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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."
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.
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Africus aut Europaeus?
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?
Umm, there is more to a product than technical specs.
1) Size
2) Design (!!!)
3) Target audience
For a data point, I have a 15g iPod, and my wife has a blue iPod mini. I need more space. She needs a small, lighter MP3 player. Different preferences.
It's not all about the 4gigs vs. 15gigs.
--- witty signature
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.
Most consumers, however, don't need to transfer large data files between places. They don't see that functionality as being worth $50 more.
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).
You're echoing the exact same arguments made when the iPod mini details were announced on Slashdot. Just about everyone chimed in and said that this thing was too expensive and wouldn't sell. Well, the small form factor (and possibly color choices) have shown to be a hit with the market and iPod minis are currently selling like hotcakes.
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My answer is you're asking the wrong question. What the buyers are asking is "The mini iPod holds more than enough music, fits in my pocket better, and is $50 cheaper. Why would I buy a regular iPod when it doesn't do anything extra, doesn't fit as nice, and cost more money?"
From their perspective, those extra 11 gigs don't do anything for them, because they aren't even using the 4 gigs up.
50 bucks is 50 bucks. That's still real money. And if you don't have 15G worth of music and don't even listen to all that you DO have, then that 50 bucks is simply a wast of money.
Talk about extra space all you want, but when you can choose what to put on and take off and you're actively syncronising, it doesn't matter. Or at least it doesn't matter 50 dollars worth.
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.
About the only thing more worthless than simple anecdotal evidence would be attempting to extrapolate trends from data gathered on Slashdot.
Of course, unlike the over-cynical and ever-useless comments that serve even less of a purpose.
If a dozen people over the span of the last 6 weeks all posted that they had to wait 5 weeks for their mini, then that defintely says something about Apple and the demand. And that, sir, would make you an asshat.
G-Force music visualization
Exaclty, I don't understand, can some one explain this?
I'll take a shot: There are other people in the world besides you. These people think and act differently than you.
I think that about covers it.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
"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!
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.
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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. --
Simple. Because:
I can do all this on my 2nd gen' iPod which is about the size of a pack of cards and weighs about the same. When they bring out the inevitable mini iPod with 20+gigs I'll probably buy one (although I don't care for the 3rd gen button layout).
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
> that was also suitable for running/jogging
That's the whole reason I haven't bought a portable mp3 yet. RAM-based players don't have enough storage (or cost *way* too much), but HD-based players were too fragile (or also cost too much.) How much do you run? Is the mini holding up well? If it can take an hour-long run without a head crash or an explosion from the salt getting into it, I just may have to grab one.
What good is 20 hours of music if the machine only plays for 10?
Because I don't want to listen to the exact same 10 hours of music day in and day out. I can see all kinds of advantages of having a hard drive that would last longer than the battery life.
One could bring their portable music device to work, recharge it overnight without changing the songs on it, and still get a fresh batch of music the next day. Say one day I'm in a classical mood and the next I'm into speed metal; with a gigantic hard drive I don't have to choose beforehand what kind of music I plan to listen to.
"RAM-based players" ...I'm going to assume you meant Flash ROM-based players. ;)
What good is 20 hours of music if the machine only plays for 10?
Excellent reasoning skills.
Just like," what good is an entire menu selection in a restaurant when you can only eat one meal at a time?"
nice.
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
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.
Hiding small amounts of porn/buddy lists / emails from your SO.
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? --
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.
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?
Or maybe joggers and fashion victims don't really care whether using 128 kbit AAC files causes a notable distortion in cymbal sustain and restriction of dynamic range during detailed passages.
Maybe they just want to toss music on the fucking thing and get on with their day.
Incidentally, I recently re-ripped all my "archival" VBR MP3s to 160 kbit AAC, because I liked the sound better. It's not as detailed, but AAC distortion is different from MP3 distortion and I think it's significantly less obnoxious. I can't tell the difference between AAC 160 and AAC 192+ unless I concentrate.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Why not just get one of the 20 GBArchos MP3 Players on Amazon that are only $129 after rebate, like I did recently? The Apple Ipods are hardly worth 300+ dollars when the #1 concern I have living in a rainy area is water damage and second going to college, theft.
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.
a) no matter what encoder you use, MP3 quality plateaus WAY below 320kbps. (nevermind that encoding any MP3 with a constant bitrate is retarded)
b) while it doesn't improve quality significantly, playing back 320kbps MP3s on your iPod WILL use up the battery almost twice as fast as 160kbps encoded (AAC or MP3) audio, for example. The buffer hasn't gotten any bigger, so the disk has to work twice as hard per hour to keep it full during playback. battery life is way more important to people than the quality difference between 320kbps MP3 and 192kbps MP3.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
The question isn't can a person run for more than 2 hours, but can they be decisive enough to pick just enough music for their run and not change their mind during the run? Because with the smaller, flash memory based mp3 players, that's what you've got to do...
The average consumer cares little about sound quality.
Nonsense. The average consumer cares very much about sound quality. It's just that for the average consumer, sound quality is a binary value. Either it sounds good or it doesn't. It's boolean.
Some people think sound quality needs to be described using a 64-bit long long, so they can talk with great precision about just exactly how good something sounds. These people are whackos and are best ignored.
An MP3 at 128 kbps does not sound good. It gets a zero in the sound quality column. An MP3 at 192 kbps, or an AAC at 128 kbps, sounds good. It gets a one.
The average consumer cares very much about sound quality. They just don't bother describing it with a great deal of precision.
I write in my journal
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.
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!
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