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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: slacker711 who wrote (46593)	8/22/2005 10:43:46 AM
From: William F. Wager, Jr.	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 213172

Another huge downside of the rental services is that the songs they rent — and even the ones they sell outright for the extra 79 cents — cannot be played on the world's best and most popular portable player: Apple's iPod. That's because the rental-service songs are encoded in a format owned by Microsoft, Apple's rival, and Microsoft software is required to play them on a portable player. Apple won't build the necessary Microsoft compatibility into the iPod. So rental users are stuck with inferior portable players that don't sell well and thus don't attract the huge number of accessories available for the iPod. Apple estimates the iPod has about a 75% share of the total U.S. portable player market, with the next-highest brand at just 5%. There are over 500 accessories sold for the iPod, such as customized car mounts and leather cases, and just a few for other players. Walt Mossberg