If you want to burn DVDs on your Mac with Apple's iDVD software, you'd better think about buying a new machine. If you have a perfectly good Mac and could connect it to an external DVD writer, forget it: Apple wants to use its monopoly control to encourage you buy a whole new system with an internal DVD drive. Other World Computing, a Macintosh dealer, has learned this from Apple's lawyers, after bundling a product called DVD Enabler with its external Mercury Pro DVD-R/RW FireWire drive, ZDNet News reports. Presumably Apple has no way of stopping users from doing the job with third-party DVD burning software -- or at least, not yet. However, Apple's bundling of iDVD and lots of other proprietary software with its hardware is hardly likely to encourage the growth of the independent Mac software market.
Apple stomps on DVD upgrade
If you want to burn DVDs on your Mac with Apple's iDVD software, you'd better think about buying a new machine. If you have a perfectly good Mac and could connect it to an external DVD writer, forget it: Apple wants to use its monopoly control to encourage you buy a whole new system with an internal DVD drive. Other World Computing, a Macintosh dealer, has learned this from Apple's lawyers, after bundling a product called DVD Enabler with its external Mercury Pro DVD-R/RW FireWire drive, ZDNet News reports. Presumably Apple has no way of stopping users from doing the job with third-party DVD burning software -- or at least, not yet. However, Apple's bundling of iDVD and lots of other proprietary software with its hardware is hardly likely to encourage the growth of the independent Mac software market.