Intel On-Board DRM: Architecture Does Matter

Looking over the responses to yesterday's Stevenote, the only person I think has got it right so far is Jonas Luster.  I'm with Scott in not really caring, objectively speaking, whether my computer runs on PPC, Pentium, rabid weasles, or a rack of 2,5000 1.023Mhz Motorola 6502s.  Intel Machines are fine with me.  I have several running a variety of OSes. I don't think the performance of the Intel dual cores is as good as the performance of the IBM dual cores, but if Apple is confident in the road map, ok.

What I do care about is my computer spying on me or telling me what to do.  I don't like DRMed software, and I detest DRMed hardware.  But that's exactly where Intel is headed, and it's silly to think that the Pentium-D and 945 chips or their successors won't make it into transistioned hardware.  In fact, it's probably a large part of Apple's interest in Intel to begin with.  The RIAA and the MPAA like on-board DRM, and Apple has a cozy relationship with both.  Far from a move to Intel being a poor plan on apple's part, I think it could easily be the first step toward taking iTunes to video and exapanding Fair play into a multimedia, harware-based solution compatible with the Microsoft DRM the Pentium-D is designed to support.

And that sounds like a pretty good business plan.  What it may not sound like is something I'd want on my desktop.