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iPod Mini Hits The 'Sweet Spot'?
Tooky writes "The BBC is reporting on a survey carried out by Jupiter Research which found that most consumers were only storing about 1000 songs on their portable MP3 players, claiming that ' The finding seems to be borne out by the demand for Apple's Mini iPod'." According to the piece: "Jupiter said digital music players with capacities of 5,000 songs will provide too much space for most people. It added that consumers rate other features as highly as the ability to store all the songs held on their PC."
I can't afford one you insensitive clod!
iDon't buy it.
Thought I'd share a data point for what it's worth...
I ordered my iPod mini about two weeks after the iPods were available (about 6 weeks ago-ish), was told 3-5 weeks delivery, and it arrived at the 5 week point. A friend ordered his last week, and they told him 4-6 weeks.
Perhaps we should put together some more data points and extrapolate if this has been the trend since the iPod mini release.
For all the reasons described in the article, the iPod mini exactly fits my preferences--it's sufficiently small, long-loved, well-designed, and spacious. More specifically, for me, the breakthrough was to have a audio player that a capacity beyond ~500 megs that was also suitable for running/jogging--the mini is the first to break that barrier.
G-Force music visualization
They obviously have never seen my music/divx/p0rn collection.
I have one of the original 5GB iPods, and I'm constantly deleting less-listened-to songs to make room for newer songs and albums. If people are complaining about too much space on their bigger iPods, then let's trade. :P
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Hey, there's a limit to how much I can get through this P2P pipe. The university keeps shutting down my Internet connection for filesharing. Give me time!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Yeah, I hate having extra space, it drives me nuts!
My question is:
Ipod mini 249.00 4gig, Ipod 299.00 15gig I don't understand why you would purchase the mini ipod. Its not amazingly smaller and only 50 dollars cheaper.
Sure, you may not have enough music to fill up that 20GB, but that doesn't mean that you'll never use the space.
I have a 10GB Archos MP3 player, and while I only keep about half of that full of music, I find it incredibly convenient for transporting groups of large files between places. It works just like an external hard drive.
Size is all for digital jukeboxes
Music lovers appear to have a track limit
The perfect size for a portable music player is one that can hold 1,000 songs, a study suggests.
A survey carried out by Jupiter Research has found that almost all the consumers questioned were storing no more than 1,000 songs on their home PC.
Jupiter said digital music players with capacities of 5,000 songs will provide too much space for most people.
It added that consumers rate other features as highly as the ability to store all the songs held on their PC.
Portable problem
The survey asked people who already store music on their PC about their ideal portable music player.
Gadgets that can hold about 1,000 songs seem to hit the "sweet spot" for these consumers, said the report.
Consumers care about more than size
The finding seems to be borne out by the demand for Apple's Mini iPod. The global launch for this has been delayed by three months to ensure it can cope with demand.
Music players that can hold about 1,000 songs are starting to become more common. Creative has launched a version of its MuVo player with a 4GB hard drive onboard - the same size as found in the Mini iPod.
Unsurprisingly, the report said that 77% of those consumers thinking about buying a portable player would pick one that would hold the store of music they currently hold on their PC.
Jupiter research director Michael Gartenberg said the research helped to explain why portable players that can hold fewer than 1,000 songs have not sold well.
Consumers were also wary of gadgets that gave them too much storage space, such as those made by Creative, Archos and Dell.
But the report said that almost half of those thinking about buying a portable player, 45%, would like one that could play video.
The report speculated that this could lead a push to players with bigger hard drives on board.
Other features that matter to consumers are rechargeable batteries (55%), small size (52%) and the ability to listen to Menudo while skydiving naked (49%).
Few of those questioned had a preference for the format of the music being stored.
Apple has learned quite a bit about marketing since the days when they let IBM eat their lunch by not persuing the business market. Ever since Jobs returned to the helm Apple seems to be all about a better product for a slightly higher price that is packaged and marketed well. And judging by their financial performance this has been a fairly sucessful track for a company with such a small piece of their primary market.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
When they were introduced, "hard cores" like me and, I think, a lot of the slashdot "community" (yeah, I know), scoffed.
It just shows that what we as wireheads look for in a tech product is not always what the average non-geek consumer wants. For me, the concept of "too much hard drive space" is completely foreign and absurd.
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
Space and time itself is being distorted with all the Mini iPod spinning on around here. These products are GREAT, but must absolutely everything good that ever happens in the entire universe be attributed in some way or inspired by the iPod.
You might have a ton of songs on your PC's HD, but How many tracks do you actually listen to?
The average radio station might have access to thousands of songs on their premises, but in a typical broadcast day they're only going to use about 40 to 50 of them.
1000 songs at roughly 3 minutes each is 3,000 minutes. That's 50 hours. We're talking enough music to go two days without having to re-dock to swap songs without having to repeat anything during constant playback. By that point, you'd want to hear your favorite songs again.
Sure, having more space on your iPod is great if you intend on using it as a data transfer and backup device. However, your average jogger doesn't care about that, and they in fact would rather shave off the 2 ounces and 2.64 square inches off the form factor. Smaller is better sometimes.
By buying a 30$ mp3 cd player and a spool of 100 disks for 20$
- 05 -28&res=l
And those of you that complain about skipping. Thats okay, mine doesnt skip, I cushion it by about three hundred dollars IN CASH.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2003
no
ne would think that the amount of music stored on a device shouldn't be more than can be played before having to recharge.
What good is 20 hours of music if the machine only plays for 10?
Huh?
Style is nice, but I think that thinking in terms of higher bandwidth formats, one needs to think about the larger capacity of the other iPods.
And nothing that you don't. That's just smart business catering to the demands of the consumer, and also cutting costs of production. I expect that Apple will make a plentiful profit from this decision.
Karma whorin' since 1999
You're the 10,000,000,000th person to point out that the 15 gig iPod is only $50 more.
You obviously don't understand who the mini is being marketed to (hint: not geeks).
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Better make sure it's a next gen ipod mini, or the headphone jack might just "breakthrough" too!
The iPod Mini was almost universally laughed at on Slashdot, and we seem to have a bad record of predicting these things (the original iPod announcement comes to mind..."Lame"). Apple does research which they use to develop new products. All we have is our personal preferences and better-than-you attitudes.
Why mention "the songs held on their PC."? This little ol' thing is pretty big on the Mac, not just the PC.
It is much easier to organize the songs on the computer, if for no other reason, the sheer size of the screen.
I would much rather sacrifice some storage capacity for a smaller model
If you have too many choices (songs ) on your portable device, you may just end up not using (listening to) all of the choices (songs ) anyway. After a point, as the number of choices increases, the ability to make a decision suffers, and the time it takes to make a choice increases.
I've got a 30GB iPod with 5GB free space on it right now. That's about 350 CDs encoded as 128K MP3s (they sound fine to me even at that low bitrate), plus all the music (~2000 songs) I've downloaded via p2p over the years.
I have a playlist that only holds my absolute favorites, songs that are rated at 4 or 5 stars. 95% of the time, that's the playlist I put on when I'm using my iPod. And guess what, it's got just about 1000 songs in it, out of the ~6500 that are on there.
I like being able to carry all the music in my collection in a shirt pocket, but I could make do with a device that only carried 1000 songs.
I've got a 15GB ipod, and i only have about 1000 songs on there (~5GB or so)...but the rest of the space is filled up with various software, disc images, and backups of various things.
Then again, I've started re-ripping all my old CDs, this time using 320 kbps mp3s, and these soak up the space big-time. I can imagine using 80 gb easily within the next few months. No, the iPod mini is great for "low" quality rips and downloaded music, and apparently people seem to be satisfied by that. I would too, though and here lies a small problem. I want GREAT sound for my system at home, but when I'm on the run with my iPod and its earbuds, a 128 kbps mp3 is going to sound just about the same as a 320 kbps mp3. This is why I wish iTunes would downsample the mp3s on my computer for use on the iPod.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Truth is, there aren't even 1K songs out there I consider listening to more than once or twice.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"Jupiter said digital music players with capacities of 5,000 songs will provide too much space for most people."
There's no thing like too much space, why do people want cars that can drive 300km/h when the speed limit is 110km/h? Because you want the best.
Maybe if the mini I-pod is _significantly_ less expensive than the regular one people will buy it.
Few of those questioned had a preference for the format of the music being stored.
So much for the demand for OGG music players. Most people will end up picking a PC-based... music player and sticking with it some even being talked into saving ripped CDs in the players favored format. A consumer doesn't really care about open compatiblity, just that their portable and their PC music collection can play nice together. For DRM'ed digital music downloads, they definitely don't want to hit the wall of not being able to take those to their portable device.
Surprisingly, it's Microsoft who has the most compatible-with-them devices, and also is the only one who has multiple compatible-with-them digital music stores. Microsoft the champion of consumer choice? Who let that happen?
I have a 100Gb of MP3s on my hard drive at home (and the CDs they were ripped from), and so the 20Gb on my 2nd generation iPod requires a lot of reloading. On the other hand, my step-daughter has a 3rd generation 30Gb iPod (which she got for babysitting the children of somebody who works at Apple) with only about 5Gb of songs. And do you think she'd swap iPods? No way! She's *so* selfish.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
What good is all of this hard drive space if the iPod mini loses access to data stored on its internal hard drive?
Opera Watch - An Opera browser blog.
Typical thinking in the "here and now". They have 1000 songs now, but what about later? These guys don't think once consumers see how easy it is that their music collection will grow?
I would not buy a device that holds 1000 songs if I only owned 999. I would buy one that holds thousands because I wouldn't want my device being obsolete in a year or less.
I own a 15 gig 3g iPod and it's almost full. I'm hardly a power user either, I just collected a shat load of CD's since childhood.
Too much free space for my tastes. Makes me feel selfish for some reason. Anyone know where I can find SATA drives with a real small capacity?
I'll chant that the next time I read another industry pundit complaining about Apple's lack of WMA support (or another /.er complaining about no Ogg Vorbis support).
Improved audio output. I understand the need to provide maximum playing time, but I would appreciate a decent output circuit to make my Etymotic ER-6 headphones shine. As of now, I need something like this to drive my headphone corectly and make my tunes sound heavenly.
Yes, I can use a more effecient pair of open ear headphones, but I don't want to be one of those jerks on the express bus where
eveyone can hear that I'm listening to Led Zeppelin's "Since I've Been Loving You" at moderate to high volumes.
Bigger is better (not physical device size). Now if they meant that the consumer found that the price for "bigger" was too high I'd buy that. i seriously dbout that if i offer you 2 "ipods" one with 10 gb and the other with 20gb for the same price you would say "gee 20 gb is just a bit too big, ill take the small one".
Give me a break, they just said that most really want to store all their tunes. So if i store 25gb that is really want i want. As time passes and high speed internet use increases they number of tunes the average person has will as well. not to mention the general gradual increase in bit rate and hence file size. i generally get more high bitrate files than i used to so this will also increase my size needs.
yup, we here at $big_company know what the customer needs, smaller, creeper low quality gear that they will hate and have to replace as often as possible.
"It added that consumers rate other features as highly as the ability to store all the songs held on their PC."
Yeah, like battery life length.....
When trolling is criminalized, only criminals will troll!
Limiting posts to 1 a day should be a "YRO" story.
Trolling is a art,
Consumers actually prefer an mp3 player that can hold about 1000 songs and doesn't consistently & horribly break in two months.
Hopefully Apple will take this to heart.
"Oh. Right. People don't use all that space on their players so lets release inferior products for the same price! More cash for all!! Hehehe"
Had it been left up to the tranditional personal stero makers, I think they would have release a HDD based product that could hold 10, 20 CDs max so that people wouldn't abandon CDs. Apple gave people more space than they had ever dreamed of in one little gadget.Because apple didn't have a vested interest in CDs they release a product that essentially made them obselete. Sony for example would NEVER have done this. It would have effected their CD sales.
I think this will lead to a glut of about 1GB sized iPodlets pushed as an alternative to the admittedly pricy ipod, by companies who, because they're also in the record business, don't really want us using compressed music anyway.
Begs the question. Will that drive apple out of the music player business? Recall, the mere 4GB mini has sold like hot cakes.
I expect the Sony HardDiskman to arrive soon..... With over 15 hours!!! of playback!!
They will of course be useless as portable hard drives. IMO the handiest extra of the ipod.
May the Maths Be with you!
when they were first announced, my thought along with a million other people) was 'the 4 gb is 250, and the 15 gb is 300. who woud buy the mini?'. i konw someone at work who came to the same conclusion, and went with the 5. i actually sprang for the 20 gb model, because it also comes with a case, remote, and dock. i use the damn thing all the time. however, i find myself wanting to get an iPod mini also. i figure i can use the iPod in my ar, or when i'm at me desk, and use the mini when i'm walking around or (if i ever get around to it) jogging and bike riding. that thing is smaller and lighter enough to me that i would like to have one. and after spending 400 on the 20 gig, 250 doesnt seem like a lot to me.
Why not use the extra space for better sound quality rather than greater number of songs?
You can have a larger size fries and almost 1.5 times the pop!
But some of us just don't need that extra bit of food, regardless of how little the cost. The marginal cost is still more than the marignal benefit.
Go take a basic economics class. Bigger is not always better.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
a 5 gig tarball ain't nothing to keep around, and it sure is fun to see a bunch of them .gz'ed on a cheap disk.
.rss feed (or 50) and my ipod is suddenly a nightly-updated 'personal radio station'.
so, yeah, thanks to my ipod, i'm now 'completely off the grid' of commercial music. i no longer really care for any music unless i am able to maintain a direct relationship with the artist, without any middle-man.
since i've gotten so used to being able to treat my 5gig ipod (rev a., love it to bits, scratches and dents and all) like a portable reference system, instead of the be-all of archive, i've rediscovered a vital interest in indepently produced trax.
a few well-scripted cron jobs and an
fuck a&r. as a digital consumer, i can do that myself. a&r is a prime target for redundancy through computerization, in my opinion, and i got there with a 5gig ipod. thanks apple, kudo's steve!
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Maybe 1000 songs is all joe average wants. But I
want my entire CD collection (~800 CD's) on my iPod in a non-lossy compressed format (WAV, SHN, OGG, ZIP, GZ). Also 1000 of my songs will take more space than joe average, since I listen to non-pop music (classical, jam bands, progressive) which tends to have longer songs.
I need the extra space, please don't remove it!
Some users have found that minimizing the number of times they plug in/out headphones and not pushing harsh pressure on the mini's case reduces the incidence of sound distortion.
Even the Chinese fixed that on their $30 CD Players.
The last time I had something so cheap the headphone jack got loose was a 1980's Citizen Tape Knock-Off "Walkman" (Cost? $9.99).
I can't believe Apple has stooped so low they make stuff of even lower quality than sub-$20 Chinese CD Players.
Unbelieveable. What country is the iPod made in, anyways? East elbonia?
Yes
[slashdot.org]
Yes, but our personal preferences and "better-than-you attitudes" could be the basis for a valuable new market research tool. Whenever the consensus on Slashdot is that a new product is "lame," the only proper conclusion is that it is going to be a big hit. If you're lucky enough for the Slashdot consensus to be that your product "sucks," then, Yoo Hoo!, buy your company's stock.
On the other hand, if the Slashdot crowd praises your product -- particularly if they go on and on and on about its infinate configurability and the fact that there are many ways to accomplish the same task -- you might want to take a second look.
For example, I just criticized the new WiFi radio as a crippled WiFi laptop. So how do I buy the stock?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Cushion your audio portable.
a cheap(er) DVD based discman rather than a hard disk based unit with similar storage capabilities. I'd much rather store my music (MP3, AAC, whatever) on removable storage rather than having to spend time syncing/reloading a sealed unit. Removable storage inherently more flexible in that regard. It reminds me of the many "mixed tapes" I used to create only DVD's hold so much more. One didn't create a new mixed tape every time did one? (assuming a full ipod mini or other likewise device) Well...perhaps you did, those chromium dioxide tapes DID tend to get expensive after a while (sarcasm).
www.brownsauce.org
From the article:
Actually, /. is really terrific for predicting the success of consumer products. Almost any product that gets ripped a new one when it's introduced is going to be a success (iMac, iPod, Windows XP, OS X, Photoshop...). And anyone that gets lots of favorable comments it going to fail miserably as far as mass adoption is concerned most of the time (OggVobis, the Linux-based Zaurus, GIMP, Linux on the desktop, the WiFi internet...). The only one better at being wrong than the /. consent is Taco who's track record is basically pefect.
Untill cost/price ratios gets realistic, I'll hold off buying.
MP3 players are the best example, but others include GPS devices.
i'm right at the top end of my 20G iPods capacity, with around 4100 songs. i could easily add another 10G worth of songs from CDs that i already own - if there was room to do it. since i've discovered the joys of Random Shuffle, even 4100 songs seems small - it seems like it's hitting the same album 3 or 4 times a day.
can't wait till the 100G models come out.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
When will i have an mp3 player that can hold that big a collection, at the present rate of ipod hard drive size growth?
I don't think using Slashdot as a marketing barometer this way will be too succesful. My main data point is that I have never seen a Segway in use in person. I think /.ers were dead on for that call.
Hey, remember when the iPod mini was announced?
"It's too expensive, nobody'll buy it."
"Only 1000 songs? How useless! Nobody'll buy it."
It just goes to show, never listen to slashdot when it comes to learning what the market wants.
Who on earth encodes their songs at 128kbps?
I am happy that Apple has a product that is profitable.
However, I will not buy an iPod. There are other players that are just as good as the iPod, but a quarter of the price, don't have critical parts break off, store more music in a similar size and form factor, and don't handcuff you to either some company's private (though documented) format, or shackle you to some DRM system.
Most mp3 players comparable to the iPod don't require specific software to transfer to their players; you just mount it as a drive and copy. The iPod works as a drive, but you can't play anything transferred in this mode. You must use special software.
Buying something with Apple's FairPlay DRM is just like letting yourself be handcuffed and manacled to the ground, but being told that the chains are not too binding, and the cuffs are made to be comfortable for long wear.
long loved
"me love you long time!"
For the purposes of simple background music, sure. Where those extra songs come in to play is when a friend mentions a group and you can pull it up in 5 seconds; or a situation reminds you of a funny song you have; etc etc. You can't predict when you'll want to hear a given song, and that's the selling point of the huge MP3 players.
I have 11.88 GB of music, 4.39 of which is on my "Top Rated" playlist (which I almost always have playing). Yet, I go back in to my Library at least once a day to grab a specific song, even though that song may not be on my main rotation. Which is why I plan on getting a full-size iPod (either the 15gb, or whatever they bump the 20gb model up to) the next time the capacity gets bumped. (by which point I hope to have money.)
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
Mod parent funny or mod troll, that is not the article text. "the ability to listen to menudo while skydiving naked" should tip you off. It is mostly correct, though. Thank you
More music, fewer hits
There's a great article about how more choice actually makes people less happy, especially "maximizers." Great read (and there's another good article about the XPrize). I'd suggest that everyone check it out.
I'd still get the 15GB model anyway. It can't hurt to have your files backed up and a spare boot drive!
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Chicks really prefer the small size, right??
Then again, I've started re-ripping all my old CDs, this time using 320 kbps mp3s, and these soak up the space big-time. I can imagine using 80 gb easily within the next few months.
FLAC + 128kbit aac? Yes, I know this will take up 8-900k/s instead of 320k/s. But if you put a reasonable price on the time spent ripping those CDs you don't want to want to re-rip them often if at all. If you can afford the iPod, you can afford a 250GB drive.
FLAC is lossless, about half the size of a CD, and you can encode to any format you want in the future. You should never have to rip your CDs again (unless disaster strikes your HDD).
For your iPod, I would suggest using AAC instead. Better size/quality ratio. Should you ever change your mind and go for a player without AAC support, simply remake from FLACs, shouldn't be worse than a script job.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Consumers care about more than size ... yes, things like size!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I'm hallucinating that part, right? After all, this got modded informative...
"Consider yourself a member of a virtual corporation with Mr. Torvalds as your Chief Executive Officer." - Linux Advocac
What's the point of greater than 128kbps if you are listening to most of your music in a noisy environment like city streets, a car with road noise from the highway, or a noisy classroom or office? I would guess most of the listening to portable audio players is done in noisy enough environments that greater kbps would just be a waste.
Also, why is it an ugly truth that consumers haven't trained themselves to be annoyed by minor artifacts in 128kps MP3s? That's a good thing; they can enjoy music with less investment of time and money. Almost all the musical ideas come across at even 128kbps. You might miss the last fadings of one section of orchestra for classical music, but you can't hear those over much noise anyway. I can hear a little difference in many songs between 128kbps and 192kbps, but all the essential details of music I have any chance of hearing even over light typing are preserved even in 128. If you don't focus on the errors, your brain does a very good job fixing slight infidelities, as well.
It's no skin off your nose that most people can enjoy music without focusing on slight imperfections.
In addition, you are exageratting about the tolerance of the average consumer to low sound quality. Almost no one would put up with sub-64kbps MP3s. Napster and internet downloads showed us that consumers felt a good balance of size and quality was 128kbps. People just wouldn't download 64kbps because it was too distorted. However, I would love being able to sample albums I wanted to buy by downloading 64kpbs MP3 versions. It would allow me to make an informed decision about whether to download the songs, and the quality reduction would be sufficiently annoying to convince me to purchase the album.
There were no such things as CDs in my childhood.
Actually, in the computer world, PC refers to the type of micro-computer started b IBM in 1982. Mac is something else. Go to ANY store in this PC (not Mac-centric) world and look on the side of software boxes. You will see "PC" or "Mac" compatibility. They know what it is if you do not.
"the breakthrough was to have a audio player that a capacity beyond ~500 megs that was also suitable for running/jogging--the mini is the first to break that barrier."
The Rio Nitrus was the first player to use a 1" drive. It:
- has a capacity of 1.2gb
- plays WMA or MP3 files
- has a battery life double the iPod or the iPod mini (15-16 hours vs. the iPod's 8hr max)
- doesn't come with a defective headphone jack
Oh, and you can pick one up immediately at any local electronics store.
Best,
rt
Are mods on crack. Why the fuck has this been modded as Funny??
That the Nitrus I'm discussing is the first generation Nitrus that shipped A YEAR AGO.
The new Nitrus (which is supposed be released very soon) uses the same Hitachi 1" drive as the iPod (the original Nitrus used the original 1" Hitachi drive that only had 1.2gb capacity) and comes in silver and black.
-rt
Saying a portable device has too much space is like saying your bathroom has too much toilet paper, your bank account has too much money, or that your S.O. gives you too much sex.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Apple has consistently failed to meet ship dates and demand, mostly around the time they moved manufacturing from Ireland to Asia; quality also nose-dived with nearly every model having some sort of quirk or another. Sometimes it's due to manufacturing problems, but usually, it's a simple matter of failing to deliver products on time. In most companies, that gets people fired. At Apple, it's par for the course to keep customers waiting weeks for orders to get filled, or longer. Apple was also famous for loosing orders- your order simply got dropped from the system, which of course meant you lost your place in the queue.
Steve Jobs announces something, says it will be "shipping" or in stores by a certain date- usually at least a month out. The press and experienced mac heads quietly chuckle to themselves. On that date, a few systems do in fact show up at a few dealers, and a few people get their order status changed to "shipping".
At least half of the time there are "unexpected delays". About half of the time there are manufacturing or quality control problems(as is the case with the iPod mini). Nearly all of the time, it's weeks- or over a month- before the initial orders have been filled. Even orders after demand has quieted down can take forever, because most everything is shipped on-demand from Asia; my powerbook took a week to arrive, despite being shipped 2 or 3 day air; 2 or 3 day air means "2 or 3 days after it gets put on a plane, shipped from asia, sits in chicago for 2-3 days waiting for customs, hopefully clears customs OK, and then gets back into Fedex/UPS's system again". Nowhere, of course, is this disclosed to customers.
Smart Apple customers have learned to wait until Apple starts meeting demand anyway, because by that time, Apple has usually sorted out any serious defects- or at least you know of them.
Please help metamoderate.
why? she wanted a small music player, she was in the market. i could have gotten her one of the dozen 128 meg or 256 meg models, but I got this one
1) it's small..really small
2) it's dead easy to use
3) it "just works", which is a big deal to my wife, despite her CS and Math degree. she hates fiddling with stuff
4) it came in pink
5) I got it engraved with a romantic saying for valentine's day
I cannot tell you how important factors like "pink" and "small" and "easy to use" are to people outside of the 18-25 yr old males.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
While your system is intruiging in theory, I think more study is needed before it can be truly adopted as an analytical tool. After all, if what you say is true, then the thing to do right now would be run out and buy stock in Infinium...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
As someone else pointed out, the concept of "too much hard drive space" is something most of us just don't understand at all. But it illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the general user that seperates "us" from "them"--people don't want too many choices. They just want the best and just enough to give them that.
I thought it might be an interesting viewpoint to consider since we want Linux to be the adopted desktop for new computing, but don't want to give up the endless myriad of choices in browsers, desktops, cd players, etc. To the average user, the idealistic OSS philosophy is something they don't care about. They'll just wonder why they have to install two different desktops to run all the apps, three sound mixers to hear everything, and so forth. We criticize Windows for seemingly providing less choice. I think in the case of the iPod Mini, the public has clearly spoken with regards to their needs. They just want enough to get them by. Unlike you and I who would definitely find ways to fill up that extra space, most users are not like that.
Those that laugh at you for having a Mac will laugh even more when you decide to do something with your machine other than look at it. You turn it on and find out there is hardly any software at all for it. ditch it at a garage sale, and get a PC.
The Nitrus debuted a year before the iPod mini using the first generation Hitachi 1" drive (1.2gb).
I'm not sure what research you're talking about, but I would probably analogize it with the "research" Apple did when they stopped by Xerox's research center for a "visit"...
-rt
Why is it a PDA is a small computer without a Harddrive, and an Ipod is a small harddrive without a computer?
Why don't we see a PDA with capacity for 5000 songs, image, movies, audio recordings, or database files?
The only reason I can think of for your post being marked as Flamebait is the fact you praised Microsoft for something. Horror of horrors.
Mods, if you disagree with something, reply and discuss. Don't downmod. That's not what it's for.
FYI, if you set up the playlists that the parent post recommends, the songs on your iPod will never change.
Auto-syncing a dynamic playlist will add the playlist to your iPod but (for instance) the "highest rated" playlist will contain the highest rated songs already on your iPod
And once again it is proven that no matter howmany audio compression formats you pump into the world people still think in MP3. I vote for MP3 to be the next world wide valuta standard. Everybody always seems to know it's value.
-- forget
Don't you think it illustrates the point that "they" think differently from "you?" They being the general public who is eating these things up.
Your post had a lot of "I would do this" statements. Well, that's what you would do, so just go buy a device with bigger storage and let other people do what they want. Obviously, Apple has tapped into something that you're missing here. And it's a trend Apple seems to be having with a lot of their products lately...I hope for a full-on Apple revival (yes, I'm one of those "my next purchase will be Apple" guys).
A memory-based, 1GB music player.
For $100.
Until this comes, I'll stick with my Minidisc, even with its draconian DRM.
Why isn't this product out there yet?
The Ipod's price point is too high, and the memory on memory-based players is far too low.
With an iPod your primary storage mechanism for the music is really the hard drive of your computer (the Digital Hub concept). What's wrong with ripping CDs and buying new music online, and storing it in your computer, uploading only songs you're really interested in listening to onto your iPod? Plus, I agree with the notion that most average consumers just don't have all that many songs.
People are voting with their pocketbooks. They know what they want, and the iPod mini seems to be fitting the bill quite well for a lot of people.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Maybe they are only UK results?
I keep a standard selection of about 8-11 GB of music in my iPod of 20 GB. The rest of the music changes according to the feel - but even the "clean" "essential" musics full at least to 8 GB. The rest of the content varies weekly or monthly.
I am different? I can underrstand one person being not in the mainstream, but it appears to me that most of my friends with an iPod have a similar tendency - at least if their iPod is bigger than 5 GB.
iPod mini must be treated diferently. If I want one, I can't jsut fill it with music that I want to keep always with me. And not with music that is in the normal iPod either.
I have 1100 LPs. Ends up about 40MB each on the iPod. Do the math: I need a 40GB iPod.
But then, I might also want to put my CDs on it too.
I guess I'm not the typical customer.
On the other hand, if all you want is 100 songs, who needs an iPod at all? Burn a few CDs with those songs and use an ordinary portable CD player. They exist, and they work very well. I thought a large local store was to enable a large local library.
I just looked around Troll Blacklist's homepage. It looks like one big troll in itself. "CmdrTaco has all but eliminated trolling on Slashdot." "I will conduct a detailed investigation." "I'll make Slashdot better into the new millenium."
I can't help thinking it's all tongue-in-cheek. I know this is off-topic, and I accept any mods as such. But one guy's "Troll" moderation is another guy's reversed metamod because they think it was an unfair moderation.
I've had my mini for three weeks now. Not, a super hard-core runner, but I average 25-30 miles a week, pace no slower than 7:30. I've found it to be absolutely amazing. The longest run I've used it on is about 45min and had absolutely no problems. Battery life is very good, the interface is absolutely perfect. Recommend buying the neoprene armband--very inobtrusive.
Thing is, I only listen to my portable when I run. That means that there's a lot of ambient noise, which means that good sound quality isn't worth it. So I record things at a really low bit rate (32 kbps for spoken-word files). You can fit a lot of stuff in a little space that way; I can put an 8-hour book on a teeny 128M device.
Why not check out the 20 GBArchos mp3 players only 129 after rebate, I just got one and it rocks. It even works in Linux with USB 2.0 speeds. I have my entire Wagner opera collection on hand for the bus trips to and from school. Are Apple Ipods worth 2x the price for less compatibility? I have never owned an Apple product so don't flame me.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
And this is the community that wants you to think it has a handle on what the user wants in their desktops! Good luck with that.
This is not a troll. Seriously, this whole thing exposes Slashdot opinion for what it is. It's time to actually listen to users for a change and not what the +5 upmods say.
More so than open ear headphones.
I wouldn't go expecting something like this soon.
Also, this circuit is pretty low-grade next to the amp in the iPod. I wouldn't be surprised if you are giving up significant fidelity for your increased power.
Ha! I never thought of that. Clever.
Anyone have some good methods for having random playlists that EXCLUDE certain tracks/albums? Most soundtracks will sound out of place in a random list.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Wow,
I had to read the poster name of this post to make sure I didn't write it and forgot about it.
I do exactly this (more or less) and it works just great. One difference though, and maybe that's what Elwood really meant, I have a list not with all _unplayed_ songs but a list with all _unrated_ songs.
Listening to a song and rating it to 2 or less and it will fall of the iPod on my next sync, 3 or higher and it stays.
I love it.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Congratulations. I'm sure Apple is now scrambling to add all that useless crap so they can get one more sale out of you. Oh, but then you'll probably complain that it's too expensive.
Depends on how expensive it is. At the current price point, even extrapolating up to account for the increased storage space, I'd be happy to pay for it. Until it can actually play the music I have though, it's pretty worthless to me.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
yes.
Photos.
I honestly can't fathom this. Ok, I can understand that maybe they might not see the value of having tons of extra space, but actually frightened by it? Are they afraid that the extra space is going to be used by Apple to rip, encode, and store their soul?
As for the 1,000 song figure it seems rather odd to me. I'm a college student who doesn't pirate music, I have what I'd consider an average if maybe smallish cd collection along with about a gig or so of stuff on my computer (I don't keep my rips, they just go onto the iPod) and I still have around 2,000 songs. I realize as well that while I may not be cramming my iPod at the moment I'll be glad I have that extra space when I get more cds and don't quickly run out. I have space to grow on this and hopefully it will be able to last much longer as a result.
People are lazy. As soon as they realize how inconvenient it is to swap songs around they'll be complaining about size and wanting more just like everyone else. At some point those 1,000 songs won't be enough and they'll have a rather strong backlash regardless of how they feel now.
Time to buy stock in SCO.
D'oh!
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
There's no reason to assume that hard drives in the 1.8" and smaller form factor won't get bigger and cheaper, so a 20GB unit with the iPod Mini's size (like, maybe the Archos Gmini?) will be available shortly (The Gmini is only a little higher priced, only because nobody discounts the iPods much -- they don't have to).
So with 20GB, you can have more songs, or about 28 70-minute CD's-worth of uncompressed music. Seeing as most discs aren't full 70 minutes, we're probably talking close to 400 songs, without a lick of compression.
And if my math's a bit fuzzy? Six months later, it's moot, and you're back to 1000 songs... uncompressed.
Now uncompressed songs may not be optimal: you're running the drive more, probably shortening the battery life. Between the (usually) ever-cheaper, ever-denser RAM, and shrinking hard drives, battery life will probably depend on the amp circuit power eventually.
But what to put on a huge portable hard drive? When I bought a 20MB (yes MB) drive for a Mac in 1986 or 7, I barely filled it, because I had to fill it with stuff on 1.4MB floppies and 14Kbaud modems. My next PC in the early 90's with a 1.2GB drive seemed endless, because the CD-ROM held most of the media.
When games started shipping with 5-10 CD's, that's when HD capacity started to get tight. So now, it's easy to fill a 30GB drive (although the one on my laptop is 1/3 empty, mostly because I don't have an iPod).
So what else will you fill your jukebox with? Video? I don't think so. I want to watch on a 50" screen, not a 5" one. Photos? Maybe for pros, but my 256MB CF card is usually enough for a short vacation. Even for a couple weeks, I'm only eating a small piece of 20GB.
On the other hand... my PDA is habitually short on space, I want a GPS with maps on it, I want all my data in one place... What I really want is to carry the 'brains' of my computer around, and use it on whatever KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) I'm near.
Hmmm.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Most people listen to the same crumby 10-20 songs over and over and over and over again, so I don't know how this is such a big issue.
Being able to have your entire Menudo collection plus the entire works of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Brahms on one portable unit is great, but how often are you in the mood to mix Menudo with Mozart?.
Karma Schmarma
I think 640kb ought to be enough for anybody!
-BillG.
... saying that there should only be about 200 people on earth. That way, we can all be on a first name basis.
...because it has excellent sound quality, it can host most of my music, and I can take it with me almost anywhere.
My girlfriend has an iPod Mini because it is pink.
4 giga-what? Pink.
And I save money by living a mile and a quarter from work, and walking to and from. My never actually using my car means more money left over for the absolute *RAPE* that San Francisco rents have become.
But, well, we're terribly house and garden at #7b.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
The iRiver iGP-100.
Major Disadvantages: 1.5 gb drive. No firewire.
Major Advantages: It's slighty larger than a stopwatch. Costs $200, not $250 (before accessories). No Software Interface on either Mac, Windows, or Linux*. FM tuner. Flywheel navigation (just like a Blackberry), excellent GUI. Backlight. Firmware upgradable. Passes the Girlfriend Aesthetics Exam with flying colors.
For the size and craftsmanship of the device, I firmly believe that this player is the better deal, especially if you already have a full-sized iPod (or equivalent). It is easy to operate within a pocket -- just orient the flywheel, and you can navigate the filesystem with ease. The other buttons fit naturally beneath your fingers when you hold it in your hand. The player does not require any accessories to use fully; my girlfriend can exercise with it clipped on. It also comes with a case. I find the 1.5 gb drive is perfect for a trip's worth of music, or a few weeks of commuting. This is useful if you have a lot of music that is overlooked in your normal music listening, or if you aquire music quickly.
4 gb for $250 is clearly the better deal. But the....philosophy of design is an invisible modifier to that price, at least in my eyes.
===---===
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
"...I cannot tell you how important factors like "pink" and "small" and "easy to use" are to people outside of the 18-25 yr old males."
And they say size doesn't matter.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
I purchased a 15 BG ipod for $289 and a 40GB 1.8 inch Toshiba drive for $210. I put the 40GB drive in the ipod.Total expenses $499, the same as the price of a 40GB iPOD. Now I have a 40GB iPOD, and in addition I have a 15 GB spare drive!
It's better than everyone hearing "i give you every inch of my love"; those Led Zeppelin fans will recognise the line. BTW, most "jerks" wouldn't listen to Led Zep anyway.
4. You don't go running.
While i agree its a lot to listen too, i dont agree that its 'enough' for everyone.
Id love to be able to carry all of my collection.. though that would take more then a 60gb daddy-ipod...
But id be happy with an *inexpensive* 5gb SOLID-STATE ipod... and live with having to change tunes every so often..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Don't you mean they'll upgrade to the new pink/blue/green/silver/gold 20gb iPod maxi?
Where's the backlash when someone finds out their video card isn't fast enough to play the latest game, and they buy a new system/card/CPU for it?
GPL Deconstructed
It's called iTunes (for Mac or Windows)
Rip as you get CDs
It organizes everything on your hard drive
As you want to back it up, just select the smart library 'all music', hit burn, and insert DVDs
Connect iPod to maintain a copy on the iPod
Drag and drop your Music folder onto your iPod to back it up a fourth time
Technology is fine, as long as you get the right tools for the job.
GPL Deconstructed
1000 songs is a lot. My library is about 1200 right now.. And I could easily drop it down to 800 or so.
Sometimes price and size is worth more than just storage.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
I'm using a hacked Muvo2 (with a 1GB CompactFlash card instead of the original 4GB MicroDrive).
Every night, I use LAME to re-encode all the stuff that I've listened to into ~192 kbps VBR MP3s (this list is generated by a script called by the XMMS "Song Change" plugin). I keep the most recent 3GB of these songs on the hard drive, meaning that there's a few weeks of recently-heard music that I can choose to transfer to my player.
Since my collection is a mixture of MP3, FLAC and Ogg-Vorbis files, this makes it easier for me to handle everything.
With a few scripts, I can also auto-generate playlists based on when the files were added to the player.
For what it's worth, I bought myself a 10GB iPod for Xmas, just before Apple bumped the "base" iPod to 15GB (at the same price) and introduced the miniPod. While I naturally grumbled about the "lost" 5GB, I've since transferred most of my CD collection to it (the LPs... will have to wait), and I also use it for portable storage of my Photoshop and Flash projects, between school, work, and home... with room to spare. I'm sure I could fill it up if I really wanted to, but y'know... I really don't need to carry that much data around with me. I bought the iPod in part because I could also use it for portable storage of non-audio data; if not, 10GB would definitely be overkill. (Of course I could be an atypical case, because most of the music I have was acquired through royalty-paying channels.)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I should have clarified. By less choice, I meant that the user will have fewer MP3s and therefore less ability to use that extra space for whatever.
Several people have commented that ~1000 MP3s seems so little, but most people just want to stick the best on there and are willing to get a device that lets them.
There are other things I was going for with my statement, but that's why I brought up choice to begin with.
YOU ARE UGLY!
Still, it's probably more reliable than any slashdot poll...
I had a green ipod mini within a week of release from bestbuy.com, seems like a lot of people are still waiting. Our local store actually had about a dozen in stock the first week. I hate to be a cheerleader, but I must admit the ipod mini is one of the best pieces of equipment I've ever owned. I was impressed with everything including the box it came in. I've never owned a mac before, but this really woke me up...now I am considering buying a mac to see if the quality i found in the ipod will also be in the powerbook. I bet I'm a key person in apple's overall marketing plan...market a amazing device to non-mac people and ultimately convert them over to other apple products. My g/f is already planning to buy a mac now....so it seems to be working.
First of all, my iPod has never skipped. I will stop short of declaring "THE IPOD IS A MAGICAL SKIP-FREE DEVICE" but it has never skipped. Not once. Not when being shaken. Not when running. Not ever.
As for flash-based things, I used to say "I will never ever own a flash-memory based device" but now I noticed it's cheaper so I use memory cards and I love my new 256MB Cruzer Mini (USB 2.0 key)...but when it comes to a portable music player, for me anyways, the whole reason I replaced my Sony MP3 CD player (which I could stand for only about six months because I lacked the time and energy to compose the twenty-hour-mega-mix-cd that an MP3 CD really is) with an iPod is the fact that I never have to bother picking out some new subset of my music again. It's all there, all the time. I pick songs as I go. That's what it's all about. That's why I got tired of mix cd's, and MP3 cd's, and why I bypassed the flash players altogether.
As long as you don't mind creating new subsets of your library every time you want to hear different music, then all the power to you. You've saved some money.
1 iPod to store data and listen to music and read non European text files.
1 Palm to visualise pdf-files and to store new documents written on the road.
1 Palm ultrathin keyboard to enter the new documents to the Palm properly and quickly.
1 Phone to... ehm... phone.
1 Camera to take pictures with a decent quality.
Add to that a Gecko GPS for hiking.
It should be possible and not too difficult to fit all of those ones in the same not clunky device. Ok, let's accept that the keyboard has to be a separate thing.
Pleeeeease, Apple, Dell, HP, Nokia, Palm, Sony Ericsson, or whoever, give me one for X-mas.
That sounds a lot like the system I use to determine if I will go to the theater to watch a movie. If the critics say it sucks I'll go see it, if they love it I stear well clear!
The biggest your karma can get is "excellent."
Oh, absolutely. But I don't think this works the way around you expect. I don't want to have to choose which quarter of my music collection to put on my iPod!
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
the male teacher would not work the same. People are driven for the younger, more viril, healthy, semtrical person who would make the best mate and produce children capeable of carrying on the species successfully... at least, that is what was intended. God sort of fucked up when he included "free will" as a factor in otherwise basic, predictible biology.
The mini may hit the sweet spot in the trade off between size and weight on the one hand and storage capacity on the other. When it needs recharging, I can put new songs on it. It is way off the sweet spot in another area: price. Even the US price of $200 plus tax seems pretty steep, and I'm sure when it is available over the counter here in the UK it will be steeper still.
I am pretty damn picky on compression artifacts.
:).
128kps AAC is good enough.
192kps MP3 is good enough.
Therefore I re-ripped my entire collection as 128kps AAC
AAC sound much much better than MP3.
I've heard lots of people say it sounds bad.. Try it in quicktime/iTunes.. Your encoder must suck.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Not just products, but mass media as well. Remember how we priased Firefly? Remember how we still praise all 10 episodes?
If this theory holds out, then the Firefly move shouldn't do well, either. darn
I cannot agree more. or less.
;)
Having thousands of mp3's on CDs, i do not listen to all of them because i haven't the space on my HD to store them back. Indeed, i have 5-10 CDs worth of mp3 i listen to, and this very afternoon, i listened to the very same some for about 3 hours coding spree (traditionnal intrumental breton track (i love instrumental things, because without lyrics i keep on being concentrated)). So 10Mb would be enough on the player for that
The fact that they all could fit on the ipod, freeing space on my computer btw and not having to deal with cd (which is really a pain in the ass) would be the most wonderful thing in the world ! (having a good meal, being on week-end, on trip to a sunny beach with my gf, having some wild sex, or sleeping 24 hours in a row... disclaimer : this list is not complete)
Yeah. That's it.
Errata ;-) ... most wonderful thing in the world ! ( JUST LIKE having a good ...