• San Jose Mercury News, Wednesday, January 7, 2009 11:15 AM

Apple yesterday unveiled a three-tiered pricing strategy for music sold through its iTunes store and announced that it was removing anti-copying technology from the downloads, allowing them to be played on devices other than Apple's own products. Apple svp Phil Schiller says most songs in the iTunes catalog will sell for 69 cents. The second tier is 99 cents. The third, $1.29, is probably reserved for hits.

Apple also unveiled a 17-inch laptop with a non-replaceable battery that it says can run up to eight hours between charges. Also, a new version of Apple's iLife suite of multimedia software will be released later this month, John Boudreau reports. His colleague at the Merc-News, Chris O'Brien, says that the show has "all the feel of a company making a big transition from one era to the next. Rather than the revolutionary feel of the past decade, this next phase for Apple will be evolutionary."

He's not ruling out ground-breaking innovations in the future -- only a fool would bet against Apple on that score -- but he feels that, for now, the company will focus on consolidating its gains. And that, he feels, is a good thing in these troubled times.

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