Toshiba's iPod Competitor

a lonely moose writes: "It looks like Toshiba basically copied Apple's iPod. They got cheap on screen size and unit weight, and without iTunes, it'll be darn hard to handle as elegantly as the iPod. Anyway, check out MacCentral's article and the smoking forum at the bottom."

Comments

Better than ipod

[GoatPigSheep]

a few notes about the ipod:

-it's overpriced

-it doesn't work with window or linux by default (you need special programs to use it)

-itunes SUCKS. I have used itunes on a g4/500 with 384mb ram and it takes at least 30 seconds just to load a playlist of 7 gigs of mp3s.

Toshiba's will probably be cheaper, won't need one of those expensive plastic boxes to run it (aka a mac), and won't force you to use the horrible itunes.

Apple Doesn't Understand The Price of Closed Tech

[FreeUser]

Apple's iPod hardware is entirely compatible. It's just a hard drive, with MP3 data stored in a particular sort of file tree. It's the software that Windows and Linux need to access it, and Apple hasn't bothered making that for the simple reason that they're not in the business of making PC products.

This is the standard excuse Apple constantly uses for shooting themselves in the foot. "We are not in the PC business" [which is why we implimented a completely proprietary way of doing what everyone else has been doing using standard protocols/hardware specs for years now].

Apple keeps hoping to lure in new customers and then snare them with their proprietary hardware/software combination ("You can only do that with our stuff, switch to Apple"). What they do not understand is that anything sufficiently compelling will be implimented elsewhere, on people's preferred platform (whatever it may be), and that relatively few people are going to be compelled to switch platforms on the basis of such things.

Wintel, for all of its faults, is at least open on the hardware side (even if you're unlucky enough to be running windows), and if you're using *BSD or GNU/Linux, it is a completely open system. Contrast this with Apples growing list of "works only with Apple" peripherals, from their iPods to their proprietary LCD monitors. To be fair Apple's OS X is based on an open and free system (*BSD), but if all of their filesharing and other functions are implimented with proprietary protocols on top of that, it means very little in terms of the overall openness of the system, which in turn translates to virtual imprisonment of the customer. That may be Apple's goal (just as it has been Microsoft and Sun's goal), but customers do not like to be imprisoned, even in a gilded cage, and Apple is playing a game that, rather than taking advantage of the growing backlash against Microsoft, is likely to put them squarely in the same camp from their users' point of view.

Perhaps eventually Apple will manage to ensnare massive quantities of new people into their proprietary lock-in products ... but in the meantime their proprietary "we control everything and we interact with nothing" strategy means they deliberately cut off 90% of the market in a (likely vain) effort to make the other 10% look appealing.

I have friends who are not GNU/Linux users, who have come to hate Microsoft with a passion, but are unwilling to switch to Apple because they know that then not only will their software be monopolized (by Apple), but so too will their hardware, putting them in an even worse (and even more expensive) predicament. What is interesting is that they, even without understanding all of their options vis-a-vis FreeBSD and GNU/Linux, still have managed to develope a sense of the entrapment proprietary hardware and software platforms imply, and they are sick to death of it (having experienced it first hand from Microsoft on the software side).

Apple's leadership will have to learn, sooner or later, to work with open standards and make their products able to interact and function with computers in general, not just their particular brand. Until they do so they will never be anything more than a niche player, and likely a small niche at that. It is interesting how many people, desperate to leave Microsoft, are unwilling to switch to Apple because they see Apple's proprietary nonsense as even worse.

And you know what? Even though they are relatively uninformed users, they are still absolutely right.

It is frustrating to see a company that produces so many neat things behave in such a destructive manner. Destructive to their customers, destructive to the computing community and marketplace, and most of all destructive to themselves. One would have thought they would have learned from the last time they engaged in this particular folly and nearly went bankrupt as a result, but alas it appears not.