A few months ago, Apple introduced the iPod. I (among many others in the Mac “community”) thought that this was an incredibly stupid product move. I posted a pit thread about this decision.
Apparently I was wrong. Quite wrong. While I still question whether the iPod will do much to capture the “other 95%” of the pc market share, Apple IS apparently selling boatloads of these these things, even at the $399 price point ( I thought that the price point would be a very limiting factor except for hardcore Macophiles) . There have been several articles about the popularity of these devices, the latest one at Wired.
Not only that, but they are apparantly quite useful at stealing things from other people’s computers- it’s not uncommon now for people to go into electronics stores with IPods and download software from display computers.
You’re no doubt referring to this. There is a bit of a debate over how “widespread” this is. The incident at CompUSA is the only one I’ve heard of (you could, of course, really only copy Mac software). And it’s fairly easy to protect store display models from this sort of thing (using built in Multiple Users software or something similar).
And, as the article says, one could do this with any portable FireWire or USB hard drive out there. It’s just that the iPod is cleverly disguised as an MP3 player
