Slashdot Mirror
Inside Hardware Design - Competing Against the iPod
ihatewinXP writes "FastCompany.com has a behind the scenes article detailing Rio's (and others) attempts to differentiate hardware and compete in the digital music market against the iPod juggernaught. From the article: "We decided that we had to be radically different from Apple. Where Apple was sort of the ivory tower, we were going to be the dark rebel. Where Apple was very geometric, we were going to be smooth and curvy. Apple was so enamored with absolute pure, minimalist design that some designers may argue that ergonomics were compromised.""
You'll know they've got it wrong when...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The iPod is so popular in part because it is a simple, no-frills solution. For most people, the world of players is confusing, riddled with complex features that they don't understand or need. Apple realized this, simpified the approach, and people love it. They then went on to simplify the whole music acquisition process. iTMS is so good that it competes with illegal downloads.
It may not be very geeky, but it's this kind of clarity that the vast majority of novice computer users appreciate. Customization is something experience and confident users will do, and the simple truth is that the vast majority of modern computer users never reach that level of confidence and knowledge.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Actually, I've used other players alot because friends think I'm stupid for having spent so much on my iPod; that is, until they use the iPod next to their player. I think the best example is the Creative Zen Micro. I cannot figure out how to use the darn thing. It's got touch-sensitive controls, but the buttons don't click- it's like tapping a mouse pad, which I never did to begin with. There's some good features with the zen (a removable batter cover would be nice on a ipod, but would screw up the whole "look" of the player) but the usability makes it just plain unfun. Most of the other players remind of me of this. The click wheel is *the big feature* of the iPod. It's a great interface for scrolling through long lists, and it's so easy to use that ANYBODY (and I mean anybody - my grandfather included) can just pick up an iPod and get down. That's user-friendly, and that's Apple. Until somebody else comes up with a better idea (and so far, no luck), the iPod is going to continue its dominance.
James
Tranlsation:
The engineers at Sony would love to make a good open product. However, we keep getting slapped around like a red-headed stepchild by the lawyers and the content (Movies/Music) division of the company. As a result we'll keep throwing out sucky DRM'ed products that never take off because of that. But, we'll keep doing it. No matter how much it hurts us.
The Sony guy blabbing on about their customer focus and listening to the customer and all that shit, when the main reason they didn't have a competitive player 5 years ago is that they insisted that everything had to be stored in that same crap format they used in the minidisc player. What was it called? Atrac or something like that? And when they did bring out a player, they called it an MP3 player but what it really was was a player that played their proprietary format, and software that converted MP3s to their format.
That's really customer focused. Boy oh boy. I can hear the teeming millions saying "what I want from an MP3 player more than anything else is the inability to play MP3s".
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Every one of the interview subjects sounded like a mouthful of sour grapes. Why is it so hard to admit that you got your ass kicked, and are noew attempting to do something to come back?
Every single one of them had some dig at the iPod, and then a marketing spiel about their own POS product that's in the clearance bin at Sam's. Tell us something NEW and we'll consider your product.
interesting.
The person at Sony said what customers really want is choice. Actually, most customers don't want choice, or at least they don't want to begiven choices that just get in their way.
What most customers really want is something that will do the job and get out of the way. For most the journey is not destination.
Steve Jobs understands this. Most Linux sellers don't.
They both provide an OS (or an iPod) and while the former says "Here is OS X and Aqua and iTunes and you can hook it up to your iPod and stuff and it just works." the later say "Look at all the configurations you can run this under, you have a __choice!__. But of course that implies you are smart and knowledgeable enough to make a choice."
At which point most people run screaming for an exit because they want anything but choice.
They just to do something and not be bothered with all the geeky stuff. They want to know nothing about how it works under the skin. They just want to enjoy it.
Apple is able to 'get away with "foisting their decisions on the world"' because they select components that do their work and then 'hide'.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Apple was so enamored with absolute pure, minimalist design that some designers may argue that ergonomics were compromised.
How in the world can anyone claim this?
I can perform the following actions with one hand holding the iPod and my thumb controlling it:
And that's compromising ergonomics? The iPod probably makes the fewest ergonomic assumptions than any other product I own/have owned.
Well, alright, it assumes you are a homo sapien with at least one opposable thumb on one hand. But even with that assumption anyone belonging to the homo genus can use the iPod.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
apple is stylish because typically artists want them and make decisions not on specifications and performance to cost ratios alone but if it looks pretty in their "space".
Bullshit. I mean sure, Apple makes some sales because clueless people with too much money think the look "cool" but that is by no means their main market. You think Linus Torvalds bought a powerbook because he is so artistic and wanted a computer that looked cool and was ignorant about how poorly it performed? You think the dozens of security professionals I work with daily bought macs because they are ignorant of the specifications and cost/performance ratios? Hell no. They bought them because they work better for the task at hand. Raw cpu cycles are by no means the best judge of how suited a computer is to a task. If I want to play Half-life I'm not going to use a cluster of PPC processors even though they provide more bang for the buck because first, they can't run the software and second, I don't need that much CPU power to play a stupid game.
Similarly, many people buy macs because they run OS X, which is the best environment for what they want to do. These people might be artists, or writers, or security professionals, or geneticists, but macs allow them to get their job done better than and other machine available. The number of artists who run macs because they are ignorant is probably a handful compared to the number who run it because the system works better for working with graphics because of the tools available, the better multithreading, the prioritization of input which means when you're painting a line the OS won't suddenly hog the processor and stop recording mouse input for half a second, the color support is much better, and because most artistic software is written for macs with Windows as a buggy afterthought.
Your condescension towards those poor ignorant artists is really annoying and your ignorance about using computers as a professional artist is glaringly obvious.
WMA vs. MP3 isn't a tech thing. It's a what sounds better at what rate thing. You can encode everything you own at 320bit MP3 and be happy as a clam. Its when you start collecting a huge collection that size/quality becomes an issue. Some people can live with 128 Mp3s. Some settle for 192Mp3s. WMA files might give you the same perceived quality of 192MP3s but at 160bits, and a smaller file size.
Ogg is a good compressor. Don't get me wrong. But the consumer doesn't care. They will go with whatever sounds good.
For me, a Musician, with a huge library, I encode all my CDs to iTunes using 160AAC. For Jazz music, which is my love, I can't really hear any difference between 160AAC and CD. If I did the same for 160MP3, I can hear problems. Cymbals don't ring right, etc.
As for the DRM non-sense. That only applies to music that you purchase online. If you own the CD, you can rip it to whatever you want. AAC doesn't have DRM in it. The stuff from Apple's iTunes store does, a protected AAC.
I think it's a moot point in supporting Ogg. It's kind of like, to me, supporting the old Archive format ZOO. Yeah, ZOO had a lot of interesting things, and it compressed well, but, it went nowhere.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Linux users are the computing equivalent of car enthusiasts. They want the spoiler, the tricked out stereo, the racing stypes, the hand-tuned carburator (sp), the custom muffler, the racing tires, the bling rims, etc, etc, etc - car enthusiasts crack open a parts catalogue and drool.
Most people only give a shit about their vehicle when it breaks. Most people want to just turn the key and GO. They don't want to have to worry about engine timing or oil pressure or RPMs or torque or rather their car parts are metric or imperial because absolutely NONE of this has ANYTHING to do with running down to the store to get groceries.
The failing of linux is that you've got a bunch of hotrod enthusiasts trying to sell The Last Of The V8 Interceptors to people who really just want a commuter coupe - and these hotrodders just can't see that the rest of the world gets absolutely NO pleasure from fucking with things that should Just Work Already.