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iPod Trivia

Q: What's the most expensive official iPod Apple has ever sold to consumers?

A: Prior to the release of the iPod photo, the answer was limited edition iPods laser-engraved with the buyer's choice of four alternatives: the signatures of musicians Beck or Madonna, the logo of band No Doubt, or the signature of pro skateboarder Tony Hawk. Asking price: $49 over the retail price of each iPod, or $548 for the then top-priced 20 GB iPod. The new premium iPod is the 60GB iPod photo, sold for $599.

ilounge would beg to differ in their history of iPod, also I know because several friends of mine went out and bought them ASAP, damn the price... then complained loudly about the price.

Just what are the facts? I noticed you haven't bothered to offer any nor have you even suggested what I am misrepresenting. I assume it's about the claim that Apple won't allow 3rd party apps. Who knows.

Some Jobs quotes:

"I don't want people to think of this as a computer," he said. "I think of it as reinventing the phone."

"These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them," he said. "That doesn't mean there's not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn't mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment."

"We define everything that is on the phone," Jobs told the New York Times. "You don't want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn't work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers." Jobs told Newsweek something similar. "You don't want your phone to be an open platform," he said. "You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up."

A couple articles discussing the fact that Apple won't allow 3rd party apps:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/app les-jobs-more-iphone-apps-coming-before-launch/932 0
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/12/ 0430200

Of course, there are many others but there's no need to list them. The fact that the iPhone is closed to 3rd party development is so well established and confirmed by Apple that it's a joke that anyone would suggest otherwise. Go ahead and masturbate to the belief that Jobs is about to deliver the greatest gadget in the history of the world; that is if you've even made it through puberty.

I respectfully disagree. I think it's clear that Apple has to keep their products secret more so than any other competitor because they are cloned and copied so much more than any other competitor. In my opinion, the buzz benefits are secondary. Apple invests very heavily in the design side of things and has a very distinctive design tradition. Since design is something that can so easily be stolen, Apple has to put special effort into keeping its designs secret. Why do you feel this explanation alone isn't sufficient?

The overall discussion is about iTunes purchased music, which is DRM emcumbered. See for example http://playlistmag.com/news/2005/11/21/ipoddrm/ind ex.php or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay.

The additional gripe I have with the ipod is the unnecessary difficulty an ipod owner must go through to share a song stored on their ipod with a colleague. I.e. I resent the unnecessary difficulty one must go through to copy a song from an ipod to another storage device, eg the hard drive on a pc. See for example http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments /copying-music-from-ipod-to-computer/. Note that the latter link is an evangelist site helping ipod owners with this problem. This is a form of DRM placed into the hardware.

So you see my gripe is with DRM, not with itms

Actually, with the iPod I would consider that annoyance to be an equalizer that for some reason or another results in digital clipping (a.k.a. distortion) when you use it regardless of volume. Nevermind the fact that the EQ presets are preloaded by Apple and that there's no way to change those or add your own.

Actually, with the iPod I would consider that annoyance to be an equalizer that for some reason or another results in digital clipping (a.k.a. distortion) when you use it regardless of volume. Nevermind the fact that the EQ presets are preloaded by Apple and that there's no way to change those or add your own.

One major killer feature of the iPod are iPod accessories. If Microsoft wants to compete with the iPod, they'll need to be completely compatible with it...

If Microsoft wants to compete with the iPod, the Zune needs to be able to support the accessory market. The iPod may not be the greatest MP3 player ever created, but it has the accessory market, and that provides a lot of value that Microsoft will be missing.

Licensing fees will supposedly be less than the "Made for iPod" program. The article also hints that Zune accessories may be able to use the built-in wireless technology.

So, will accessory makers offer many good accessories at Zune's launch, which will supposedly result in good Zune sales? Or will accessory makers wait until Zune is a good seller (if that ever happens)? From what I recall, the iPod accessory market didn't really catch on until the iPod became a hit.

Maker of exploding music players joins forces with maker of exploding cars.

Shipping G5 Video iPods can play back 720x320 content when the video is encoded with MPEG4. I've tried this myself and can confirm that it works.

Given that iPod hardware can handle widescreen-aspect video at near-DVD resolution (DVD encodes are 720 pixels wide, although they're 480 pixels high - iPod is *definitely* widescreen here), file size and distribution are the only barriers to DVD-quality iTunes content.

What the msPod will look like:
http://gallery.ilounge.com/ipod/displayimage.php?a lbum=4&pos=139

A video has also been showing the box design:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeXAcwriid0&search= microsoft%20iPod

I dislike the earbuds so much that the primary use of my iPod is to play music on my home stereo. I found the earbuds to be extraordinarily uncomfortable and unpleasant to use.

I also realized when I used it on the street that it isolated me too much from reality. And as a typical nerd, I'm too isolated to begin with.

So back to the home stereo for this iPod owner!

I seem to remember Bang & Olufsen makes some pretty darn cool looking earbuds. They're probably $5,000 each if I know that company but they might be worth trying.

Nope, not so bad. Here's a link:
http://playlistmag.com/products/complete/41-detail .php

And there's that cool looking integrated bluetooth earbuds/glasses from Oakley. At $350 (including a Bluetooth transmitter for your iPod), they might be the most expensive set of earbuds on the planet, but it looks like they would get the job done. Here's a pretty appealing review:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/ipod/review/oakle y-o-rokr-bluetooth-eyewear/

That nice Oakley fellow:
http://jimjannard.com/life.html
is also making a really cool video camera:
http://www.red.com/
Can't say he doesn't have an interesting life. He seems kinda like a typical Slashdot reader, but with unlimited cash.

D

For folks with the 1.1 firmware and a 60 Gb iPod, videos for the iPod won't generally won't play. Unless, it's from Apple. See here.

Okay, I have to admit I've responded to you elsewhere with a little vitriol since you had said you tried an iPod and seemed to be ignoring the features of iTunes that made it superior to the old method of manual folder management. But in this comment you reveal that you haven't really used an iPod with iTunes for any useful period of time, so you honestly don't know what you're missing.

There are multiple ways you can set up iTunes to copy music to your iPod:

1.) By default it tries to copy everything in your library, and if you don't have enough space on your iPod, iTunes tells you it will copy as much as it can. If you've got a small music collection, you can even use the checkmarks beside each song name and have iTunes only copy the checked music.

2.) Manually dragging music from the library to the mounted iPod icon in iTunes. This is similar to what you do now with your manual copying, though it's still simpler since you don't have to navigate a vast folder hierarchy of music (shudder...memories of my old music collection before iTunes came out).

3.) The obvious solution and the one most people use is create a playlist and tell iTunes to copy whatever is in the playlist to your iPod. You can have a manual playlist where you simply drag music to it that you want to hear, and next time you plug in, iTunes will copy it automatically. Or, you can create a Smart Playlist, and now your iPod will have music based on the algorithms and conditions you set in the Smart Playlist (it sounded like something I would never use either...until I tried it and loved it). You can have multiple playlists and check off the ones you want iTunes to keep automatically synced.

So the answer to your question of how iTunes knows what to copy over is that you tell it exactly what you want, so that you don't have to worry about it ever again. When I get a cool new album, I just drag it over to my "iPod music" playlist. Next time I plug in my iPod, the album will be synced, and I'm outta there.

This control extends to everything iPods can play/display--videos, photos, and podcasts. You can tell iTunes exactly what you want it to be copying. I have a photo album of my friends' pictures that iTunes also keeps synced.

It's time you read the guides at iLounge and read about how people use iTunes. The whole hipness/cool factor of iPod/iTunes is just icing on the cake.

If you had a video iPod (5G), that may have been because there was an unusual relaxation of Apple's return policy for that model alone. If you didn't, could you tell me what Apple store this was that was so gracious, and could you check if they're as lenient on PowerBook replacements? :)

iLounge also performed a comparison. Moondog Digital and RipShark came out on top. http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/reviews/review_gr ades/C208

Pretty simple premise, really. If you're sitting in a plane, having a little wire stand would mean the iPod could sit up on the tray table for you to watch without having to hold it the whole time.

It's called a dock, and Apple sells them for $39.

If you don't need docking functions, try one of these, or these, or these, or these.

Would it be cheap for Apple to have included one? Sure - that $15 one is just a little piece of plastic, I'm sure it costs about 45 cents to make. But what would Apple gain from it? They're not going to sell any more iPods because it comes with a stand, and they're just going to annoy their accessory makers. One of the things that's kept the iPod so popular is this cottage industry of accessories that's grown up around it - people know they have many options to customize their iPods, so it makes them more likely to buy (vs. another player that may have a smaller selection of cases, stands or other products available).

I do personally wish the iPod still came with a dock, but I don't just want a crappy little stand. And I understand why Apple took the dock out of the package - it hasn't hurt sales any and it's let them do these feature and spec upgrades without raising prices at all. I'm not defending their removal of the dock from a consumer's standpoint, but I do understand it from a business standpoint.

Pretty simple premise, really. If you're sitting in a plane, having a little wire stand would mean the iPod could sit up on the tray table for you to watch without having to hold it the whole time.

It's called a dock, and Apple sells them for $39.

If you don't need docking functions, try one of these, or these, or these, or these.

Would it be cheap for Apple to have included one? Sure - that $15 one is just a little piece of plastic, I'm sure it costs about 45 cents to make. But what would Apple gain from it? They're not going to sell any more iPods because it comes with a stand, and they're just going to annoy their accessory makers. One of the things that's kept the iPod so popular is this cottage industry of accessories that's grown up around it - people know they have many options to customize their iPods, so it makes them more likely to buy (vs. another player that may have a smaller selection of cases, stands or other products available).

I do personally wish the iPod still came with a dock, but I don't just want a crappy little stand. And I understand why Apple took the dock out of the package - it hasn't hurt sales any and it's let them do these feature and spec upgrades without raising prices at all. I'm not defending their removal of the dock from a consumer's standpoint, but I do understand it from a business standpoint.

Pretty simple premise, really. If you're sitting in a plane, having a little wire stand would mean the iPod could sit up on the tray table for you to watch without having to hold it the whole time.

It's called a dock, and Apple sells them for $39.

If you don't need docking functions, try one of these, or these, or these, or these.

Would it be cheap for Apple to have included one? Sure - that $15 one is just a little piece of plastic, I'm sure it costs about 45 cents to make. But what would Apple gain from it? They're not going to sell any more iPods because it comes with a stand, and they're just going to annoy their accessory makers. One of the things that's kept the iPod so popular is this cottage industry of accessories that's grown up around it - people know they have many options to customize their iPods, so it makes them more likely to buy (vs. another player that may have a smaller selection of cases, stands or other products available).

I do personally wish the iPod still came with a dock, but I don't just want a crappy little stand. And I understand why Apple took the dock out of the package - it hasn't hurt sales any and it's let them do these feature and spec upgrades without raising prices at all. I'm not defending their removal of the dock from a consumer's standpoint, but I do understand it from a business standpoint.

Pretty simple premise, really. If you're sitting in a plane, having a little wire stand would mean the iPod could sit up on the tray table for you to watch without having to hold it the whole time.

It's called a dock, and Apple sells them for $39.

If you don't need docking functions, try one of these, or these, or these, or these.

Would it be cheap for Apple to have included one? Sure - that $15 one is just a little piece of plastic, I'm sure it costs about 45 cents to make. But what would Apple gain from it? They're not going to sell any more iPods because it comes with a stand, and they're just going to annoy their accessory makers. One of the things that's kept the iPod so popular is this cottage industry of accessories that's grown up around it - people know they have many options to customize their iPods, so it makes them more likely to buy (vs. another player that may have a smaller selection of cases, stands or other products available).

I do personally wish the iPod still came with a dock, but I don't just want a crappy little stand. And I understand why Apple took the dock out of the package - it hasn't hurt sales any and it's let them do these feature and spec upgrades without raising prices at all. I'm not defending their removal of the dock from a consumer's standpoint, but I do understand it from a business standpoint.

And another redicted 10 million ipods sold, just in Q4, 2005 ... yeah, iPod owners are really angry being "stuck" on iTunes ..

The guys at iPod Lounge did a comprehensive review of this little guy some time ago, with lots of pictures comparing it to the various iPods and previous GameBoys for perspective. Worth checking out.

The colour iPod distortion problem? I'm going to guess "never".

It's a scratch guard to protect your nano at least until the nano tubes arrive.

how much you want to bet they seek an injunction before September 7? :->

Man, how much more loaded a post title could this get? Patents dont mean anything about inventing.

read what the Apple spokesperson had to say about that. Chronology with evidence does hold up for something, I'd hope. Its not who applies first, but who can prove they thought of it first.
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/app le-loses-ipod-patent-because-of-microsoft/

Move along. nothing to see here. Put it back in the oven.