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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."
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.
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 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.
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.
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.