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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."
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
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.
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 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??
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.