Hasta La Gadget!

Future, Cupertino — After a long and fruitful tenure as CEO, Steve Jobs steps down in early 2009 to fanfare and industry fawning. Apple needs a new leader. It’s time to choose your own adventure.

Much deliberation and coin tossing goes on in the back rooms of Apple. Their board of directors choose a person who they strongly believe can lead Apple into its next phase of growth, a person who can, at the very least, match Steve Jobs’ product development whip cracking, if not his outsized public persona.

The board chooses…

• Jonathan Ive, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Industrial Design. Turn to page 10.
• Phil Schiller, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing. Turn to page 11.
• Tim Cook, Apple’s Chief Operating Officer. Turn to page 12.
• Bill Gates, Super Rich Dude. Turn to page 13.
• Yourself, Super Poor Dude. Turn to page 14.

Choose Your Own Adventure is property of CYOA.com.

I know—a juicy sale price on a gadget is hard to resist. But the extras associated with these items are the real killers. It’s time to look beyond the tag in search of values.

Game Consoles

Xbox 360: Let’s say you scored an Xbox 360 Pro bundle this holiday for $240. Not bad—that’s a 20% savings. But you still might need/want an extra wireless controller, an HDMI cable, a wireless adapter and two play-and-charge battery kits. All of a sudden, the price jumps up to $440—nearly double the initial cost.

While you may be stuck with Microsoft wireless controllers, there are workarounds for the other components that can help bring costs down. Going with trusted 3rd party manufacturers like Nyko on peripherals is one way to do this. Their version of the play-and-charge battery kit for your controllers will save you $10 right off the bat. As for the wireless adapter, you can set up a DIY version fairly easily using a cheap router, a few feet of Cat 5 cable and open source DD-WRT firmware—saving you as much as $70. You can even use your laptop as the wireless adapter and save the entire $100.

By using your own HDMI, you can save as much as $45. And if you want to send digital audio separately, there’s a simple hack to your included AV cable. All in all, the total cost of of your Xbox 360 hardware can be reduced from $440 to as little as $325.

Nintendo Wii: As far as essential add ons are concerned, Nintendo and Sony are not nearly as extreme as Microsoft. However, there are still some deals to be found on accessories if you know where to look. For example, Nyko will be offering wired versions of their Wing (classic controller) and Kama (nunchuk) for $15 apiece starting in January. A $5 savings over the official version isn’t much, but it starts to add up if you are buying several controllers for party games.

Another area that you can save with the Wii involves storage. Buying the officially licensed 2GB SD card will set you back around $25—but other than the Nintendo seal there is no difference between that and a standard $10 card.

Playstation 3: Even if you managed to score a deal on the PS3 this holiday, you are still going to shell out additional cash for an HDMI cable. By now, the world has realized that a cheap HDMI cable works just as well (in most cases) as an expensive version. Therefore, it doesn’t make much sense to shell out $50-$60 for an official PS3 HDMI cable when you can get a version that is perfectly fine for as little as $5 shipped.

Computers

Hardware: Like game consoles, picking up a new computer isn’t always as straightforward as paying the sticker price. MacBooks are a good example of this. If you just picked up your first MacBook, chances are you are going to need two things right away: an upgrade to Wireless-N and an external hard drive that takes advantage of Leopard’s Time Machine functionality. One option would be to drop $300 on a 500GB version—or $500 on a 1TB version—of Apple’s Time Capsule wireless hard drive/base station. Granted, this is an ideal solution to both problems, but MacBooks tend to put a hurtin’ on finances so there may not be much money left over to go this route.

On the lower end you could go with Apple’s AirPort Express and your own external hard drive. The AirPort is actually a decent value at $99—but you can still save a little extra cash by making a sacrifice or two and going outside of Apple. For example, you can get a decent 802.11n router for as little as $70. You can also score a 500GB hard drive that can do the job via USB for $90 and under. The throughput on the router may not be as high and you may have to deal with USB cables on the hard drive, but you are still getting fully functioning hardware at a sizable discount.

Software: It’s almost never a good idea to purchase additional software from the manufacturer of your computer as an add on. If, for some reason, you decided to get the Microsoft Office Home and Student 2008 suite from Apple they would charge you $135 extra when it can be easily had elsewhere for around $110. Dell goes even further by charging $149 for Office Home and Student 2007 when a version licensed for 3 PCs can be had for $75.

Home Theaters

Cables: Whenever you purchase home theater equipment there are a seemingly endless variety of hidden costs that can end up nickle-and-diming you to death. Again, cabling is a big part of this equation. As I mentioned earlier, in most cases shelling out big bucks for fancy HDMI cable isn’t much different that flushing your cash down the toilet. However, at cable distances greater than 6 feet or so this may not always be the case. As we learned in our Truth About Monster Series, as a general rule, it is better to purchase your cables from a discount retailer like Monoprice and give them a shot before spending wads of money on products like Monster with enormous markups.

Installation: Wall mounting televisions and installing surround sound speakers can be expensive and/or labor intensive. Of course, there are alternatives that can help you avoid these pitfalls. Even if you have your heart set on a wall mount, there are stands out there like the Synchro Furniture Mate that are designed to achieve the wall-mounted look without the hassle of tearing up your walls. As noted in our post on tips for buying an HDTV, if you decide to do it yourself to save a little extra cash, make sure you plan things out in advance. I would also suggest pricing your mount across the internet before purchasing at retail because the markups are likely to be astronomical. Case in point: Best Buy is offering a Sanus tilting wall mount for $145 when a quick visit to Pricegrabber revealed that the same mount is selling on Amazon for $78.

As for setting up surround speakers, it definitely pays to do it yourself. The old-fashioned method can be problematic, but there are solutions as simple as picking up some 4-strand flat speaker cable and running it along your baseboard. It costs under $60 from start to finish, it’s simple and it looks great. Again, plan ahead and price your mounts online before heading off to your local electronics store.

These are but a few examples of how add ons and extras can kill a budget, but the point is clear—it pays to look at the big picture. Before you jump at a sale price, do a little research and think about the total cost of ownership. If you look hard enough, you can find deals that will help you save in the long term.

Prof. Dealzmodo is a regular section dedicated to helping budget-minded consumers learn how to shop smarter and get the best deals on their favorite gadgets. If you have any topics you would like to see covered, send your idea to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Professor Dealzmodo” in the subject line.

This may sound weird, but maybe the children—the future engineers, programmers and techs of our world—deserve crappy gadgets as presents this holiday.

It’s not that I think all kids are bad. Nor is it about avoiding breeding spoiled brats. Buying high end gadgets for kids is not quite like buying new driver a sportscar. Not exactly. But a kid driving a beater that is slow, handles poorly and needs mechanical love once in awhile can teach an early driver a lot more about how to coax the maximum performance and life out of a car when learning on a piece of junk. Likewise with tech. Giving them great gadgets can deny kids the unavoidable toil poorly designed or rough-around the edges technology offers that can be so educational. I don’t have kids, and I won’t presume to actually propose parenting advice to anyone, but I can draw on my own childhood, where I learned tech by taking the harder way.

My dad wisely refused to buy me a complete toy remote controlled car, but instead had me work on a Tamiya kit car, which required me to learn how to solder at age 7. The kid across the street from me eventually had to ask me how to build his own car. He was 16. In another instance, one of many, I couldn’t get Ultima to run on my dad’s old 386 until I got the autoexec batch file set up right. It was a pain but getting that game to run right taught me a nugget of knowledge. I had plenty of experience like this, and they all added to my collective experience with machines.

One famous geek dad I put this theory to said he didn’t think high end gear in itself was the problem.

Because computers suck so much, every high-end gadget requires learning all sort of tricky OS stuff like managing several devices, understand DRM, password and username management, updating firmware, rebooting when things go wrong, etc. Compared to a games console, practically everything involving a computer is a mini lesson in IT.

I can agree with that, but I think it strengthens my point. What’s funny is that the types of devices I use manage most of these problems he mentions very elegantly. Today, most of the gear I use is from a certain manufacturer that prides itself on making things very easy to use and consumer oriented. And I appreciate it, but I can’t help but feel like I’m becoming dependent on technology so polished, its no harder to use than biting into an…Apple.

Then again, other tech parents I talked to believe what I’m saying is nothing new. One creative family in particular thought the philosophy here could be applied to all mediums. For example, Instead of having their kid listen to pop music, they give her weekly music lessons. And although their daughter has total access to all the gadgets her father and mother do, they’re using it to ramp her up to more difficult and advanced ways to interface with and control tech. That is, she’s getting programming lessons soon. Knowing the girl, I think she’ll enjoy them, even thought she’s been raised on easy to use tech. But perhaps the difference here is how that energy is diverted — instead of using a tinkering mentality to get the baseline OS working, she might use it to write programs.

Another parent says this is all theoretical. I heard on some NPR show awhile ago that there’s not much you can do to encourage or discourage the spirit of a young person. I guess what I’m saying is that giving junior geeks personal tech problems from a young age can be can be good basic training, so what benefit do we get by buying them stuff that works out of the box?

Damn it’s cold out there. If only I had an obnoxious and impractical super suit of armor that protected me from the freezing temperatures. Fortunately, there are gadget garments that can make that happen.

Core:

Wine Rack and Beer Belly: These wearable bladders are intended to smuggle alcoholic beverages into forbidden areas while enhancing bust size or making your six pack look more like a keg. For our winter suit of armor however, I suggest filling them with your favorite hot beverage. You could stick with alcohol of course, but the accepted wisdom is that it actually lowers your core temperature. Still, fresh boob booze will make you feel warm. [Wine Rack and Beer Belly]

WarmX Electric Underwear: WarmX’s line of undergarments feature special conducting thread woven directly into the cloth that keeps you warm using power supplied by lithium-ion batteries. A charge will keep you toasty in even the coldest conditions for 2-5 hours. [WarmX via Link]

Ardica Jackets: As a final layer of core protection, these Aridica Jackets generate enough energy with a lithium-ion battery to keep you warm for 3-9 hours (depending on the settings) and even charge your portable gadgets. [Ardica via Link]

Legs and Feet:

USB Warming Kneepads: Okay, USB gadgets mean that you will need to carry around a laptop as part of your winter armor—just think of it like your version of an Arc Reactor. When plugged in, these kneepads will keep that trick knee of yours limber and ready for action. [Link]

USB Slippers: Like the kneepads, these slippers will keep your feet nice and warm when plugged into a USB port. Yeah, this is not so great for mobility, but your not chasing after criminals in this suit. In this case, your mortal enemy is old man winter—and he is a crotchety old coot. [Brando]

Hands:

Aevex Gloves: Like the Ardica Jacket and the WarmX Underwear, these gloves keep your hands warm using battery power. A charge gets you about 4-6 hours of warmth, and the gloves are smart enough to allocate heat where you need it the most by taking temperature readings on various spots of your hand. [Aevex via Link]

Head:

iLogic Sound Hat: Not only is the iLogic warm, it can also plug into your mp3 player to pump tunes into your brain via speakers located in the ears. [iwoot]

USB Eye Warmer: If you really want to get crazy with this suit, these USB-powered eye warmers will keep your eyeballs warm at the expense of your vision. Sounds stupid, but there is nothing worse than a pair of chilly eyeballs. [Thanko via Link]

USB Shawl: What good is a flamboyant super suit without a cape? It’s worthless, that’s what. Plugging in this USB heated shawl should do the trick. Embroidering it with your own personal superhero logo is optional. [Brando via Link]

[Image via infowidget]

Condensed explanation: Digital rights management is a corporate pain in the ass that stops you from doing whatever you want with music and movies in the name of fighting piracy. But there’s more to it.

Straight up, you run into DRM pretty much every day. Bought music from three of the four major labels or any TV show from iTunes? Played a game on Steam? Watched a Blu-ray movie? Hello, DRM. If you wanna get technical about it, digital rights management and copy protection are two different, if similar things. Digital rights management is copy protection’s sniveling, more invasive cousin—it isn’t designed simply to make it harder to steal content like straightforward copy protection—you thieving bastard you—but to control exactly how and when you use media. We’re going to cover both here, since they both refer to technologies that restrict what you do with music, movies and more.

There are, approximately, 10,742,489 kinds of DRM and copy protection. Almost every company or format has its own flavor that works in a slightly different way from everyone else—Apple’s iTunes-smothering FairPlay, Blu-ray’s BD+, the restrictions built into every gaming console. They’ve gotten more complex and nuanced over time, too, as content delivery has evolved. For instance, elementary-school DRM would simply keep you from copying or converting or doing other unseemly things to a file, like playing it on a non-sanctioned device. Or you might remember old-school CD keys, before the days of online activation. Today’s DRM, like for movie rentals, music subscriptions or software, constructs more elaborate obstacle courses, nuking videos 24 hours after you press play, or allowing a certain number of copies.

Many of these work in similar ways—files are encrypted with the DRM flavor of the day, and they’re unlocked or decrypted for your use by authorized programs and devices. Think of it like a secret handshake that only certain programs or pieces of hardware know. Often, they’re tied to an account like on Steam or iTunes. This makes it easy for the Man to keep track of and manage what you’re doing with stuff—how many copies you’ve made, how many machines you’ve authorized to play your content, whether your monthly all-you-can-eat music subscription is still active, that kind of thing. DRM-busting cracks look for ways to strip that encryption out to allow free usage, copying or modification of the file.

So, aside from the fact that DRM keeps you copying or modifying content, and playing it on whatever damn player you wanna play it on, and maybe limits your time with a movie to a fleeting window, it doesn’t sound so bad. Okay, it does. But it can get worse—like when DRM breaks. For instance, Valve’s Steam network had a hiccup in 2004 that meant people were locked out of the game they paid to play. Or when Windows cocks up and tells users their OS isn’t genuine. Or Sony’s infamous rootkit CDs. Or when DRM servers are shut down, rendering music useless. The list goes on.

But wait, haven’t you heard that DRM’s dead? Or has a cold? Weeellll, yes and no. Sure, some music stores sell DRM-free MP3s—Amazon is unrivaled in that has ’em from every major label, and iTunes sells DRM-free music from EMI. And CDs have never had ’em, except for that aforementioned BS copy protection from Sony and a few other short-lived misguided attempts. So, it’s sort of going away for pay-to-own music, but it’s still fairly ubiquitous, in all-you-can-eat subscription music, in movies and in software, and it’s not going away anytime soon. The emergence of streaming serious video content, like with Hulu in particular, sort of challenges this on the video front—there’s no DRM, but then again, it’s not as easy to rip a stream for Joe Blow as it is to share a file over Limewire. Harder questions, though, like whether DRM means you ever really own anything anymore, we’ll leave to the lawyers.

Here’s a list an quick blurb on every major kind of DRM you’re likely to run into, and why it sucks (beyond the whole keeping-you-from-sharing-it-with-all-your-friends business):

Audio
• FairPlay is Apple’s flavor of DRM that’s baked right into iTunes, iPods, QuickTime and iEverything else—most music from the iTunes store is lojacked with it, with exceptions from EMI and some indie labels. It allows for unlimited copies of music files, but only five computers at a time can be authorized. FairPlay files only play on Apple’s own iThings. Like every other DRM scheme, it’s been cracked.

• PlaysForSure (now simply “Certified for Vista,” which is confusing since not all “Certified for Vista” stuff will play PlaysForSure, like Microsoft’s own Zune) was Microsoft’s attempt to get everyone in the portable player industry on the same Windows Media DRM. Even though Microsoft has basically ditched it, it’s successful in that a bunch of services, like Rhapsody and Napster, and players—essentially everyone Apple, from Sony to Toshiba to SanDisk—have used or supported it. It’s fairly generic copy protection that keeps you from sending it to all of your friends, though it works with and enforces subscriptions, with the biggest bitch being that it restricts you to Windows and to PlaysForSure devices. (Read: Not iPods.)

• Zune uses a totally different DRM tech than PlaysForSure and is incompatible with it. It allows you to share DRM’d subscription content with up to three other Zunes, though it won’t let you burn songs unless you buy ’em. And if subscriptions die, it nukes your songs. It also manages the Zune’s “squirt” feature, making sure you don’t play beamed songs more than a few times and other annoying restrictions.

• PlayReady: Hey lookie, another Microsoft DRM scheme. This one’s different from the similar-sounding PlaysForSure in that while it’s backward compatible with Windows Media DRM, it works with more than just Windows Media audio or video files, like AAC and MPEG, and is meant to cover a broader range of devices, like mobile phones.

Video
• FairPlay for video is a lot like the audio version, but adds a couple tricks like nuking rental videos 24 hours after pressing play and presenting a slightly more complicated obstacle course to sync them to portable iThings.

• High-Bandwidth Digital Copy Protection prevents video from being copied as it moves across certain digital video interfaces like HDMI, DisplayPort and DVI, which sounds innocent enough, until you try to watch something on a non-HDCP compliant display—and you can’t.

• Content Scrambling System (CSS) was DVD’s piddly encryption scheme, long ago busted open like a rotten watermelon.

• AACS (Advanced Access Content System) is one layer of copy protection that’s part of the spec of both HD DVD and Blu-ray. It’s way stronger than DVD’s CSS setup with several components involved in the encryption/decryption process, and allows for blocking specific players that have their keys compromised. Plus it can allow specific numbers of DRM’d copies of content, like for portable players. Also cracked, rather explosively.

• BD+ is Blu-ray’s secret sauce DRM that’s actually a virtual machine, allowing it to do stuff like make sure the hardware and keys are kosher, and execute code. It’s been cracked, twice actually, but part of the appeal is that it can be updated—the last version is at least three months away from being cracked again, though it totally will be. BD+ was the main reason some studios supported Blu-ray over the AACS-only HD DVD, and you can see why.

• Macrovision VHS, yep, that old chestnut: copy protection on VHS tapes that made everything squiggly when you tried to run two VCRs together. Why include it in a digital roundup? Well, besides nostalgia, if you want to convert your original 1986 Star Wars VHS tape to digital, this will make your life difficult—fortunately, a quick Google search turns up ways around it.

• TV and cable—there’s a lot going on there to keep you from stealing cable’s goods, so you need a box or a CableCard to take the encrypted feed and make it watchable. The industry didn’t even really get behind the plug-n-play CableCard, either—it was more or less forced on them. There’s also this thing called a broadcast flag that stations like ABC or NBC or HBO can embed in shows at will so you can’t record them.

• Tivo uses DRM from Macrovision that can slap you with all kinds of restrictions, ranging from no copying at all to automatic expiration, limiting copies or managed transfers to PCs, or even not allowing you to view certain football games outside of a designated region. Its TivoToGo, for porting stuff to portable devices, actually uses Windows Media DRM though.

• Windows Media DRM, speaking of it, is one of the more popular off-the-shelf DRM kits, used by everyone from Netflix for its streaming service to Amazon’s defunct Unbox downloads (now Video on Demand downloads) to Walmart’s old video store, that’s somewhat flexible it what it allows or doesn’t, depending on the service’s wants—from no copying to nothing but Windows Media compatible devices (i.e., no iPods). It only runs on Windows, naturally.

• Even Adobe Flash has DRM now. If you’ve used the streaming part of Amazon’s Video on Demand service, you’ve run into Flash DRM (which had a lovely Antarctica-sized hole allowing you to rip movie streams until a couple months ago). Two bad things about this DRM, notes the EFF: First, with an unencrypted stream it’s “unlikely that tools to download, edit, or remix them are illegal.” That changes if it’s locked up with DRM. Also, it means you’ll have to use Adobe’s own Flash player to video Flash videos. Lame.

• PlayReady is another Microsoft DRM flavor, aimed mostly at portable devices, but it also powers the DRM in Microsoft’s Silverlight, which is what just brought Netflix streaming to Macs.

Software
• Windows Genuine Advantage is what makes sure you’re not using a pirated copy of Windows. It phones home occasionally, which can cause bad things if the servers go down. If your copy is legit and it says you’re a pirate, you’re not the first person it’s falsely accused.

• Valve’s Steam is one of the most elegant, integrated DRM solutions we’ve seen in a physical-media-be-damned world (except for its two infamous outages). Unlimited copies of games on unlimited computers, but only one can play on an account at a time. It’s fairly seamless, like good DRM should be.

• EA’s copy protection system got real famous, real fast thanks to Spore, and nefariously restricts game installations to three computers—in its lifetime, not just at one time like some media DRMs.

• Pretty much every console has varying levels of DRM and copy protection (duh, it’s a closed system), but DRM issues are coming more brightly into focus as we download games from stores, like on the Xbox 360 and Wii, where games are tied to your original system, so you’re screwed if you get a replacement—it’ll take some decent footwork to get your games back, at the very least.

• Not software DRM per se, but Windows Vista has a ton of DRM technologies baked right into it.

Any DRM schemes we missed, feel free to complain about how they make your life more miserable in the comments.

Something you still wanna know? Send any questions about DRM, rights, McDonald’s managers or Taiko Drum Master to tips@gizmodo.com, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.