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Microsoft, Sony Announce iPod Competitors
Pfhreak writes "According to the Denver Post -- Las Vegas section, a little over halfway down the page -- Microsoft will begin selling a $50 music player that will 'look and feel as good as the iPod' later this year. Yusuf Mehdi, a Microsoft VP, is quoted as saying that the player will give customers more choices than Apple."
In related news, Tetsugaku-San writes "The Register has the scoop on Sony's new portable audio/visual playback device. Impressively it plays MPEG2, MPEG4, BMP, GIF, PNG, TIFF and MP3 (finally they got the message Apple was gonna whoop em!) straight out of the box. Not as good battery life as I'd like to see, but real world tests remain to be seen."
Nomad Jukebox... archos... both were out long before the ipod.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
"That's just the way it is. I want my open-source, patent-free, DRM-free codec."
Instead of bitching about the lack of OGG support on Slashdot where it won't help matters, why don't you email Apple and tell them that you would be an iPod if they'd ship with OGG support? That would be the more constructive argument to make. Here, I'll even help you out and provide the proper link to submit your comment:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipod.html
Happy codec hunting!
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Have you ever priced buying one of the little drives in an ipod or ipod mini individually? The primary reason that competitors can claim similar features cheaper is that their players are a bit larger, thus able to use cheaper hard drives. The smaller form factor of the ipod and the hard drive inside does add value. If you don't value the slightly smaller size, thats a perfectly valid opinion, but some people do value it, and the smaller drives are legitimately more expensive than larger ones with the same capacity.
Most of Apples competitors have only been able to compete in form OR function OR price, or 2 of those factors, never all 3. That indicates that the iPods aren't as inflated in price as you think, or with all the competition out there, they wouldn't be so hard to improve on. Apple does have a higher markup than some companies, but if they knocked $100 off the entry level iPod, I doubt they'd be making any net profit, and they are not a charity. The markup is not that dramatic.
No one will argue that iPods aren't expensive, but to say they are overpriced is certainly up for debate. In fact, I remember an old slashdot story talking about this very issue and pointed to an article on arstechnica. Found the article here.
Little Bricklets
That statement borders on blatant trolling! However, since I have faith in your high moral caliber and good intentions, I'll assume what you meant to say was "Dell laptops have higher rates of failure (or lower MTBF) than powerbooks, and here are the statistics to back it up. You can clearly see that the dramatic difference in failure rates justifies the 2x price difference (or some portion thereof, the rest being accounted for by superior features, etc).". That would be a convincing argument. Unfortunately, I've yet to see it phrased that way. Moreover, if your Dell laptop does happen to fail in a week, there is this thing called warranty, which I hear Dell is pretty good about.
And as for their music player, it's rediculous. They make you pay extra for "enhanced" (i.e. non-crippled) software, and I'm sure the hardware isn't as good as Apple's.I'm not going to deny that Dell's music player isn't the best. In fact, the iPod is much better, but I would make that choice based on the individual products involved (ie. the iPod, vs. the Dell player), not based on the companies' track records at making some other product (although you could argue that inability to make good laptops is correlated with inability to make good portable mp3 players ... but to that I say that just because a company makes better laptops doesn't mean it will make good mp3 players either). Similarly, when the MS player comes out, I'll judge it against the iPod based on the characteristics of those two specific gadgets - not the quality of Windows against Mac OS, nor the quality of MS mice over Apple mice, or some other equally irrelevant benchmark.
For instance, read any review of MP3 players and you'll find that Apple's sound output hardware (DA converters, amp, etc.) is the best.I would dispute this. The iPod hardware has nothing over, say, the hardware used by the Creative Jukeboxen (except, maybe, size, which is a separate category to sound quality when comparing mp3 players). The Jukebox produces sound that is no less clean and vibrant, and also supports things like 4 channel output and a whole heap of EAX post-processing (a small fraction of which, believe it or not, is actually useful!! I know, I had a hard time believing it too.). Not only have I read reviews that say this, but I've compared the sound from an iPod and a Jukebox too. Even if the iPod hardware is better by some absolute measurement of fidelity, it is not a difference 99.8% of the population would pick up in a blind listening test.
But you can't really market that.You're saying that in a device the purpose of which is to play music, you can't market the quality of the sound that comes out? If it's not marketable, why do the very reviews you speak of mention it? Tell you what, just send me some of whatever you're smoking and we'll call it even.
Microsoft's business practices (and OS) make me want to blow up their headquarters on a daily basis. I'm sure others agree with meWhat a concise summary of the rest of your post!
"Why are you watching the washing machine?"
"I love entertainment, as long as it's clean"
The Karma's a whopping 1.1 inches thick to the iPod's 0.62. It also appears to have been designed by someone with a terrible hangover from the late '90s.
After that, everything else is just quibbling. Still, I should point out that you neglected to mention the iPod's new lossless codec.
You forgot a few things on the iPod:
Width: 0.62"
Interfaces: FireWire 400 AND USB2
Extras also include Smart Playlists and auto playlist syncing.
Also, an interface that doesn't suck the balls.
- oZ
// i am here.