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5 Reasons Not to Buy an iPod
TommyH1000 writes "CNet has posted an article with five reasons not to buy an iPod. " The article really just shows the major shortcomings with the iPod (Battery, Cost, Moving Parts etc) and gives several alternatives. A great summary of the major things going on in the portable MP3 player market.
Rip all my CDs and then burn them back onto CDRs. You can fit like 12 CDs on one CDR in MP3 format. I have a wallet case when I travel and I manage to pack the music of 144 CDs with me that way. Best Buy has portable CD players that they sell for 30.00 that read MP3s and there you go, the cheap solution. When I get my cut of this money that the Nigerians are transferring to me though an iPod is the first thing on my list!
You can replace them. You don't even have to send them to Apple.
Go here: http://www.ipodbattery.com/
Well, FWIW, if you're not constantly fast forwarding or skipping songs, the hard drive buffers 20 minutes of music and then spins down.
There are third-party battery replacements available, and they're under $100.
I personally get about 8 hours from my iPod. And when I need more juice I use this:
s ?Merchant_Id=&Section_Id=201526&pcount=&Product_Id =148969
http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.proces
If you need to listen to music for more than 10 hours having an optional battery pack is a must, and it uses AA's so I just swap those for more power.
I don't see one offered for the Dell or Samsung player.
The author says, "Don't get me wrong; it's still our favorite overall MP3 player." He agrees that the iPod is the best MP3 player, but that doesn't mean that it's ideal in every single situation.
The article discusses several of these situations and suggest alternatives. If you do care about low battery life or do want to jog with your player, perhaps you may wish to consider one of these alternative.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
Clickety click! for the cut'n'paste impared!
Fellowship 9/11
And your music collection is only ever on your "digital jukebox"? You don't understand bitrate peeling. It lets you encode things at a super high quality to stay on your hard drive (say with 5.1 sound), but then strip it down on the fly as you transfer it to your "digital jukebox" or email it to a friend or stream it on the internet to a lower bitrate and fewer channels. And, not everyone plugs their "digital jukebox" into headphones. You could plug it into a real speaker set, or a sound system.
it seems odd that for each point, they suggest different mp3 players
I don't really find that odd. It's more of a "If you want to go jogging with it, don't get an iPod, get one of these instead." - "If you need over 15 hours of battery life, don't get an iPod, get one of these instead."
They're not claiming that any one thing is better than the iPod, just that some are more suitable for certain niches.
Sent this missive off to CNET:
While there certainly are downsides to the iPod, your article took a very skewed and biased approach.
1) Battery life - you mention the iPod has "6 hours". Not sure where you got this information since Apple quotes 8. I've routinely gotten 10 hours (full drive from Memphis to Chicago, including some rush hour traffic). Meanwhile, Dell quotes 15 hours and you helpfully add "lasted almost 20 hours in our battery test". Okay, you want to run your own tests, fine, but do it for the iPod as well. I don't dispute that the Dell has a much longer battery life, but your reporting is extremely biased here.
2) Jogging - First off, you give the impression that the iPod drive is running much more than it is (" hard drives spin thousands of times per minute") - it's on for a couple of seconds. You yourself say that experts agree the iPod hard drive will not suffer problems from sudden shocks. Yet even with that, the gauntlet comes down from your "expert" opinion - "Some experts say that it's impossible to damage the drive in this way, but I'm not buying that". Some experts say journalists are supposed to have some objectivity and quest for truth, but I'm not buying that.
3) The iPod is expensive. Agreed.
4) You want decent recording. Yup, the iPod won't do that.
5) Choice - So, you get the iPod and can use the most popuar music store with the most liberal DRM and largest catalog. Or you get some other playerand either get locked into its service (ala Dell) or maybe not be able to play purchased stuff at all - many players have major issues with DRM WMA.
However, what strikes me most is you make several points and back them up with an example. However, the examples given fail the other points. The Dell has great batter life, but is expensive and will suffer the same claimed jogging problems. The CD MP3 player is cheap but is all moving parts and is far, far too big for jogging (and certainly no recording). Flash players can't generally record and while they might have great battery life, that means you can play your 20 songs over and over and over. Which leads me to my final point...
You neglect the key benefit of a hard drive based player - for many people, this means they can take their ENTIRE music collection with them. If they're jogging, it's there. In the car, it's there. No remembering CD's and switching them in and out. No getting locked into burned playlists on MP3 CD's. No limitations on the tiny, tiny limitations of flash based players.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
It looks like they really had to stretch to find 5 reasons. "choice in music stores", look, it doesn't matter, the fact is that they still cost $.99.
;-). Still, it's nice to see someone being objective about it.
The skipping while playing is pretty iffy, because they are suggesting that the flash buffer is completely empty before the HD spins up to refill it, which is completely untrue. It spins up long before it's empty to fill up the buffer. A lot like the way burning a cd works (only different
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
bitrate peeling = multiple streams at different quality from one source file. You could implement a power-saving mode in a portable with that.
Or fit a lower-bitrate playlist (longer play) onto space-constrained solid state players from a high quality archive without re-encoding.
Heh.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I too had that problem. Then I updated my firmware during the Windows iTMS launch.. now my iPod's battery meter actually gives me a real warning.. it shows a bar split into 8ths indicating the remaining power.
Hope that helps,
Eric
PS - iTunes > manually using Disk Mode > MMJB
It isn't an issue for me, and only 1 out of 5 iPod owners I know wanted radio. For that 1 person, it was simple to buy a tiny inline receiver that works with the iPod.
Yeah... I'm using one. I lusted after it ages ago when it was first covered on /.
.
It has some shortcomings, but for the price ($229 for both backpacks) I couldn't say no.
The sound quality is great.
FM transmitter is great for playing through car radio. Some people have had less luck with this than I have.
Their support is great. Check out their forums on www.neurosaudio.com
Their PC Sync software is less than great. Not a big deal though.
USB 1 is less than great. Still, not a big deal. I'm not moving files all the time.
Their OpenSource initiatives are great.
They use a standard laptop hard drive. People have popped in 80 gigs into the backpack.
Some have complained that it is too big. This was one of my worries. When I got it, I was actually pleasantly surprised at how small it is. Easily fits into a jacket pocket, cargo pants pocket. If you use the CF backpack instead of the HD backpack, it's really small.
Again. The thing has some quirks. If you buy, you'll be getting a great product on the cheap that plays ogg, mp3, wma and is soon to be replaced by a better model for much more money.
Those are my random thoughts, presented in random order. I'd be happy to address any specific questions if you have 'em.
The articles mentions that the iPod battery is not replaceable, but that's not true. Check out http://www.ipodbattery.com/ I haven't used their service, but presumably it works. $49 sounds like a reasonable price to me, especially when you take into account the cost of the iPod itself.
-hero.
www.pogoproducts.com/products.html
PogoProducts MP3 Player / Recorders work very nicely thank you.
I like the PogoProducts RipFlash Plus.
Expandable Storage, Direct MP3 recording of any audio - voice or line-in.
You can use it to record meetings, classes, or CD's - all without the need of a computer.
i(diot)Pod's cost way too much !
iPod's are just like the Apple 'Cube' - the most expensive way to make a product, without improving it's functionality.
Almost every goddam response in this article is from a fanboy who seems profoundly hurt and confused that someone would say anything negative about their precious iPod. Not only that, but the moderators seem to be fanboys too. More than a few undeserving posts have been modded up, while all anti-Apple posts have been modded down.
6. You don't want to use 3rd party software to manage files.
Although it has major other faults, the Archos jukebox has one selling point - No third-party software is necessary to upload and download files. It's just a hard drive that plays mp3s (and other stuff in later models). You can load and unload mp3s from it using Explorer, or mount it in Linux. Copy your mp3s just like any other files and play them. There is no necessary uploading software and no download controls. It's fully linux-compatible.
When I was researching MP3 players last May, this was a big selling point of the Archos.
"One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin." George Bernard Shaw
I have a 20gig Archos Jukebox. It's a souped up mp3 player. In additition to storing and playing mp3s, the thing has a little LCD screen, and it plays MOVIES! Or it can output the signal to a TV.
Additionally, it has compact flash and SD adaptors, so you can download the pictures from your camera to the device. This is handy when travelling: you can empty your CF cards and browse photos on the Archos whenever you feel like.
Best of all, it's easy hackable so you can stick a 60gig drive in there.
Revolutionary? Hardly. I've had mine more than 1 year. Currently, there's bigger and better Archos players out there, and doing more for less. Compared to Ipod hype and price, Archos stuff is a steal.
Witold
www.witold.org
witold.org
The iPod is not just an MP3 player. It is also a darn nice portable, plug & play, hard drive. It's very handy for backing up and/or transporting a swack of files. It's often used when rebuilding an old mac or moving to a new one.
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
Er, considering that you're most likely going to be listening to it through a car stereo or headphones, I don't think there's really a need for monstrous, extremely high-quality files.
1/ I know a few people with iPods that do plug them into their stereo, where you can hear that those things are not hi-fi.
2/ It's nice to not have to convert your music to lo-fi to put it on your portable music player.
That said, I wrote a script that converts my hi-fi MP3s (that I'm too lazy to re-encode) and OGGs to lo-fi MP3s as it transfers them to my flash MP3 player... But I paid $35 for it, which is a bit less than my SO paid for her iPod... I expect more from the iPod.
The iPods are very cool, but I consider the non-replacable battery to be a showstopper design flaw. As the article points out, these batteries will lose their ability to store a charge in a few years (all rechargable batteries do so), and buying a replacement battery (as one does for one's camcorder or discman every few years) isn't an option.
... well, an ipod with exchangable battery MIGHT persuade me, but with a neuros as an option (albeit a less polished one) is, quite frankly, more likely to win on that front.
Instead one has to throw away the ipod and buy a new one, and while one may argue that the technological changes in 5 years will be such that one would want to do this anyway (and perhaps most people would), I do not like buying a product with built in obsolescence in the form of "it will stop working properly in time X" when "it will be outdated in time X" is sufficient. I do have old technology I still use well beyond its end-of-life date, because it still works, and any ogg/mp3/wma/aac player should work until I decide I'm done with it.
Build an iPod with a changable battery and I'll seriously consider buying one. Add ogg and wma support, and any remaining question would vanish. But expect me to rerip my extensive collection in aac or mp3 format and
In short, the article's criticims are quite valid. The iPod is a very nice machine, but let's not kid ourselves about its limitations, which are non-neglibable to a great many of us.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Out of the possible solutions, he doesn't mention MiniDisc (which uses Sony's proprietary format). It's great for doing portable recordings (so long as you get a model with a mic jack) and has extroardinary battery life, with the extra bonus of only neading 1 cheap AA battery.
CNet is biased. They're being paid off by Microsoft.
Just look at the unjustifiably bad review they gave to the 12" PowerBook.
And they've been brutal on the iPod. "Battery life compromised somewhat by small size?" What the hell?
But to save the best for last, look at all the lies they printed when they "reviewed" the Power Mac G5. Frankly, I think they hired Microsoft to write that review for them.
I don't believe anything CNet ever writes. I only trust unbiased sources like MacNN or Macworld magazine.
For more information, click here.
I've found my second gen iPod lasts around 9 to 10 hours easy. Plus, if you've got your Powerbook handy you can always cheat and charge up the iPod a little bit to stretch the battery out farther. And of course the third-gen's have an external battery pack available if you really need it.
-sam
I was just here, where did I go?
Clicky Clicky
I run Marathons and 6 extra ounces means a lot.
Plus i still don't like the idea of shaking a HD whilst I'm running.
No thanks. I'll stick with a flash based MP3 player. They're smaller, lighter, you can shake them as violently as you want without breaking them and if you get hit by a flash thunder storm which soaks you, then you don't have to pay big bucks to get your MP3 player replaced.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
A: Oh please. I got mine for $239. The best $239 I've ever spent. I never leave the apartment without it. I never carry my CD-wallet around. Amortize it over the next year if you want to. If you get a the 10GB $299 model that I got, that's $0.82 a day for a year, and after that it's yours to keep. And they laser-engrave now for free. That looks cool.
For that $299 you could also get a player from a different company that hold more music. Expensive is a realative term
And the suggestion here: CD-MP3 players! HA! I used two models of those and they are worthless. You have to burn mixes, just like regular CD mixes, but these mixes have to be about 20 hours long or you're wasting your time and CD. Sure they're under $50 now, because no one would pay more than that for 'em.
I love my slimX cd based player (i also have a nomad IIc flash player). The best thing about it is taking it on vacation. When I go on a vacation I take two mix CD-RW's. They take almost no time to make and that's more than enough music to get me by. I don't have a laptop, so that's the only music I'm going to have on the road. The reason I love it the most though is this. I often buy CD's when I'm taking a trip. It plays CD's. I don't have to wait until I get home to listen to them.
Give me another "Oh please." If you want to make hi-fi digital recordings with your portable MP3 player, that's like saying "I want to win a demolition derby in my new Toyota Prius Hybrid. The Prius is cool for a totally different application--driving efficiently on streets.
I actually do think this serves as a selling point to many people. If you buy a player that supports hi-fi recording, you don't need a computer. Plug in your cd player and record all your discs. Do the same thing with your turntable. At a friends house, want to record one of his cd's easy as pie.
Choice? Please. You do have a choice. Good quality, legal AAC's, or good quality, legal AAC's/MP3's from your own CDs. Or un-legit MP3's too. That's way good enough for me. WMA stores are inadequate. The DRM is stifling at many. Why mess with a good thing?
Please explain this too me. As far as I can tell most of the WMA stores have exactly the same DRM as the iTMS. The differences are only with the streaming music by subscription which iTMS does not offer!.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
The battery life really is not great, and it continues to suck power even when you don't have it on so you have to recharge the thing constantly.
You may have to upgrade your firmware. There were a few bugs in the earlier versions of firmware that made use more juice than it should have. My iPod will play for 9-10 hours on a single charge. I recharge it about once a week (I use it a little more than an hour per day on average).
The other issues like weight, and expense are valid too, I also dislike the the touch-sensitive buttons, no manual EQ settings, no line-in.
I have real buttons on mine (2nd gen), so I don't know much about this. I do however flip the key lock switch when I stick it in my pocket since I do tend to bang the buttons somehow.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
My reason (aside from not wanting to drop that much cash) for not getting an iPod is quite simple -- I don't like iTunes and I don't like having to use it (or any other program for that matter).
.10 quality Ogg I can fit maybe 10 albums on it and it gives me incentive to change what music I have on it regularly.
I mean, I'm a Mac user, but I don't like that the iPod functions as a hard drive and yet I can't just copy MP3s to it and have them play; I have to load them in iTunes and build playlists and syncronize everything (at least, the last time I payed with my gf's iPod it was like that -- if this is not the case then someone please let me know). This to me is counterintuative.. the only thing that iTunes gives you is playlists and something similar to that can be effected by using directories as artist/album delimiters. It's a hard drive and I should be able to treat it just like a hard drive and it should be smart enough.
Instead, I got a (comparativly) cheap PocketPC and a 256MB CF card or about half the cost of an iPod (and it's a PDA, ad infinatum). Yes, I know that 256MB != 15GB but if I transcode things to
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
Also, if you want longer battery life, Belkin offers a cheap add-on pack that extends it considerably.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
How about this?
Sony D-NE1 ATRAC3/MP3 CD Walkman. 5 3/8" x 5 3/8" x 5/8", 6.25 ounces, 90-150 hours on a charged set of batteries. [2 NH14WM(a) Rechargeable batteries for the player and 2 "AA" Batteries for the Backlight Remote] The NH-14MW are 1.2v 1350maH batteries.
Sony D-NE1
Apple iPod (40 GB Model)
4.1 x 2.4 x 0.62, 6.2 ounces. 630mah LiON Battery, 8 hours on a charge (Apple Literature)
Pure FUD, nothing more.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I own a "docking" IPod. This is my 3rd mp3 player and the best one.However, there are some things I don't like about it:
1 "Touchpad-like" controls- you touch it in a pocket, and it skips a song or does something else
2 Sometimes those buttons don't respond- have to touch up to ten times (not sure if I got a bad unit, or this is typical)
3 Can't "drug and drop" mp3 files on iPod- must use a software
4 Doesn't understand file names or directories- identifies fiels only by ID3 tags
5 Battery life- have to charge it as often as analog cell phone. Forget about overnight trips without a charger
6 Forgets the last played track after being connected to a PC, sometimes does it for no reason at all. Very annoying to audiobook listeners.
7 Clip on the remote is designed in such a way that the controls face outside only when clipped to a shirt with buttons on the left- ladies style.Does it confirm a popular Slashdot opinion that Apple is for gays?
I recall one of the biggest holdups to ogg support in portables was in the hardware. I think it was that none of the portables shipped with an FPU, and ogg required one. So perhaps you bought a player before there was technical ability for portables to support ogg. I'm sure someone will post a link or two and take any potential informative mod points i might have received were i more motivated to research futher.
Really? I'd say the Neuros pretty much satisfies all of those complaints: Battery life is VERY good in my experience. You can't beat the price right now: Something like $220 for the 128mb flash/20gb hdd combo. You can use the flash backpack for jogging if you're worried about damaging the hard drive. You can record 44khz 16-bit WAV through either the built-in MIC or the 1/8" mic-in (there's also options from 160kb/s to 64kb/s MP3 recording, as well as a couple lower WAV qualities). DI (the developers of Neuros) don't believe in DRM, so buy your music from wherever youw ant. Oh, did I mention it has a built in FM tuner and FM transmitter? In my opinion the Neuros beats the iPod hands-down in features. Granted, it may not look as cool, and it's a little bit on the big side, but they're working on that for future versions. I LOVE my Neuros.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
There is an integer only version of ogg available.
Hope that helps.
Yep, I shopped at CircuitCity for an MP3 player about a year ago, and the salesman told me most of the employees there use MiniDisc players for that. Each disk (a couple bucks each?) could store 5 hours or so of MP3's. Overall it's a cheaper, more flexible alternative to other MP3 players.
Though I'm not sure if it has any real advantages to a mp3-cd player, if you can burn 700mb worth of MP3s per disc.
You want a sig? I can get you a sig... Hell, I can get you a sig by 3 o'clock this afternoon... with nail polish.
I probably would go with the belkin battery extender if i needed more battery life.
e ss ?Merchant_Id=&Section_Id=201526&pcount=&Product_Id =148969
http://catalog.belkin.com/IWCatProductPage.proc
But the time I get now is more than enough for me.
Here is a better portable audio player that does the stuff the article talks about (and some more) and has a very reasonable price - Neuros.
- First off, it comes with a small memory card and optional 20GB HD attachment, so you can go light when you are jogging and attach HD for long road trips;
- Speaking of road trips, it has an FM transmitter that lets it play any audio on any FM radio without extra connections;
- It has FM radio, and is able to record directly from FM radio to MP3 format;
- It has a microphone and a voice recorder;
- It has full Linux support;
- It has Vorbis support;
- The whole package - the unit itself, software, USB cable, earphones, 20GB HD attachment, regular charger, car charger = $230.
That would be less than half the price of iPod. I would like to see some reviews of this baby.
I think you might want to take a look at the Stereophile Review of the iPod. If you read the article, what is actually (between the lines) reviewed is the DAC of the iPod, which is incredible. I'll attest to this*. Sure, MP3 generally sounds like ass, as to lower bitrate AAC files, but that's a product of lossy compression, not the player itself. iPods themselves sound absolutely wonderful, especially if you use the line out (often from the dock) into your stereo.
*At home I have my iPod dock in the living room hooked to a mid-range NAD receiver and some Gekko speakers. It just sounds amazing.
I bought a 10 GB 2nd Generation iPod from the Apple Store's Special Deal refurb section for $169. They sell out fast, so you need to check in the morning, and frequently. Good luck!
Oh, it was sold as refurb, but it was brand new "old stock" they were clearing out.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Think Secret, an Apple rumors site has a story here about all the anti-Apple stuff coming out of CNET lately.
To quote:
Was the timing of all this bad news just coincidence, what with Microsoft announcing plans for its next OS and giving CNET an exclusive interview with Bill Gates, or was it something else? In this particular case, it looks suspicious even to other journalists.
Yes, women's shirts generally have the buttons on the opposite side of men's shirts.
Why is this?
It's easier to dress someone else when the buttons are oriented towards your right hand. Back when women didn't dress themselves, they had servants to do it (or daughters, if they weren't rich). Shirts just kinda carried over the tradition.
(Although I'm lost on the remote comment...now I have to go look at my wife's iPod clip)
Oh, more stuff for you. This is just looking at the specification BEHIND the dumb features that have you floored (proprietary transfers over FM...only a true geek would get impressed by that)
128 meg Neuros: $230
2.5" x 4.3" x 1.3" x 5.9 oz
Res: 128x128
Input: USB 1.1 max 12 Mb/s
Time to full charge: 8 hours
The backpack adds a further 7.6 oz to a pleasant 13.5 oz, or 3/4 of a pound en total. And the unit size becomes 3.1"x5.3x1.3"
20 GB iPod: $399
2.4" x 4.1" x.62" x 5.1 oz
Res: 160x128
Input: USB 2.0 / Firewire, max 400+ Mb/s
Time to full charge: 3 hours (at 80% after an hour and 20 minutes on the charger is usually enough for my hour and a half workout)
So what you have here is a unit which is, i admit, check full of neat ideas and features for $170 less. But it also takes twice as long to charge, up to 40 times as long to copy files (USB 1.1 is absolutely unacceptable for a hard drive and you KNOW this), is nearly three times heavier, twice as thick, an inch taller, has 20% fewer pixels, the headphone jack is on the bottom (which is just wierd)...the buttons aren't inlaid, the hand interface just looks unwieldy (with buttons on either side of the face, how do you GRAB it without pushing them in all the time? Even with a lock they'll jam up pretty quick).
All in all, it looks like an iPod knock off that tried really hard and nearly succeeded in being a better unit. You're right, integrated FM and microphone are neato...and these are two features Belkin and others are trying their damnedest to shove into the iPod...but they're also features most people will never use.
There's a design rule I like to follow, one that I think always makes devices easier to use: make common things simple, and complex things possible. I think Apple has done that -- common things, like selecting songs, copying songs, and walking around with the thing -- are easier. I think the Neuros has taken the opposite approach...laden the device with features, tried to keep it smallish (and yeah, 13 oz is still pretty small, smaller than those 2 lb Archos machines) and succeeded in making a device that I would probably buy if the iPod hadn't been invented.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
: I want to see support for (smaller) lossless formats before I see Ogg support.
ogg is a container (like mov), and has lossless support already (flac):
http://flac.sourceforge.net/
what you meant to say was ogg vorbis.
- p