers less choice over what they can do with their purchased music? Oh, they can copy it to a few WMA supporting devices. But what about those who have an iPod? Or a MiniDisc? Or, shock horror a portable CD player? The WMA playing market is small, especially when you look at it as a portion of the portable music player industry as a whole. (I unfortunately have no stats to back this up, but if you take into account the iPod being biggest in terms of units, and flash players being not unpopular, and they don't usually offer protected WMA support, that I know of, and the fact that CD/MiniDisc players are still biggest of all, that I know of.)
(On a side note to those saying iTMS isn't compatible with most of the portable media devices out there: you forget the venerable CD player. Silly people.)
Will the iPod now support WMA? Some people seem to have jumped to this conclusion. While it isn't as 'never going to happen' as some people seem to think, it's obvious it is not a priority. As Jobs has said in the past 'why spend our engineering dollars on supporting some one else's store?" (maybe slightly paraphrased).
This has all be discussed elsewhere. But really, Microsoft, they are, not the smartest cookie in the jar some times.
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