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iPod's Two-Year Anniversary
the terminal of Geoff Goodfellow writes "Two years ago this month, Apple Computer released a small, sleek-looking device it called the iPod. This Sunday's New York Times Magazine has a long article on it: The Guts of a New Machine."
nice how the guy does not let us listen to the whole call so we can here the explanation.
perhaps next time, the dude should get the care plan on it.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Not least because it's adding a huge amount to Apple's bottom line. Its helped apple through a dodgy period whilst they were moving their users to a world class OS and struggling with a slipping processor roadmap. They need a new killer device soon though I predict that this xmas is going to be the peak in iPod sales so I home January's Macworld (or the next year at least) brings something twice as cool. I'm sure Apple won't disappoint. (Well I hope at the very least).
There certainly is a customer service problem. They should tell their idiot customer service employee(s) that. I know, all the 1337 geeks on /. know how to search for a replacement at DigiKey, but when someone calls the company up and asks about a battery replacement and their customer service department tells them, "the iPod is worthless, it would be $250+ to fix it, throw it out and buy a new one," there is a major problem with that company's customer service.
I know that this article was written for people who aren't technical types, maybe folks who first heard of "MP3's" just last year, but the difference between the iPod and the MP3 players that proceeded it are more numerous than suggested.
Here's a story that makes a point...
Some Apple employees loaded Mac OS X Server onto one of the early iPods and connected it to a desktop Mac. Then, they booted to it. It ran.
I hope that all the folks who always seem troll on Apple product, saying that all they do is slap on some pretty exterior, jack up the prices, and market, market, market, will think for a moment and appreciate the depth of this product.
And I don't even own one.
--Richard
Slashdotters are some of the most negative people on the planet. That's because nearly everyone on /. thinks he is a generalized critic with some profound insight that others need to hear.
Celebrate the finer things in life
I guess we should expect typical character assassination from a slashbot. It seems Mac / PC is just as political as Republican / Democrat. What it all boils down to is this: $250 for iPod battery replacement is LUDICROUS. Apparently at the time of the video, this was the only offer from Apple. This $99 service is MUCH more reasonable. I think these brothers have shed some light on an important issue for iPod owners. Thanks to them, awareness has increased, a new service has been offerred (or we have been made aware of it), and Apple should be held up to the same standards as other device manufacturers. Personally, I think they should have made the battery user-replacable (i.e. it slides out like any other portable audio player). Of course, they'd probably charge you $250 for a standalone battery purchase :)
Taking the music off it is cake.
Second - it locks itslef ot one instance of itunes. That's because it's behavior is to synchronize with itunes, not just to copy mp3s to it.
Third, it's flat and sleek..which means it fits in my pocket nicely. nothing jutting out.
As for "a discman is better".... if you are happy with your discman, and some cdrs, power to you... it makes sense for the reasons you say.
I travel.. and I don't like to carry a binder full of cds around with me, nor do I like swapping them. All those little things like CD wallets and whatnot add up when you are travelling.
My ipod fits in a shirt pocket, and has far more tunes on it than your discman.
Your discman will be stolen just as easy as an ipod.
That said.. it's a luxury item.. nto a must-have. If you use it the way it's intended, and especially if you already use itunes to sort all your music, it's a pleasant device to use.
The replacement programme may not have existed at the time it was made (who knows), but it was announced and publicised before the video was ever put on the net.
Turns out these guys are not even remotely interested in solving the problem. They're in it for the publicity.
Here's the email exchanges that show what these guys really care about
I suspect that there is a small group of techies who have bought iPods, and then gone on to buy their first Macs. I bought a Windows iPod and was very impressed by it, and my positive thoughts on it's design helped influence my decision to buy an Apple powerbook 12" a few months later - my first Mac. At least one of my coworkers also bought an iPod and a few months later bought a Mac. So I think the iPod might be introducing Mac design ingenutity to people who otherwise wouldn't have bought Macs.
I have blog like everyone else
I was never a Mac-head, and what initially completely turned me off about Macs (back in the days of DOS) was their "less is more" attitude. No command line, one mouse button - sure, that simplified life for an average user, but not for me.
Now comes the iPod. I own one. It plays music. But I need more features. On a regular basis, I use FM radio and a voice recorder (and don't tell me to get a $50 attachement to record lousy quality mono audio). Why doesn't the iPod have those things? If iRiver has been implementing these features for years on their players, it should be trivial for Apple.
But it's not in their design philosophy. Stuffing it with features would, in Jobs' opinion, detract from its greatness as a music player.
Hasn't OS X taught Apple that you can design something that can both be minimalistic, and yet have enough features and power to satisfy any hard-core geek?.. Why can't iPod be like that?.. Unfortunately, I doubt it'll happen. I'm eagerly waiting not for the 4G iPod, but for the 2G iRiver iHP-120 -- that's a company whose products never stop evolving, and if they try hard enough they can make a UI at least decently comparable to iPod's.
I'm not sure if Apple had the battery replacement plan and AppleCare at the time of the call. However, if it is the case that they did NOT, it's easy to understand why they wouldn't recomend an unsupported 3rd party service to their customers... especially after the whole Nokia "exploding knockoff phone battery" incedents. Could you imagine the lawsuits if they recomended a 3rd party battery that exploded?
I have blog like everyone else
i guess it's a sign of the immense success of a product when you forget that it was only introduced no more than 2 years ago... once a product feels like it's been there forever and it somewhat doesn't easily occur to you that a while ago it didn't even exist and no body heard of it, that is when it become a part of the popular culture.
kudos to apple; and also for the fact that 2 years on no one seems to have been able to bring to market a better product.
you're missing the point, the ipod pretty much defined what a portable mp3 player was supposed to be like.
.. basically a hard drive (or tiny expensive RAM) and an mpeg decoder.. no firewire, no small size, no good design.
the stuff that came before was "proof of concept"
apple doesn't "copy", they "redefine".
why do all the new music players look like ipods these days??
ipodsdirtysecret.com was registered on Nov. 20 and the site went live on Nov 23. The first verified reports of an official iPod battery replacement program hit Nov. 18.
Please explin to us how the video precipitated the battery replacement program.
2) It's not Apple's fault that you chose to rip your CD's using a compression format that most of the industry (and most users) has chosen to to adopt. Ogg advocates are starting to sound like Betamax owners from around 1990 or so.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
CmdrTaco's reaction was typical of what I heard from many geeks, on Slashdot and elsewhere. It didn't occur to them that reducing download time by a factor of 30 was a big step forward. Interesting oversight. I saw it right away, and I usually don't grok performance issues.
I can tell one thing for sure about Apple. They have brilliant marketing
In recent years, Apple has become much more aware of what customers want. They've always made interesting technology, but they haven't always understood what customers wanted to buy, and they haven't always understood how to present their interesting technology in a way that appeals to customers. Steve Jobs is masterful in both these areas, and we have him to thank in large part for Apple's resurgence.
The HD, the circuit board and the battery are each just less than the height and width of the iPod, and they are stacked inside the case. If you used AA or AAA batteries instead, You'd make the iPod more than twice as thick. It's a straight engineering trade off. You compromise the battery ubiquity to make the device very small, or you compromise the size for the the ideal of standard batteries.
the reason NYTimes is annoying is because a link to the article is not a link to the article, but to some redirector crap. mod grandparent up.
And you think that AA or AAA batteries will SAVE you money in the long term, perhaps?
The iPod has to run a hard drive and power a bunch of other things with batteries, and these things typically take a lot of power to run. So, pretend that it takes 4 AA batteries to run the iPod. Here, it's $4 for a two-pack of AA Energizers, so that's $8 to run your iPod. Since they're not rechargable, it only takes about 10 packs before the cost of buying one of the third party replacement batteries (I'm working in Canadian money here, BTW) is cheaper.
If you want to buy rechargable batteries, you can buy NiMH batteries with a charger for about $50CDN. These will last at least as long as the built-in battery, but the recharging is somewhat less convenient. Admittedly, the convenience of being able to carry spare batteries just in case can be a match, if you use it that much (and we assume that 4AAs last as long as one charge on the iPod battery).
I think that it's probably better to have an internal, non-swappable rechargable battery, personally.
As for Oggs, I used to have everything ripped to ogg, but I've switched to AAC, since I really like iTunes. (I know that there's a plugin to listen to oggs with iTunes, but it's REALLY bad under windows. It works great on my Mac, though). If you're using iTunes, re-ripping your library isn't so bad.
Then why is it the best selling MP3 player?
I like microcars
Apples and oranges, pardon the pun. OSX is software, where it's easy to hide a bunch of powerful and hidden features from the ordinary user but accessible to advanced users. heck, we had "power" features accessible with modifier keys since at least as far back as System 7 in 1991.
The iPod is primarily hardware, and fairly small hardware at that. What little software it has must fit inside the operating code memory. Include a built-in FM tuner, or a mic/line in? Increase the unit size and price. And there's no easy way to hide the extra options to control these features from such a minimalist interface.
If you read your own quote you would notice that the parent talked about not evolution or revolution, but innovation.
The whole thing about the iPod isn't that it is a massive leap forward in technology, its that it is so perfectly refined. The design is so pure, they didn't set out to make the most money, or sell the most players, they set out to make the best player. Thats the innovation, making a product as close to perfect for the consumer, not just churning out a mass market money spinner for the company.
well, at least not even significant minority. As far as quality concerned, Vorbis is mediocre to say the least. There was enough tests done in this respect. Check hydrogenaudio.org for more information. It is also not well supported. Remember how slashdotters rejoiced when there was the announcement that BBC has adopted vorbis as its streaming protocol. I don't remember any news on slashdot when BBC dropped it, primarily because of lack of any decent support.
AAC is the state of the art compression technology, and it is *standard* part of MPEG4 protocol suite. it is a natural extension and improvement of MP3. Remember my words: you'll see more and more vendors jumping on AAC bandwagon. Ogg Vorbis? Don't expect a lot. may be a few, like Karma.
Drive sizes will keep being useful the larger they are if you want uncompressed audio. And I think we'll be heading there eventually.
But already now my 40 GB iPod is an external firewire harddrive that just happens to play music as well.
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
When the first generations came out, they were $399 for a 5 gig iPod. Now you can get a 10 gig for $299. Hmm, twice as much space, better design, and 50 bucks cheaper. That seems like a price drop to me.
There really isn't any reason for Apple to price it too low. First of all, most people see it as a luxury item. People pay a premium for the cache of owning the high end product in the catagory - like owning a Rolls Royce or Porche. Secondly, they seem to be making a decent profit as it is - why make less per unit if they don't have to? Thirdly, since all the parts are custom-designed, there aren't going to be huge cost savings from amortized costs - especially since they keep redesigning it.
I have blog like everyone else
I never wan't to listen to the radio and I never want to record voice notes...so...I guess the iPod is a perfect design for me, and obviously for hundreds of thousands of other similar individuals. On the other hand, I do use it as an extra hard drive, a contact manager/calendar as well as a VoodooPad/wiki notepad.
:)
Just goes to show that designs can actually be perfect without you even knowing it.
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
At the low rates, Vorbis quality is about the same as WMA. By low rates I assume you mean the rates lower than 128Kbps.
Now with devices like iPod, the capacity from 10GB to 40GB, there is no reason *not* to encode at the rates of 160Kbps and higher, and this is where AAC and even MP3 beats Ogg.
This is correct that Vorbis was created primarily for the low rates (as defined above) to compete with WMA and their likes, but once again, with harddrive based devices doing something like LAME with default settings (VBR, 200Kbps on average) or AAC (160Kbps CBR and higher) seems reasonable enough, and this also eliminates the majority of artifacts.
With respect to Vorbis will be free, I frankly get tired of this mantra. Free for whom? For users? How much do you pay for MP3? How much do you pay for AAC? You may say 'hidden license charges'? This is a few bucks per device, which costs $200-300 and higher to begin with, drop in a bucket, don't you agree? For manufacturer? As i've mentioned, in addition to free software you need a good support. Also Ogg Vorbis binary is large, and not easily fit into many of the portables, so the code needs to be optimized, and then of course, the manufacturer has to support this extra work.
So - before you repeat the slashdot favority mantra 'Vorbis is free', think a bit first.
I hate to resort to definitions, but inovation can be defined as follows:
A creation (a new device or process) resulting from study and experimentation
I wasn't referring to the iPod itself being an innovation, but to the unique design mentality applied to it. When designing the iPod it is obvious that Apple looked at existing devices saw the flaws and designed the iPod to not only correct these flaws but also address the essential usability ideals that previous (and most subsequent) players ignored.
They avoided the normal approach of looking at an existing product, seeing how it works then making a clone. Maybe adding a feature here or there in order to differentiate it from the pack, but essentially adding features for the sake of another bullet point in the advert. Not looking to see what consumers actually want from such a device and addressing those areas.
Apple is in fact now falling into this trap, instead of relying on the iPod competing on its own merits they are adding PDA functions piecemeal with updates. Of course this isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as these add-on features continue the ethic of usability.
If it used AA or AAA, it would be far too big, heck I haven't seen a recent HD based player that uses them.