Apple stomps on DVD upgrade

If you want to burn DVDs on your Mac with Apple's iDVD software, you'd better think about buying a new machine. If you have a perfectly good Mac and could connect it to an external DVD writer, forget it: Apple wants to use its monopoly control to encourage you buy a whole new system with an internal DVD drive. Other World Computing, a Macintosh dealer, has learned this from Apple's lawyers, after bundling a product called DVD Enabler with its external Mercury Pro DVD-R/RW FireWire drive, ZDNet News reports. Presumably Apple has no way of stopping users from doing the job with third-party DVD burning software -- or at least, not yet. However, Apple's bundling of iDVD and lots of other proprietary software with its hardware is hardly likely to encourage the growth of the independent Mac software market.