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Apple releases iPod
The BrownFury writes "At an invitation only event Apple has released their new MP3 player called the iPod. iPod is the size of a deck of cards. 2.4" wide by 4" tall by .78" thick 6.5 ounces. 5 GB HDD, 10 hr battery life, charged via FireWire. Works as a firewire drive as well. Works in conjunctions with iTunes 2. Here are Live updates". No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
5 GB still is more than my whole mp3 collection
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
can make those who defended it eat crow. All in one day! It just doesn't get better than this....
FireWire (400Mbps) data syncing _and_ recharging at the same time. That's cool.
I wonder if it's hackable for a bigger drive...
Plus, you can use it as a portable disk. No "content protection". Yay!
...until Apple releases their new line of pastel contact lenses:
The iEye! [ducks]Apple is being distroyed by the rumors that are being created. When they announce that they are going to have a new product, everyone thinks it's going to blow their worlds. Rumors start flooding in about even the most outragous products ( I even heard a few "sources" mention teleportion) This is getting plain stupid.
Apple is a normal company. Why does the public constantly expect them do the impossible?
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
I need a fast, really small, 3GB+ hard drive, for software project transfers. This will do nicely, I think. Back in the day (early 90s) I used to use something called a Pocket Rocket, a SCSI HD about the size of a TV remote. When it comes to stuff that, for size reasons, really needs to be sneakernetted, this is the ideal solution. Any songs that I want to listen to can fit in the remaining 2GB with ease...
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
iPod, uPod, we all Pod for iPod!
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I think this is neat. Firewire is nice, and this can be used as an external harddrive as well.
:)
The only problem is the failure to play ogg files. I no longer have any mp3s, so this isn't as useful as it could be.
Waiting for those ogg-compatable players
data drive is kinda neet.. You can haul around some images. videos etc.. Firewire makes syncing fast too..
/it can be used on "Non" apple computers...
Not bad. The big question is whether they'll let
It's not limited to Apple users... you can get firewire ports on any type of computer, you know. It would be in Apple's best interests to release drivers to make this thing work with other OS's, unless they want to reduce the market for this thing by like 99%.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Less space then the Nomad yes, but also MUCH MUCH SMALLER. You ever try putting a Nomad in your pocket and go for a walk? The Nomad is only good as a psuedo stereo component, or perhaps in your car. Not to mention the horrible battery life!
//lame my ass.
Also, how many HOURS does it take to transfer your 6.4gb MP3 collection onto your Nomad? I know my USB player takes forever to even fill up its 64mb memory. Firewire let's you do it BLAZINGLY FAST.
This is a marvel of engineering, very useful and I give apple much credit for coming out with this device.
Also, did I mention automatic playlist/sing library synching with iTunes2? THIS is what portable music should be.
http://kered.org
Why? It's pretty and light, and it auto-syncs. Style and convenience matter!
sulli
RTFJ.
Nomad: 5x5x1.5 at 14oz
iPod: 2.4x4x.78 at 6.5oz
I'll give up a gig for size and weight.
And I was all excited they were going to release a OS X based wireless web pad. Instead we get yet another portable MP3 player .. "groundbreaking" I think was the term I heard them use to describe this new secret product the other day. How "groundbreaking" can something be when I can walk up the street and buy something with similiar (and in some cases, additional/better) features?
Sigh. One day Apple will live up to the hype. OS X is cool, and their plastic molding team has skills, but the hardware just sucks.
--
Yeah, what about Lame? How else would you encode your mp3's?
Seriously, this device is far from lame in my eyes. 5GB is plenty of storage. I have like 20GB of mp3's anyway, not like they're really going to fit on anything out there. And uh... I never really need more that 5GB at a time, ya know.
The recharging via Firewire is cool too. The size is a plus... the Nomad is too big for me to carry around. And being able to use it as a portable harddrive is cool, too... burning CD's to ferry files back and forth is a pain. I'm gonna buy one if it works with other OS's.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
I like it. iTunes, for those that haven't used a Mac, is REALLY slick. It is a great UI and makes things really easy and intuitive. My fiancee recently got an iBook, and she loves how easy it is to rip CDs into her machine and burn CDs. Rather than swapping applications, she does it all within iTunes.
Us geeks, who always acknowledged that Macs had a great UI (but we called them idiot machines) miss out on some of the impressive stuff that Apple does.
The Macintosh way is to organize things by things the users do, not the underlying file system. This is a HUGE paradigm shift from the Unix (everything is a file) paradigm, and from the Microsoft (everything is about something).
On a Windows box, you run a program to rip your CDs into MP3s. If you want to burn a CD, you use a program to convert them to WAVs, then you burn the WAVs to CDs.
On a Mac, you pop an audio CD in to your computer and add the songs to your library. If you burn a CD, you pop a blank in and hit burn CD. Now with iTunes 2, you'll have the option to make MP3 CDs (which previously would be done as burning a data CD).
In UNIX, you focus on the files. In a Mac, you focus on the activity. My fiancee doesn't have to think about file formats, she thinks about music. She barely touches her Windows PC or MIT's UNIX network anymore.
This device extends the Mac functionality. Instead of firing up Creative Lab's software and pick and choose which songs you want on it. Want to listen on the computer? Fire up WinAmp. Want to rip CDs, fire up that application.
With the iPod, it integrates into your system. You plug it in, it keeps your songs available. No need to mess with a clunky interface, the thumb-rolling thingy-ma-bopper looks like a clean way to use the device.
The Nomad Jukebox 20G with the batteries is about a pound. My brother loves his, but it mostly sits in the car now. He used to take it to the gym, but it wastoo big and bulky.
I realize that most Slashdotters are looking at the specs, but realize what this actually does. Its tiny, it'll fit in a jacket pocket (or pant pocket), its convenient.
Take it jogging, to the gym, etc. Sit in the park, walk around.
The Nomad Jukebox is too damned heavy.
This device rocks, I expect them to sell plenty.
I think that they should sell a Windows version of it with a Windows version of iTunes and a Firewire card, but that's just me.
Oh boy, another overpriced mp3 player, just what I need. I really dislike memory or hd based players as you can buy a burner and an mp3cd player for less than the cost of these devices I'll go buy a portable mp3 cd player and be done with it.
But, since its not an iWalk, let the Apple buying palm rumors return.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
Ah, not so.... My x86 boxes have SCSI and FireWire. Heck, check out the specs on this from a few days ago - note firewire - think drive for car, with the option to go personal...
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
But what does being highly innovative get Apple? Think Newton. It still runs circles around the Palm, but was a commercial failure. It was too innovative.
But, how about if you took the idea of an MP3 player, made it look nice, gave it a Firewire port for fast transfers and easy recharging, and made the whole thing sync seamlessly with iTunes.
Sounds like a pretty good idea to me. I imagine they'll sell quite a few. It's the right feature set at the right time.
Geoff
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
This is exactly this sort of MP3 player I'd like to buy, decent space, tiny size, light, simple interface and doubles as a hard drive.
Unfortunately $400 is about twice as much as I'd want to pay for something the size of a pack of cards. Too bad, it's an otherwise well-designed product.
Waiting for iPod 2.......
That said, I am both a shareholder and consumer of Apple products. When I read the announcement and specs I went straight to the Apple Store. At $199-$250, I would have bought two, immediately. Instead, at $399, I am buying zero, and expect that many other people will feel the same way.
I am very sad that Apple seems to be repeating the same mistake they made with the Cube - great, nifty product that anyone would love to own, except that it's burdened by an unbelievably poor price/performance ratio.
A laptop hard drive of that size in the quantity Apple buys is about $30 these days. I am more than willing to pay a premium for Apple designed hardware and software. This thing will undoubtedly have a great interface. But that is not worth $200 extra (double the price!).
I know Apple prices it's products to maximize profit. But I wish they'd realize they could make the same amount of money, and have more marketshare, if they'd sell 3 times as many at half the cost instead.
All I can say is, as an Apple "fan", I'm sad.
I submitted this as an article as well, but I must have been slightly behind the other guy.
:) Sure, hard-drive based players do this as well, and they have a much higher storage capacity -- but they are much more bulky and require careful care and feeding.
I have two major problems with this. First of all, yeah, it's tiny (the length of a credit card and less than an inch thick.) However, what happens when it gets dropped on the floor? For now, hard-drive based players are bulky for a reason -- tiny laptop drives are FRAGILE and need to be protected! The spindles won't hold up to much abuse, and MP3 players are subjected to a large amount of abuses on a daily basis, from being shoved in a backpack to being put in a pocket while the person is running. How well does the Apple player stack up?
Secondly, the Apple player is competing with many others on the market. Steve Jobs makes it sound like Apple is the only player in the arena, but in reality, there are several. Sure, Apple is the only one doing Firewire, and Firewire offers a faster transfer rate. But that's all for moot if my player pukes once I throw it in my bag.
If you're interested in finding a really tiny player, check out the Flash-memory based ones. Flash memory is getting a lot cheaper. MyDivaPlayer.com is offering a 128MB player that also accepts Flash memory for $135 after discount. Plus, these things are about half the size of the iPod. Flash memory players can be neat as well -- infinitely expandable storage, rewriteablity, and most players automatically plug-n-play as removable drives on Windows systems. Plus, you can do voice recording and cart around lots of other files as well, so the players double as mini Zip disks.
For the clueful, it can be used as a 5GB firewire hard disk if you need it to. This can come in very handy -- my wife already wants one, and this is one of the reasons.
However, there are two critical problems I see with it. The first, of course, is the price. Expect this story to be the sequel to the Cube, which everyone thought was cool, and too expensive to actually buy.
Second, expect the RIAA (and Apple Records) to SUE THE PANTS off of Apple! (And hear the Village idiot cry when his new, un-rippable CD's won't work on his new iPod).
Not only is this a lackluster MP3 unit
Considering that it's got far more memory than your average 128MB MP3 portable, and that it's clearly smaller and more portable than a Nomad, I think this is a hasty judgement.
which by virtue of being firewire will be limited to Apple Mac owners
PCs have access to FireWire, as does Linux. The direct connection to iTunes is the only Mac-only feature that I can see; I should hope Apple will be smart enough to enable compatability with PCs, or if not, develop a Windows version of iTunes to do the same job.
but it has virtually no UI wizardry that might define it as an Apple product.
It has a six-line LCD display, backlit, a simple four-button interface, and a circular scroll wheel to navigate your songs (which can organize by CD, artist, or your own custom playlists). You call that "virtually no UI"?
Methinks some people's "first post" ambitions are getting in the way of a decent review of the features.
So at what point does Apple violate the terms of the agreement with Apple Records for ripping off the name and logo? At what point have they engaged in music-related business?
I have been looking at getting a portable MP3 player. Will I get the new iPod? I am uncertain. I will definitely consider it, however.
What you need to realize is that while other products may be more "technically advanced/powerfull/whatever," Apple products win, almost hands-down, in the ease-of use department.
Ease of use is something that I am willing to spend a little extra money on. Sure, I might be able to find a 10 gig system that is cheaper than the iPod, but if I hate the menu system and the syncing on the cheaper one, I am not going to enjoy it as much. If it is bad enough, I will think to myself "I wish I had payed the extra $50/$100/$200 to get the iPod."
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
You mean other then the scroll pad, and the seriously small number of controls and options on it? (yes, cutting down on choice is a UI feature, and one that Apple is very good at)
Having it all go through iTunes is also a good UI choice (a no brainer for Apple of corse), you don't need to deal with another little lame MP3 manager (my most despised part of my Rio). Of corse once you have more then 5G of music you actually have to do work...
Still, not the product for me. I don't really need all that much music when I'm not already next to my laptop, or my car stereo...
oh yeah, and did i mention that it doubles as a portable firewire HARD DRIVE?
http://kered.org
$400!!!! for a freakin MP3 player!?!?!?
.2x1.8" 5 GB Toshiba FireWire bus-powered hard drive.
c ts/Hard%20Drives/FWFL.asp
No, $399.95 MSRP for a freakin'
http://www.smartdisk.com/Products/Storage%20Produ
Apple's version throws in the MP3 player for free.
Not such a bad deal looked at that way, yes?
Well? Is that true?
I read the cnet article and went to the apple store but there was no mention of anything.
The mention of firewire and iTunes make me suspect it is only a mac peripheral. And that would suck.
Any help here?
Pete
The sole purpose of the Internet is to get porn and bomb making plans into the hands of children.
I just checked at the Apple Store. Oh well.
sulli
RTFJ.
I suppose that depends less on the processor platform and more on the file system being supported on the software platform. Since it uses firewire, it probably acts like any firewire hardisk. But, the player may not be able to read every filesystem you throw at it, so it may require sytems that can read and write HFS+ and/or FAT32.
Well, I was hoping for something along the lines of the Terapin Mine, especially after seeing how well the new iBook and TiBook came out, but this thing is destined to fail. For $400 you can get a 5GB MP3 player that will only (officially) work on Macs running the very latest versions of the MacOS, but will run for 10 hours. Or, for half the price, you can get a smaller MP3 player and enough batteries and flash cards to keep most people happy, and which won't depend on the computer you use, and for the rest of the price you could get a low-end 3GB Digital Wallet for more storage. I can't offload my digital pictures to an iPod. I can't move files to any computer I want on an iPod. I can't use standard rechargeable batteries in an iPod. I can't find a reason to buy an iPod.
How many computer makers let you into the case without turning screws? How many include an incredibly useful and easy-to-use external connection port like FireWire? How many include digital video editing? How many ship an optical mouse standard? How many include a full productivity suite? How many include a DVD-R/CD-RW drive as standard? How many have given up CRTs and moved on to LCDs, the displays of the future? One.
Apple is the innovator in the industry. If you can't see that, then you're blind. Everyone else has been playing catch-up since 1984.
All they did was take small, firewire hard drive technology that someone else developed and then add a little layer of glitz to it. It seems to me that virtually all of the "marvelous engineering" was done by the hard drive manufacturer...not by Apple. They just added a layer of candy coating.
...which by virtue of being firewire will be limited to Apple Mac owners...
You mean, people who own Apple Macs like these?
Since the iPod can double as a normal portable hard drive. I'm sure it will likely be pretty easily used on a PC. And if it's not, big deal. It might be nice for the other half to see how THEY like having their perfectly-good platform ignored, and having to hack a product to make it usable on their systems.
And if you haven't noticed, it is possible to buy a FireWire card for a PC that doesn't already come with it.
I won't buy one until the unit is available in at least lime, strawberry, and grape color.
Amazing magic tricks
(OK, it's a semi-troll - it's just fun to theorize about CmdrTaco / VA Linux / OSDN conspiracies)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Lets see, in a portable mp3 player, you're looking for a few key features:
Size
Battery Life
Capacity
Price
The Nomad blows the iPod away in capacity, as do CD-R players, but they are both far larger and heavier. The Nomad in particular isn't really portable. The iPod is practically small enough to hide it in the palm of your hands. Of course, then there is the battery life problem.
Then there are the solid state players, with 32 or 64 megs of memory. They are small, have great battery life, and are cheap, but they don't hold enough music to make even their low cost worth paying.
Apple termed it wrong, the iPod isn't a breakthrough. It's just another evolutionary step in consumer electronics, but an important one. While there are other players with larger capacities, smaller sizes, or cheaper price tags, the iPod is the first to really hit that sweet spot between each of those requirements. (OK, I admit, at $300, it would be a much much better deal.)
So it's only 6GB. First off, that's a *lot*. It's about 100 CD's. How many CD's, MiniDiscs, 64MB flash cards, etc, does it take to equal that? Only a couple of HD-based systems are as convenient, and they all have other, more critical problems.
All other HD based players' problems tend to be slow speed (USB, let alone performance), large size, poor battery life, and horrible interfaces. All but performance is *definitely* better in the iPod just based on the specs and demos. Performance has yet to be seen.
iPod lame? Perhaps. It's just that everything else is more lame.
-node 3
One thing I haven't seen addressed here yet, is that this device appears to be "Mac-only". That's their choice, but it seems to be a really poor one. They just chopped of their potential marketshare by 95%.
Neodymium magnets are nothing new. I remember that being listed as a feature in Sony headphones years ago. From a little quick reading on Google, they are just damned strong little magnets.
~Philly
The Nomad is also available at the Apple online store for $249 ($10 more than ThinkGeek).
Steve M
The iPod is suprisingly small, compare to the Archos (which is quite a bit smaller than the Creative Nomad):
Dimensions: 115 x 83 x 34 mm. (4.5 x 3.2 x 1.3")
Weight: 350 g (12.3 oz.)
Of course the Archos is cheaper, can record, and supports up to 30GB (just swap drives). The Archos drivers have no digital rights protection, and no special software. The device just appears as a standard USB external drive (FAT32) when you plug it in.
Firewire is quite appealing, consider copying a few GB at USB speeds... ughhhh.
Raise your hand if you have iTunes ...
...
...
...
Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port
Raise your hand if you have both
Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device
There is Apple's market. Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future of iPod.
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
The Apple product has 83% of the storage space, 20.% of the volume, and transfers files 16500% faster (assuming 2.4 Mb/s USB spec and 50MB/s firewire, im unsure).
Just because Apple didn't choose to significantly increase its volume by adding a 802.11a antenna, just to add a *very* slow transmittal solution (compared to its firewire), means it's "lame?"
I don't have a religious bent for or against Apple; when intelligent people make these kinds of comments, it confuses me.
Oh goody. Another over-priced MP3 player with too many bells and whistles. And a price that's way higher than it should be.
All I want is a decent MP3. I want one that supports some sort of smart media card, supports at least 128MB, and has USB. And most importantly, doesn't cost $400! Is that too much to ask? The Diamond Rio 500 came closest to that, but of course it's not made anymore (and cost too much anyway). Instead, SonicBlue produces the vastly inferior Rio 600 or the way over-priced 800. If I can buy a camcorder for $300, a freaking MP3 player oughta be under $100.
I don't need a built-in CD player (that's why I have MP3's fer crissakes!) I don't need a built-in hard drive. I don't need a goddamn built-in toaster oven. I just want a little MP3 player that holds more than 5 songs that I can stick in my pocket when I go for a walk. I certainly don't need to put my entire MP3 collection on it all at once.
Let's see a cheap MP3 player that does one thing exceptionally well, instead of an overpriced MP3 player that does half a dozen things poorly.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Apple (AAPL) essentially already violated that. The engineers, at least, seem to think they violated it when they added sound effects, speakers, and microphones.
Therefore, one of the original sound fx was called Sosumi ("so - sue - me")
Your daily dose of apple trivia.
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I'm replying to someone who might've been already modded into oblivion, but I'll try anyway.
Normally, it's difficult to trademark a word like Apple, but you can go ahead and try. It's NOT incredibly hard to defend a name like "Apple" in a relatively narrow field, like music. (It'd be much harder if, say, you were "Apple Sauces, Inc.) Furthermore, this already happened, and Apple Computer signed a settlement agreeing not to delve into music.
When they did, they said "so sue me"; see my post above.
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This is a marvel of engineering
Yes it certainly puts the Apollo program, the Golden Gate bridge and the Great Pyramids in their place...
Its a freakin' firewire hard drive... whoppy shit.
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While most Mac owners may not hang out here on Slashdot, there are quite a few of us around... Apple shipped 850,000 machines in the last year alone... This will sell...
RateVegas.com - Vegas Reviews
I think most sets of $20+ headphones have Neodymium magnets and 20-20kHz frequency response. Next thing you know they'll be bragging that their circuits use "state of the art semiconductors etched by particle-waves travelling at 3 hundred million meters per second."
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Wasn't the 6GB Nomad $400 when it first came out? Could you use that as a HD? Could you fill it up in under a minute? Could you charge it over the same cable you were loading it up with? Did it automatically sync with your computer? Nope.
Get off your high horse and realize that just because the individual comonents aren't unique, the combination of them all is, and that's why it'll sell, regardless of whether some /. moderator thinks so.
today is spelling optional day.
Since when is Apple concerned about market share? They do what capitalism was born to do. Cater to a small market, and do it the right way.
/did/ (and many do/will have OSX within the next year), this piece of gear was BORN for that market. All while keeping Apple gear at the front of the pack in terms of usability, transfer speed, and respectable battery life.
.. you'll understand why having a big market share essentially garauntees tha you you have to give up innovation. Heck, Intel shipped their latest chip with features /disabled/ .. so I, for one, am glad that apple is content to own just a small slice of the pie, because its the most /delicious/ slice.
I don't have an OSX box, and consequently, no firewire and iTunes, but if I
Apple has never been about selling the most number of units. Just look at the market leaders for cars, OSes, books, movies, CDs
And no, I dont own any Apple gear. I wish I could justify it tho; unfortunately, MS keeps underselling quality, thus keeping wk2 on the the corperate desktop, and *nix just happens to serve the 'net industry better than anyone else.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Innovative my ass.
From the Microsoft Press Dictionary:
Innovate [verb]: To copy what has been done by others.
Steve M
Last time I checked, they only sold hardware and software to the "tiny percentage" of Mac users, and yet they somehow manage to stay in business... unthinkable! We all know that market share is the only indicator of a company's success!
At the end of the year, look at who had a higher profit margin.... Dell, Gateway, or Apple.
Apple is making an MP3 player for the Mac users. It's an AMAZING product tied into the hardware they deliver (when will all Winderz boxes ship with firewire), OS X, and iTunes
If you have a Mac, this is a SWEEEEEEET thing. If you don;t have a Mac, guess what, Aplle does not care.
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...I really wanted an iWalk.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
So does this mean the iPod will take over the bodies of the users and turn them into mindless drones?
OK, I have too many Apple punchlines going through my head to pick a best one. Please post your best punchline here. Moderators to vote which one is the best. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I dont give a rats hind end about specs... and apparently niether do many electronics consumer purchasers...
Yeah, all those consumers are much more discerning than to simply buy based on specs, like getting the computer with the highest megahertz rating they can afford and looking down their noses at anything slower. Oh, wait...
Goofy internal projects, expensive gaffes trying to "diversify" into areas it has only a tenuous relationship to, a complete inability to understand markets, and a constitutional immunity against learning from their mistakes.
There is no future in a $400 (about $250 too expensive) firewire-only (5% of computer users) hardrive-based (read: fragile) mp3 player. Any one of these critical flaws might doom the product - take them all together and you have another classic corporate farce.
When you see silliness on this level, though, normally you expect to see a raging egotist who is immune to common sense and criticism in some position of power in the company... oh wait, Steve Jobs. Never mind.
This just reinforces my steadily growing sense of foreboding about Apple. Yes, I've said this before and been wrong, but I'll say it again anyway. They're living on borrowed time.
We're on the road to Tycho.
The only really lame thing I've read so far are the comments people are posting. A quick scan so far results in only 2 comments garnering a 5 and 2 comments garnering a 4. I would like to go to one of the Apple Stores and try it out, see how it works. Then I'll say whether or not it's lame.
...they make their products for Mac users. Period. And I don't see this as a problem.
Apple places itself in the market to be the *prestigious* computer company, the Bang and Olfsen of PCs. Apple owners (which I will be when I start school next year and can get an educational discount) treat their computers as sacred. Apple may have a small market share, but their market share is fervently adamant about their products. (And justifiably so -- I think they make great hardware, and they make it easy enough for novices and powerful enough for nerds, not to mention stylish as hell.)
It's much akin to the religious fanaticism Open Source folks have toward spreading the Word about Linux and praising Linus Torvalds as a Jesus. I get as much criticism from Apple owners for begrudingly using Windoze as I do from Linux users. To keep this religion metaphor going as long as possible: it's one thing to oppose the evil Satan of Microsoft, but Linux-users and Apple-users arguing at this point is like the Pope arguing with Martin Luther over the 42 Theses -- you're both worshiping the same God, just one has more money than the other.
Okay, so that made very little sense, but it certainly sounded good.
This is what it boils down to, folks:
Apple has made a fairly smart business decision with iPod, saying to themselves, if we can't earn more market share, then let's give the market share we do have more items to buy. And they will becuase they're freaking crazy about our stuff. For Mac users, the iPod is most likely a super convienent, super cool MP3 player.
Those of you complaining that you can't use it on your PC or your Linux box or your TRS-80, go buy a Nomad because that's the market share you're in.
And good luck fitting that Nomad in your pocket. (Ha-ha!)
----------
Cheese it! It's the FEDS!
The iPod has 32MB of RAM, which it uses to buffer data from the HD. So it only has to turn on the HD every 20 minutes or so for just a few seconds to refill the RAM cache. The drive spends most of the time off and heads parked.
Saves tons of power, and should make it tough as nails.
Check out the mine, it's certainly more expensive but I think it lends itself to a greater versatility, USB is a limitation though.
Note that the Fuji 1.8" 5GB PCMCIA drive costs $400.
Note that the iPod has a 1.8" 5GB hard drive (probably a Fuji, as Calluna who also made 1.8" drives went bust) plays music, has a display battery and firewire port, and also costs $400.
Bargain!
Keep in mind it's $400 right now becuase the Apple Fanatics will have to have one. They'll pay anything for the latest cool toy from Apple.
In 6 months, hopefully the rest of us will be buying the 20GB version for $200.
I dropped my white iBook a couple weeks ago. Well, not dropped so much as flung. I snatched the briefcase off a chest high pile of boxes, saw the lid come open, nearly caught the ibook with my other hand as it flew past me, hit the door and fell to the floor. (standard cheap office carpet over concrete)
Its a little bent. It only sits on two feet when on a flat surface, but other than that its fine. Heck, it didn't even reboot. Just woke right up from sleep when I opened it.
I'll bet they do at least as well with a handheld device.
he iPod is definately a cool little toy. Firewire support and the incredibly small form factor is truly a plus. Honestly, for what you get, $400 isn't really that horrible of a price. I realize that there are cheaper units with more space on the market, but they are USB devices (S L O W T R A N S F E R S) and are all rather large and clunky. I could actually see myself buying an iPod just because it gives me an mp3 player to stick in my hip pocket and carry around.
That said, the iPod will still bomb. While it really might be worth the money, people won't be willing to drop $400 for an mp3 player, especially when the US economy is already in the toilet, and getting worse daily. If Apple really wanted to be revolutionary and give us something new, this thing would cost no more than $300, enough money to buy a nice game console.
Ok, everyone keeps talking about the Nomad Jukebox and other similar players, and must of the crazy apple people have defended the iPod with it's other features.
but this crazy apple guy (that would be me) has a better defense....have you ever used the interface on the jukebox or other large MP3 players? they have horrible navigation, i cringe everytime at the idea of finding one paticulair song out of over a thousand on one of those players.
but the iPod is different, its taken a lot of influence from the iTunes software, the interface is intuitive easy to use and fast. You can sort by just about any tag, and furthermore it fully supports ID3 tags, not just ID3 v1.1, but all the way up to 2.3 i believe.
also, the iPod has a scroll wheel type thing on it to further help you navigate quickly.
maybe im insane, but ill take an overpriced, well designed, easy to use apple product any day over some cheap generic device.
SWGS
Raise your hand if you have iTunes
Bundled for free on every Mac sold in the last 18 months, and installed retroactively on god only knows how many other ones. Easily in the high hundreds of thousands, possibly in the millions.
Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port...
Every iMac, PowerMac, iBook and Powerbook sold in the last two years, plus almost every Sony VAIO and a good chunk of Compaq and HP's product lines. Easily in the millions.
Raise your hand if you have both.
See above.
Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device...
Looking at the sales of (picking three examples) Pilots, Rios and Digital Cameras, I'd say the number of people willing to spend $200-500 on a "cute" electronic device is "lots and lots."
There is Apple's market. Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future of iPod.
I guess you don't. This is why Apple is a company with $4 Billion in the bank, and you're trolling on slashdot. Want fries with that?
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Raise your hand if you have iTunes
Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port
Raise your hand if you have both
Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device
What, is there a large market for mp3 players with people who don't own computers?
Apple knows that their biggest market is existing Apple customers. If Apple sells one of these for every 5 iBooks they sell, they'll be sitting pretty.
Why should Apple fund a software team to port iTunes to Windows, just so they get a few $400 slim margin sales of an mp3 player?
Better to let the Windows users wish they had an iPod, and go out and buy an iBook to get it.
Apple's finally learning to bring the market to them, instead of chasing it all over the map.
I haven't seen either of these points mentioned.
One: using firewire, the iPod can hotsync almost instantaneously with your Macintosh. That's very thoughful. The longer that I use technology, the less patient I get. I'd pay a little extra for this speed.
Two: what is the target market? The answer seems to be age 12-25 (junior high to college). These individuals are somewhat less price sensitive (assuming that their parents are paying) and are more likely to be sold by the flashy technology and design. If you agree (with some minor provisions), then you'll accept that Apple has a chance to win young converts to its platform. If this works, it's very attractive for Apple's future.
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
They would have to be incredibly stupid not to include Windows support for this device. They've clearly sunk some R & D dollars into this device, and if they want to recoup those dollars they need to sell as many as possible. And remember-- FireWire is Apple's baby. If they can sell a million iPods to PC users that means a million PC's with FireWire ports, which thereby expands the market for Apple's other firewire-enabled devices.
If they're smart, they're working on a PC version of iTunes, or with existing MP3 players to get iPod compatibility. They can make sure that the Mac version is out first and has the best compatibility, but it's icing on the cake if they can sell a bunch of them to PC users as well.
This is *not* a zero-sum game. Apple not only gets the revenue from the devices themselves, but if these devices are popular they promote FireWire and they get their name out in front of the public reaping opportunities for future efforts like this. I wouldn't be surprised if they release analogous devices for digital video/DVD playback in the next year or two, thereby expanding on the "digital hub" analogy that they've been pushing since January.
recharges/transfers with firewire
integrates with iTunes
mac ease of use
lame:
expensive
As a happy iBook/Mac OSX user, I would definitely consider getting one of these (if I was made of money). The size limitation doesn't bother me so much seeing as how 1.) you can (theoretically) completely fill the drive in 2 minutes and 2.) it'd take you a lifetime to listen to the entire contents of a Nomad, while taking almost four hours to fill. Plus, the Nomad takes rechargeables/AA.
The biggest problem with it is the cost, IMHO
Sean
For the best audio quality, simply carry around uncompressed WAV's. The specs indicate that WAV is one of the supported music formats. Assuming 700 MB per CD, 5 GB of storage still gives you enough room to hold 7 uncompressed CD's. Pretty cool if you ask me.
Exibit 1: iWalk
Exibit 2: iPod
These two products look nothing alike, exept for their rectangular shape. Perhaps the iWalk is fictional, but it is not related to the iPod in any way.
(It is my understanding that your post is implying that someone took the iPod, and "photoshopped" a new name on it. If that is not what you intended to imply, perhaps you should expound on your points a bit more...)
True, kinda. It comes with an AC charger. You don't HAVE to charge while connected to the PC. But it's a nice option if you can.
Carl G. Jung
--
"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia
How about using it as a storage device for your firewire camcorder or digital camera (if there are firewiere still cameras).
5GB is about 22 minutes of DV video. It's easier just to pop in another 15GB DV tape.
Since firewire devices are peerless, it shouldn't be much of a problem to connect the devices.
They're peerless when they provide a unique service on the bus. FireWire video cams are DV publishers/consumers. The HD claims to be a mass storage device. The camera would need UI for selecting a mass storage device other than the one built in (the DV tape).
For example, hook 3 DV cammeras together with FireWire. Hit play on one, record on the other two, and you should get two perfect digital copies. Hit play on two of them, record on the other, and unless the recording camera provides a UI for selecting from multiple DV streams, it's probably random which one you'll get.
50MB/s is the max throughput for firewire.
Odds are, the drive can't handle the full bus speed.
If it's using the Toshiba 1.8" drive, you're looking at a top end of 12MB/s, which means a about 50x the speed of USB.
(assuming it's the same drive that someone pointed out in another post, is listed for $400, without the mp3 playing ability, at smartdisk.com)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Apple *says* that you can access the iPod as if it were a normal 5 GB Firewire hard drive.. This isn't that complicated. Writing a windows or Linux client that talks to this thing's hard drive and transfers mp3s to and fro couldn't possibly be even the tiniest bit complicated. Even if they're using some crazy proprietary filesystem for the iPod-- which i don't see why they'd go to the bother-- disassembling iTunes and figuring out how it talks to the machine would likely be effortless. Apple doesn't need to "support" windows and linux-- freeware authors can do that for them.
.ogg files, run linux off the iPod's disk, play games on a TI-83 emulator, and do any number of complicated random things. The instant this happens, CdmrTaco will certainly suddenly love the thing..
Trust me. In about six weeks someone will put up a "hacking iPod" website with DETAILED technical specifications of the thing, along with instructions of how to overload the thing's "upgradable firmware" to play
(Note: does anyone know, what processor does the iPod run on? The tech specs site doesn't say. Either way, i'd imagine that anything powerful enough to decode mp3s is more than powerful enough to emulate the Game Boy.. and, hell, i'd imagine we could figure out some way to hook up input devices into the firewire port, which would lead to all kinds of crazy things. Emulating the newton or the palm, maybe even.. there are a *lot* of different nifty things you could do with a little portable device with a 5 GB hard drive, a firewire port, a little LCD screen, some buttons and a processor powerful enough to decode mp3s, once you overwrite the default firmware.. damn. The possibilities are almost limitless, and at the least i'm certain in about a year you'll see a LOT of fun little "ipod games" out there. I'm starting to wish that i was frivolous enough to spend $400 on an mp3 player..)
Anyway, my only thought on the subject is extreme happiness that the people trying to mount the iPod as a hard drive on a linux machines will FINALLY after all these years, give us HFS+ support for linux that actually works. I've been waiting so long..
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
"Weighs just 6.5 ounces -- fits in your pocket"
- That's neat, but not enough to be a major selling point.
Oh yeah? The Newton 2000, which kicked the shit out of any Palm organizer then available, lost out to the Palms for one reason (among people for whom price was not an issue): It wouldn't fit in their pocket.
~Philly
What else? It has a clever power-saving mode which spins up the disk, reads a whole track into memory, and powers down the disk immediately. That means 5 mins anti-shock (or was it 10? can't remember) and 10 hours listening per Li-Ion battery. Support is nothing less than fantastic, with new firmwares containing features such as minesweeper :-) And I can upload via USB faster than I can rip CDs, so who cares about FireWire?
This is the hacker's choice of MP3 jukebox. It's a no-brainer.
Power and battery
Built-in rechargeable lithium polymer battery (1200 mAh)
Playtime: 10 hours when fully charged
Charges via FireWire connector to Mac system or power adapter
Fast-charge time: up to 1 hour (charges to 80% of battery capacity)
Full-charge time: up to 3 hours
The battery is built in much like a cell phone or Palm, but it gets power over the FireWire cable, eliminating the need for a cradle. The battery will run out long before you listen to all the music since it stores about 1,000 hours of music, but 10 hours is quite respectable and will get most people through a day.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
I might point out that the Soundblaster Audigy has a firewire port. It's even gold plated.
Speaking of comparisons... Let's compare the iPod to a sampling of other units that share its form-factor... that excludes all CD-MP3 based units AND it excludes units such as the Nomad. So how does the iPod stack up to it's form-factor matched competitors? What are it's competitors? Looking at the ever-cool ThinkGeek's MP3 player selection, here are the competition:
Price: $499
Capacity: 20 GB
I/O Interface: USB
Desktop OS Compatibility: Windows, & Linux (??)
Battery Type/Life(playtime): Internal rechargable/ 12 Hrs
Dimensions: 150 x 80 x 26 mm
Weight: 9.9oz.
Price: $249
Capacity: 6 GB
I/O Interface: USB
Desktop OS Compatibility: Windows and Mac
Battery Type/Life(playtime): 4 AA/ Max 8 hours
Dimensions: 4.5" x 3.2" x 1.3"
Weight: 12oz.
Additional features: Can function as USB hardrive. Also, Archo's website is unclear as to whether the unit can charge "it's 4-AA rechargables" with the included power adapter but such is hinted at...
Same as above, with 20GB of storage, for $349
Price: $199.99
Capacity: 32MB int. Expandable w/ SD card
I/O Interface: USB
Desktop OS Compatibility: Windows only
Battery Type/Life(playtime): 1 AAA/ Max 4 hours
Dimensions: 2" x 2" x 0.5"
Weight: 1.5 oz w/out battery
Price: $159.99
Capacity: 64MB int. Expandable w/ add-on back of up to 340 MB
I/O Interface: USB
Desktop OS Compatibility: Mac & Windows
Battery Type/Life(playtime): 1 AA/ Max 8 hours
Dimensions: 3.5" x 2.5" x 5/8"
Weight: ??
Price: $219.99
Capacity: 128MB int. Expandable w/ add-on back up to 340 MB
I/O Interface: USB
Desktop OS Compatibility: Mac & Windows
Battery Type/Life(playtime): 1 Ni-MH AA Rechargable (built in recharger)/ ??
Dimensions: 3.5" x 2.5" x 1"
Weight: ??
Price: $399.00
Capacity: 5GB
I/O Interface: Firewire
Desktop OS Compatibility: Mac only (?)
Battery Type/Life(playtime): Internal, (rechargable via external adaptor or via firewire bus)/ 10 hrs max.
Dimensions: 4.02"x2.3"x0.78"
Weight: 6.5 oz
Additional features: may be used as firewire disk
General discussion:
First, why exclude such different form-factor units such as the nomad? IMHO, size plays a major part in dictating what one of these units will be used for. A CD player, or Nomad is simply too big for me to take to the gym and use while I am running, biking or using any of the machines. Therefore, it's gotta be small..
So how does the iPod stack up? It looks like it's middle of the road, but if certain features are or are not important to you, the choice may be easier (for or against the iPod.) For instance, the Mac only (??) status of this unit makes it unacceptable for many consumers (I love my macs but single OS support IS a handicap for any MP3 player and when that one OS is not the numerically superior one, it's a real issue. On the other hand, the iPod is the only unit that supports firewire. That speed advantage can be really big. Additionally, the iPod blows many of the other units away as far as storage goes (such as the Rio's, Toshiba's, Samsung's, Iomega's and Intel's offerings) but it is matched and exceeded by the Archos units.
My take, overall is that this is a good start and there is a lot of potential in the iPod, but for my $$, right now, I'd buy one of the Archos units.
USB is much faster than most home broadband connections, so the time to fill 5 gig will be much less than the time it took to download the files. :-)
iPod and iTunes are for legal or rightholder-authorized copying only. Don't steal music.
Apple seems to have the right theory on "content protection"
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
And why does everything have to be wireless? I don't understand this.
1.) plug firewire cable into the back of your computer
2.) bring other end of cable on to desktop
3.) plug in MP3 player when needed
I don't get how this makes life easier. By adding a wireless recieving unit in the thing, it would be bigger, weigh more, and cost more. Probably be more complicated, slower, and use more batteries, too. Or to cut costs you could put an IrDA port in it, although I think less people own an IrDA port for their desktop than firewire, and it would be sitting there transfering data wirelessly so long, you might as well have taken the 4 seconds to plug it in. Why is this a good idea?
I guess i'm just not getting it. Mabey i'm too practical from a monatary standpoint, but i wouldn't spend $400 on a wireless setup for my apartment when i can run $6 worth of cat 5 myself anywhere it wants to go in the apartment. Wireless is for cell phones and possibly for laptops at how much it costs right now, and i can't even afford it at that. Beyond that its just extra gadgets.
~z
sig?
It needs a way to hook into component stereo systems too.
I was thinking that if the iPod came with the iTunes software actually on it, then you wouldn't have to worry about whether it was installed on the Mac you hooked up to or not. Thus you could manage your iPod on any mac. And if it came bundled with Windows or Linux apps, (even stripped down compared to iTunes) you've got a great system for exchanging and managing music. Also, it would be great if you could hook two iPods together via firewire to exchange files... Firewire has peer-to-peer capability so it should be possible. The RIAA would hate that though.
Does anyone know what hardware/software system they use for playback? Can you load new codecs or system software or anything?
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
USB is fine for syncing. A typical song would take around 4 seconds to transfer over USB. That sucks when you first get the thing and are downloading months worth of rips to it, but is is fine for keeping the device up to date with your new rips.
A $122 shell that you can put any size laptop hard drive into. 20GB drives sell for just a tad over $100 on PriceWatch. With shipping and handling, total of $250. Probably no Linux drivers, but it's USB instead of Firewire (which I don't have). Seems like a cheaper alternative. Especially if you have an old laptop laying around that you can cannibalize the hard drive off of. Anybody got one? What's the UI like? Thinking of getting myself one for the holidays.
Ok, well, keep in mind you're not transferring the full 650MB contents of the music CD to the iPod-- you're transferring the mp3 versions of those songs to it.
The songs in my mp3 collection average out to right around 4MB each, encoded at 128kbps. The average album these days has, what, 12-14 songs on it? Well that's ~48-56MB, which could be sucked across a FireWire cable pretty damned quickly.
~Philly
I am a recovering Apple fanatic. Now that I've escaped the famous Cupertino Reality Distortion Field, let me tell you why I have such a love/hate relationship with "All Things Apple."
I still enjoy using and playing with their products. It started with my Mac LC in high school, then my killer Mac Quadra 840av in college. When the iMac came out in '98, I was the first one buying to replace the aging Quadra. My family has purchased somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 Macs (I'm one of seven kids), most recently the iMac DV I helped my sister pick out on her way to college.
What's my point in all this? Apple almost died once by losing touch with reality. Steve bought them back from the brink, but now he's marketing a device that is very nice when you sell it at $199.95; but at twice that price, it looks like as goofy and unmarketable as a Platypus in an Edsel swinging a CueCat around.
I still love talking about new Apple technologies and products with friends and coworkers. Apple loves to release clean products with gee-whiz features. Sometimes even at reasonable prices.
But when the realization hit my wife that the 233MHz G3 wasn't cutting it anymore, and we looked at new computers, I could not bring myself to fork over another $1000 to $1500 to get a non-upgradable unit. I'm really sorry Mac enthusiasts, but here is what I built instead:
A PC in a cute, customized penguin-shaped ATX case with a Celeron 900, 512 megs of RAM, 16x DVD drive, 16x10x40 CD-RW, 30 Gigabyte ATA-100 hard drive, GeForce2 MX video, SoundBlaster Live audio, and 3Com NIC with a 17 inch monitor.
For under $800.00.
I sold the iMac to a friend in trade for a 1976 Mercury Cougar with 60,000 original miles. I guarantee I'll get mileage out of my machine than he'll get out of his. Oh, the iMac runs OS 10.1 quite nicely on the 36GB drive I stuck in, on the 288 megs of RAM I installed. But nothing can beat the commodity cost of PC upgrade peripherals. Right now, I could put an ECS motherboard and 1.4GHz Athlon in the new PC for $200, and keep right on using the rest of the components.
Yes, creative engineering clearly requires Apple charge a premium... but at this point, it's too high to pay. I have a house to buy and kids to father someday soon, and I'd much rather spring for a 4th bedroom than another overpriced tech toy.
YMMV.
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
"We have thought than when we get a little spare time, we will look at taking it to Windows. We know the experience won't be as good, but we will probably look at that down the road."
--Steve Jobs
...Apple Computers is developing a revolutionary device they plan to call the iMod for corporate use. This device is approximately the size and shape of a large all-in-one TV remote. It is designed to fluctuate to the natural harmonic frequency of computers running any version of the MS Windows operating system, thus penetrating its minimal defenses, and deactivating the hostile system.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
How will they be the envy of their windows friends? There have been at least 2 HD based MP3 players/data storage units out for windows for over a year. Today is the day that mac people stop envying windows users as far as I can tell...
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
The firewire vs USB debate leaves me cold. Try sitting down and ripping 20 CDs, then ask yourself 5 hours later if you care much whether it takes 5 minutes or 30 seconds to load them into the player.
I have an Archos unit, the USB delay has never bothered me. I have firewire on the machine but fiddling with the drivers is a real pig. I discovered after I bought my first firewire board that the 'standard' isn't. If you have a JVC camera it turns out it does not work with most boards, you have to have the B or the C version. Tedious huh?
What would strike me as really useful is the ability to record. I would like a portable dictation machine that would allow me to capture 20 hours or so of dictation and then load it into a voice->text converter for offline processing.
As it is I suspect it will not be a success because Apple are only really marketing to their existing user base. While this is not negligible, it is hardly substantial. Apple are making it very clear that they have no interest in marketing the device to the 95% of the computer user market that have PCs whether they are running Windows or Linux.
As far as innovative styling goes Sony's Vaio line matches anything Apple have come up with in the computer market in my opinion. I don't think it will be long before there are other MP3 jukeboxes that have similar styling.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Firewire, in fact, is a total of 50 MB of transfer. Furthermore, it's QOS'd and has significant overhead, so you're likely to peak at 10 MB/s (although you can perform 4 transfers each of which is GUARANTEED 10 MB/s, so you'll have 4 quality video transmissions, for instance) But that is certainly less than ATA 100. Except that no single current hard disk or CD drive can match ATA 100. (and, incidently Apple's hardware is essentially the same now)
What you forgot is MP3 compression. IF you already have your whole CD transfered into your computer as MP3s, then you can transfer it in those seconds. This works well because the mac stuff is very seamless... So IF you've got your whole music collection already on your PowerMac, then it's 10s/CD.
This doesn't work for data, of course.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
While it is cool that you can charge via a firewire cable, anyone know whether this is the *only* way to charge it ? Because if you can only charge it by firewire then it would seem you're obligated to drag around a computer (with firewire, no less) just to charge the thing. I can imagine being on a road trip in a hotel and I just want to listen to music, I don't have (or don't want to unpack) my computer just to recharge. The real possibilities for this thing lie in being able to *un*tether yourself from a computer.
Alright, how many of these people are the type that want a portable Mp3 device? Maybe half.
Half of several hundred thousand times $400 is still several heaping boatloads of cash.
And that's just right now. The obvious larger picture here is that Apple hopes to use the iPod (and, I suspect, similar devices) to leverage sales of MacOS computers, and vice-versa. It's a strategy that's made Sony and Microsoft quite a bit of cash, on the backs of products significantly less well-designed and integrated than this.
Of course, they're Apple, so they'll probably manage to fuck it up somehow, but the product is good, the strategy is sound, and the sales upside is very, very high.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Well, duh.
iPod: same size as a deck of cards
Nomad: 14' station wagon with seating for 9
What kind of a comparison is that?
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Raise your hand if you have iTunes ...
...
...
...
Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port
Raise your hand if you have both
Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device
me: [raises four hands...]
What is the problem with you Linux freeks? It's a small, light, fast, featureful mp3 player that pushes the usability envelope in its niche. Plus it's usable with other OSs (though Apple created FireWire, other cos. have been smart enough to license it). It's a little costly, but so was the first Newton - and the Mac Portable was like $6,000 when it came out. Didn't stop notebook computing from hitting it big. Don't bitch about the product cause it costs too much. And don't say it's lame because there's no AMD hardware or free software running inside it.
The interface is IEEE-1394 (aka firewire & iLink). If you've got the port you've got connectivity and it shouldn't matter what processor you're running. No doubt Windows will be supported somehow since MS has come out in favor of IEEE-1394 and are integrating driver support into Windows.
Since there aren't any iTunes available on other platforms, you're probably going to have to connect it up as a removable hard drive and drag copy your mp3 collection manually.
DB
FYI, Apple seems to be using ~160Kbits/sec for their stats (which is fair since that is what iTunes uses by default...or maybe I just changed it).
Yes, the new iPod is expensive, but you are getting what you pay for:
Look up a 5GB 1.8" hard drive on PriceWatch. They're currently going for about $350. Add a firewire interface to that, battery, the MP3 player functionality, and some headphones.
For under $250, you can get a 20G FireWire powered drive (no battery/charger necessary) from one of the name brand Apple add-on manufacturers. Check your local computer store.
Ok, but was it worth all the super-secret big-announcment hoop-la?
Most everyone will offer a resounding 'No'. The device is basically a marginal, incremental increase in many many products already on market (hipzip, archos, etc). It isnt going to revolutionize anything, it is certainly not a 'deal', its really pretty darned expensive, so why all the fuss? Im a little pissed that Apple had to gall to make such a big deal.
IEEE1394? Bigdeal - every MP3 player will have USB2 or IEEE1394 in a few months, its inevitable... its not reason to have an 'invite only' launch.
Apple makes a huge 'event' to introduce a 'me-too' product (for the most part)... im a little pissed that they have the nuts to interfere with geeks and the media and then drop what (most see as) a big let down. I think Apple is starting to over-estimate themselves.
> They would have to be incredibly stupid
... to get their own vendors supporting it, or at least supporting the systems that it requires (FireWire mass storage).
> not to include Windows support for this device.
I think the opposite. They will have plenty of demand from the half million people who just bought iBooks in the past six months already, simply because it matches so well (in other words, the iBook's quality and ease of use is an iPod advertisement). It is also the Apple Store's first holiday season (brick and mortar, anyway). Come in and spend $1698 and get a brand new iBook and a brand new iPod and they work seamlessly together.
As for Windows, it is not enough for Windows to just support the iPod. The machine also has to have working FireWire ports and software drivers and mass storage support and whatever else. Perhaps a Windows MP3 software vendor will build in iPod support, and then bundle that software on compatible HP or Sony PC's that include the right hardware and software to enable that. If that happens, then iPods will sell themselves to Windows users. If not, then Apple can look at building something like that if it makes sense, and if they can cajole their engineers into putting down their work on elegant Mac OS X so they can foray into Windows, and Windows-style support ("do you have FireWire ports?", "huh?").
For $399, the iPod is the same price as a FireWire drive that has the same super-slim 5GB disk in it. The music features are free. Windows users who want this have a reason to work to get it
EXCEPT, it will only work on a Mac...
95% of the computer population owns a PC
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
you for got one...
windows vs mac
For the immediate future iPod is expected to be an Apple-only device. In its existing forms it is not compatible with PCs that run the Windows operating system.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
It's about product placement (and it's a good thing).
Think about it - how many people have you seen jogging with their iMac hefted onto a shoulder, 80's - style?
Seriously. It's a way to get the apple name out onto the streets instead of sitting on a desk. This started with lots (and I mean lots) of iMac TV placements and hasn't ended yet. Think about it - how many iBooks have you seen out and about, and how many of these did you notice becuase of the big glowing apple on the back, or the candy-colors? The iPod's got the logo on the back too, big and white. Whether it glows or not is yet to be seen.
I guarantee (meaning I really, really hope) that the price tag won't hold too long. Probably drop after the holidays.
And to apple I say 'good for you.' It's a much better way to get attention than the new (and horrifically tasteless) Microsoft / Compaq ads - 'Like stars and stripes - perfect together.'
Oh, and please - think before you flame, particularly on the frontpage. It's closed-minded.
Triv
This thing must get pretty warm after an hour of use. I've had a couple of laptop HD drives get pretty damn hot on me. I don't see any vents on this toy. For $400 I'de get cheesed off if it just decided to stop working.
Forever. It is the same prinicpal, remove the choices few people use and most people will find the item easier to learn. Of corse a few people will find the thing useless, but if you do it right you gain more people then you lose.
If you look at the QuickTime "learn more" thing the three "real users" (Moby, "that guy from Smash Mouth", and Seal) all basically say "I'm dumb, and this was designed so even I can use it". Really. It's amazing what people will say about themselves :-)
this thing is perfect for anyone who is getting a computer/mac for the first time. and is going to use it to play their mp3's.
you get 5gb of storage. you can put ALL of your mp3's on that. most ppls collections dont get above that. and if they do...well there will be a bigger one by then. that way you get back the 5gb from your internal HD, and you can take all your music with you wherever you go. since its buspowered you dont ever have to do anything more than plug in ONE cable. all your file management can go on through iTunes, and playback on the desktop as well. this is ingenious.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Raise your hand if you're willing to spend $400 on THIS particular device, with b/w screen, no handwriting recognition, actually rather TOO big (no bigger than Palm V is my ideal size), no PDA functions - oops, sorry, wrong market. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
How easy will it be for Apple to introduce CONTENT PROTECTION via a stealth firmware update or something once a market is established and they gain significant marketshare (not really likely at that price IMO)?
Once this thing gets out in significant numbers, Apple's media partners are going to be very unhappy with them - and very large Quicktime format standardization deals are going to hinge on how cooperative Apple is at introducing content protection features.
All Apple has to do is bundle some "gotta have feature" with an OS upgrade, which "breaks" compatibility with iTunes, and then provide an update to iTunes which enforces the content protection, and force the firmware update on iPod to be compatible with the new iTunes. It's not like Apple hasn't snuck unsavory changes into firmware updates in the past.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
All Apple did was invite some members of the press to a product launch of a "breakthrough digital device (hint: it's not a Mac)". They didn't promise to end world hunger or make the Internet obsolete.
The breakthrough is passing the Grandma test. A non-technical person can now ditch all of their CD players (home and portable) and have a better experience with an iBook and an iPod. You rip the songs off your CD's with the iBook, you listen to the whole collection from your shirt pocket with iPod.
What some Slashdot readers probably don't understand is that all the digital dreams of the past few years were based on the flawed assumption that the regular Joe would take a computer science course in order to use the Internet, listen to music, run a video recorder. He won't, and he didn't. You have to build an interface on top of the geek stuff to make non-geeks happy; and you can do this while leaving a backstage door for geeks to get through (the UNIX in Mac OS X, the FireWire hard drive aspect of the iPod).
Imagine for a second that you didn't know what FireWire is, or even that computers have different operating systems, or use different methods for transferring files. Imagine that you don't know the difference between MP3 and WMF. Wouldn't you like someone to offer you a product that just enabled you to put your CD collection into a box the size of a pack of cigarettes and listen to it anywhere? An iBook + iPod does that and it's only $1698 and the user won't even need an instruction book.
Geez, this is a nice story in the midst of stories about Windows Media Format files and new kinds of CD formats that only work under certain conditions. Apple knows content, people. Take a moment and ask yourself if this doesn't make more sense as a music playback platform than anything Microsoft is doing.
Who, me? You've got the wrong guy, I *like* my one-button optical mouse.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Stupid question time: how long will it be before I can plug this baby into my PS2? :)
-_Quinn
Reality Maintenance Group, Silver City Construction Co., Ltd.
Sure, it's easy to learn the Mac. I did when I was 5. But I need to be more productive now, and the Mac interface makes it too hard.
Speaking particularly of iTunes, how do I script it into apache? How do I use it from the command line? How do I run it on the machine hooked into my stereo from my desktop with the display that is in the other room? This is trivial and elegant in my UNIX environment.
The Macintosh way (much like the Windows way) is to have applications that do everything you want to do. All your word-processing needs in Word. All your web-browsing needs in Internet Explorer. All your audio needs in iTunes.The problem with this way is that in the end it is too restrictive. If all you have is internet explorer, what if you want to do an ``internet-explorer -dump http://go-gnome.com | sh'' Or maybe you want to use internet explorer to recursively download a site for mirroring or archival?
Ahhh... you say... but with OS X or Cygwin I can use bash and lynx! True, true. But at the point you're using lynx and the bourne shell and scripts pulling together cdparanoia, lame, and cdrecord, you're not doing things the Mac or Windows way, you're doing things the UNIX way.
I do computer architecture as my job. It would be impossible for us to use Mac or Windows machines. Some of the things would work -- the assembler would be fine to do in Windows (and there's one that works in Windows) and the simulator would work ... but there are times when we redirect the trace output of one simulator into another to verify things... piping *that* output into a scrpit that gathers statistics and such. You don't just open up the ``save trace as...'' dialog box when you are about to spit out a 100-gig trace file, you need the flexability of being able to stream it into another application. And you don't want to have to open dialog boxes for 80 different possible configurations and sit there and wait for them to run when you can script together doing all the configurations on all the test files spreading across several machines over the weekend.
The UNIX way is about flexible tools. Tools that work well together. Tools that are elegant and flexable. Tools that work well regardless of where you are, where you're coming from, or where you're going. This provides power for the UNIX user that surpasses that which someone using GUI tools on Windows or a Mac can ever know.
Sure, it takes longer to learn. Most of the best things do. The sharper the learning curve, the bigger the payoff. That's why most UNIX gurus use emacs or vi... they're not easy to learn, but they are powerful.
A UNIX guru can't take working with inferior tools. She can't stand sitting there doing a repetative task when she should be scripting it. She understands that her job is to be the master, and the computer is the tool to do the repetative job.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
You should be able to install a full Mac OS X system on an iPod and boot from it, just like any FireWire hard drive.
The question really is, if you have Win XP and all you needed was to manually drag your collection to load it to the iPod, would you buy it even without iTunes?
DB
Minus RAM (maxes out at 256MB!?), Firewire, composite RCA output, battery life (not even 2 hours!?), or built-in wireless. It is oriented towards the extreme low end of consumers, but is priced higher than the iBook. Oh, but it's marginally smaller.
People buy that?!?
--Matthew
When they sell a few hundred thousand of these things and Steve Jobs pulls one of his patented 'oh and one more things' and announces a firmware update that upgrades the iPod to a full-feature PDA, will it be breakthrough and innovative enough for you?
As a business move it'd be brilliant because you'd have instant marketshare from announcement day. As an engineering move it'd be the first time it's ever been done. As for coolness/nerd factor, sure, lots of people have hacked other people's hardware to do different things but when did the manufacturer ever do something like this?
DB
Look, I love scripting. I'm sitting here on my Compaq Armada running W2K with Outlook connected to my Exchange Server and SSH connections to our OpenBSD and Linux servers. The right tool in the right place.
When I ran DOS, I used batch scripts for various things.
As an NT Admin (boo, hiss, MCSE, boo, hiss) I used the resource kit and batch scripting to automate many administrative tasks. I also used other Windows scripting languages.
Scripting rocks, in its place. The reason why NT does well in small businesses is because of its interface. Sure, they probably need a pro to set up the box, but the day-to-day tasks can be handled my anyone with any intelligence.
Adding a new user, home directory, etc., is much more straightfoward on NT 4 (not a use 2K server fan) than under a Unix OS.
NT w/ resource kit (full of command line tools, many inspired by Unix), or OS X with the developers tools and a couple of useful GNU or BSD tools, give you the best of both worlds.
When you need to do something fancy, you have the command line to aid you. When you need to just get things done, the UI helps you out.
MS's problem is that the NT 3.51 had a great kernel, but NT4 and NT5 kept adding to the kernel trading stability for speed. They also throw things together for marketing reasons.
X Windows (really, the classic X Windows UI) is a powerful engineering tool. It was designed at MIT (an engineering school...) for engineering students and researchers. It was designed primarily to run xterms, lots of xterms.
Its great for coding, but it doesn't make a great general purpose UI. KDE/GNOME are a step in the right direction, but they aren't quite there. The real trick to GUI design is building the tools based around what the USER does, not how they are represented on the file system.
NT is too hampered by its DOS roots. (I don't mean codewise, NT's userspace, Win32, evolved API wise from Win16, which was bolted onto DOS).
Linux/Desktop developers should REALLY look at how OS X was built. The UNIX system is there, providing a stable kernel and API for running daemons. The GUI has its own system, complete with APIs, spaces in the filesystem, etc. They built a full GUI OS that sits on top of a UNIX system. The UNIX core is there, available, but they built a system for users.
Now, so much of the UNIX functionality is hidden that you can't do everything from within the GUI. Expose more of the system, and you have a more powerful system.
Don't shun it because its Apple, their second attempt at a UNIX GUI is a third system, evolved (conceptually) from A/UX and (directly) from NeXTSTEP (however it was spelt on Tuesdays...)...
Could Aqua be more powerful, sure. Could KDE/GNOME be more intuitive, sure?
CDE, MWM, etc, (Classic UNIX environments) are great engineering platforms...
Right tool for the right job...
Alex
How will they be the envy of their windows friends? There have been at least 2 HD based MP3 players/data storage units out for windows for over a year. Today is the day that mac people stop envying windows users as far as I can tell...
Most of the portable MP3 solutions out there work on Macs as well, if not all of them. There is a Nomad Jukebox plug-in built into iTunes, at any rate, along with many more for Rio's and whatever else. I've been using a NomadII with my Mac for a long, long time.
What you have to understand, though, is that Windows or no Windows, my new PowerBook came with USB, FireWire (1394), Gigabit Ethernet, and AirPort (802.11). Why did I get a machine with that much connectivity to then sit down and plug a music player into the keyboard port and wait two hours to fill up 5GB? Because that's the only reliable method on Windows? Nah. Not good enough.
I actually have all my MP3's on an external FireWire drive already. What Apple has done is build a music player onto a drive. I can use an iPod just like I do the drive I have now, only when it's away from the computer, it's an MP3 player and a dessert topping. I won't have to sync a damn thing.
Rob, for a someone who considers himself a graphics guy, you have remarkably poor feel for the benefit of good design. This thing is half the weight and a quarter the size of the "better" Creative Nomad, can transparently sync with your MP3 collection out of the box using MP3-management software that's better designed, hands-down, than anything else out there. And it transfers the data a hundred or so times faster than the USB and IrDA interfaces on other such gadgets.
And it's got a readable screen, simple control layout, a well-designed UI and long battery life.
If you want a one-pound MP3 jukebox and you want to write your own software to transfer files and you don't mind spending a half hour transferring a couple dozen songs, I guess the Nomad "wins".
Apple's out to make easy to use consumer devices. That's what an iMac is. That's what an iBook is. And that's what the iPod is. Nomad and Archos jukeboxes are interesting gadgets in their own right, but they're not friendly, they're not easy to use, and they're not really designed. iPod may be too expensive right now to be a big seller, and the Mac-only factor will hurt sales too, but if you've got a Mac and you want a hard-drive MP3 player to listen to music on (as opposed to hack on, or do field recording on), it's the hands-down slickest thing around.
A word of advice: if you still plan on being a world-famous computer animator, let someone with some art skills design the characters and do the storyboarding. You should stick to the math and the wireframes.
1) All someone has to do is write the synching software for PC
2) All of Creative Labs' new sound cards - the Audigy series - come with a IEEE-1394 port. That alone will put "Firewire" on millions of PCs in the near future, catching up to the Mac.
Just wait, a PC version will be coming. If not from Apple, then from someone else.
Whats the cpu? Speed? Is it Risc based? Is it (iPod) flashable for the entire os (not just the codecs)? Can you run linux on it?
:)
Anyone else think its funny how they werer toting OS X as great because of how its gui looks and how bland others were (even compairing them to a 6 line LCD) and here they are releasing something that doesnt even have color. Irony.
Pretty neat, but it wont be as cool untill someone hacks it and finds a way to put in a 40 gig drive of the same form factor.
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
The Archos ways twice as much as the iPod. The iPod is small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. The Archos nearly weighs a pound! Not nice to have that backing against you every couple of steps or whatever.
The iPod will come down in price - it is a new product based upon new technologies (1.8" HD for example). When it comes down to $300, it will be worth the price. Apple know they can fleece early adopters before Christmas however, and who can blame them?
Also, the iPod looks a lot nicer. Maybe not important to a typical geek, but important for a lot of people. Especially people who already have Macs!
The addition of Firewire, lighter weight, better looks etc are worth an extra $100 over the 6GB Archos in my opinion. And Apple will be around for a good few more years in case something goes wrong with it. Now all Apple need to do is write an OS for a PDA based around the hardware in this device...
MB = Mega Byte.
Mb = Mega Bit.
Therefore, 400Mb/s = 50MB/s
For some reasons, some standards always seem to be listed in MBps and some in Mbps. [Normally, it's an order of magnitude thing...I had an engineering teacher who prefered numbers that stayed between 1 and 10, if possible, as he could conceptualize those numbers more easily than 100-1000.]
SCSI, UDMA and Firewire you normally see in MB/s. USB and network connections are normally listed in Mb/s.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Look, I earned my spending money through college as an NT Admin. I run a small shop developing web applications on UNIX, but my desktop in W2K. My fiancee and I have 4 computers in our apartments, 3 are Windows PCs, 1 is a Mac. I'm not a Mac person, yet I can still respect what they have done right.
You are correct, WMP has successfully copied iTunes to the point of being similar, but it isn't as clean. Personally, I still use WinAMP on my Windows machines for MP3 playing, as does everybody I know. Then again, we all ran Netscape for a while too.
I have always used Audio Grabber/WinAMP for rip play. I used to use l3dec/Nero for burning. I haven't really messed with MP3s in a while, but I've never seen anything like iTunes.
The "playlist" is amazingly useful compared to WinAMP. The computer ships with a bunch of MP3s (which was nice since the computer arrived the day of a trip, and I barely had time to toss Mac:Office on there.
No question, MS has improved TREMENDOUSLY with each release. Win95 was the key release, but 98 and ME were similar evolutions in UI. 98's browser functionality was a marketing move, but it has resulted in some simplification of our lives. ME's media integration was useful. XP seems to be an attempt to match OS X. We shall see, MS seems to be able to be consistently 90%-95% of MacOS, which keeps them in the dominant position because they can undersell.
Alex
Apple appeals to a market segment that happily pays $5000 for a niche computer ...
I have yet to see a $5000 iBook or iMac, which is what Apple sells most, mainly to students. And a quick tour through the Apple online store didn't turn up any $5000 Macs (athough I expect that built to order machines might approach that figure).
And what does it mean to be a 'niche' computer anyway? Macs seem pretty general purpose to me.
No Apple gets this one right. As Jobs said, the solution to music stealing is a behavioral not a technical one.
Steve M
If that's true, this was a VERY poor design decision. This could have been a $150 device if they'd used a regular laptop drive.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
Having to use MacOS.... :-(
Errr, how about getting to use Mac OS X with it?
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I sync my Rio 500 using iTunes...
Actually, that brings up my sole complaint regarding this device. It requires iTunes 2, which AFAIK only runs on OS X. Those of us with OS 9 systems would like to play with Firewire toys as well...
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
It's called FireWire.
I have a website. It's about Macs.