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The Future of the iPod
sebFlyte writes "Those of you waiting for a video iPod, an iPod with a radio in, an iPod with Bluetooth in...or in fact an iPod that does anything except play music and have a pretty-but-basic interface, you're likely to be disappointed. According to silicon.com, Steve Jobs and the Apple crew insist that the iPod will remain simple for the time being." From the article: "Whether people want to buy a device just to watch video is not clear - so far the answer's been no. Devices that do video... have not been successful yet. No-one's figured out the right formula."
Gizmodo found a hidden video button in iTunes 5 and Mac Rumors discovered iPod's trademark expanded to include video support.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Remember the article about the libraries using OverDrive for Audiobooks, but incompatible with Apple's iTunes?
If Apple could negociate more compatibility, I think they could serioiusly gain some more marketshare.
Student Research and Development
Something tells me that the "right formula" for a video iPod involves pr0n.
You have no idea how tired I am of these crazy convergence devices that play mp3s, watch movies, take photos, check emails, play games, cellphone, organizer, calender, does GPS... but doesnt do any of them well!
iPods do one thing and do it very very well, and that's all i want it to do, play music.... oh, and view photos, and really that's even too much on the teeny screen.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Why is portable mini-video in demand at all? The iPod's greatest feature is how little attention it needs. I don't want it bogged down (bigger, worse battery life, more harassment from confused relatives) with more features.
The article notes that the market currently has decided video is unnecessary. I'm sure Apple has dozens of features ready to release IF their test markets rate those features as "amazing" not just "useful."
How about a device that 'does video' via tv-out, rather than on a tiny little lcd screen? It could even have tv-IN as well - a mobile tivo kinda thing. That'd be real useful.
:)
Now go ahead and post links to the already existing devices that do this, but that I am unaware of
I love the iPod, but won't buy one till they reach 100GB, the size of my music collection. I think iPod is going in the right direction right now, releasing too many new products at once seems to stun the market, and then you get those pople sitting around wiating for the latest and greatest. Subtle changes everys often is fine, but that would be a bit too major, just after the Nano replaced the mini.
ModLife.Net - If it ain't modded, what's the point?
Using my superior pattern recognition skills I've deduced that a iPod Pico will be forthcomming.
Syncing without plugging in cables would be appreciated. That's my prediction for the next incremental improvement in the full-sized iPod.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
The question is, whatever Apple plans to do, why would they say anything else after this latest ipod (nano) launch?
You don't cannibalize your business with promises of imminent future products with more capabilities.
I'll accept that they're not going to have all of those features, but c'mon? When are they going to make them small and portable?
Yes, I can see how adding an FM radio interface would cause nothing but confusion for everyone. Seriously, what's the big deal? Everyone else is doing it, why can't Apple?
Why would you publish an article on the front page of Slashdot that essentially says "There is nothing happening with ipods right now"? Doesn't it make more sense to say something when there IS something going on?
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
It seems to me that the device doesn't matter nearly so much as the content. When some company can figure out how to get consumers the content that they're looking for, then that company will be successful.
Apple did it with music, why not video? I'd put even money on them figuring it out.
"Chances of RHIC-induced Armageddon are exceedingly rare, but... you never know." - MIT Physicist Bob Jaffe
There are successful devices that play video. They include the PSP and the Gameboy. That's where Apple should be headed with the iPod.
"No-one's figured out the right formula"
Somebody has to be the first to innovate, right? Why doesn't Apple try to be first off the bus instead of waiting for someone to discover the perfect formula for mobile video?
Now when they come out with 3d imaging wireless contacts (accecories available in prescription too) then things are really gonna change!
Apple are sticking to a known formula and single function, which they've arguably perfected in the iPod. They've added photo support and the like over time, but the main focus of the device has always retained music. I think if consumer demands started switching toward video, we'd see a significantly different product (and name, most probably), it doesn't seem to be Apple's style to kludge increasing functionality into a single device.
Business Voyeur
Well, duh, of course video playback hasn't taken off. Because Apple hasn't done it yet.
Your average consumer (read: idiot) has no idea that videos could be played back on an iPod, so they don't think to ask for it. If they knew, I'm sure there plenty of demand.
That and pretty much every other manufacturer is doing it.
http://downloads.oreilly.com/make/ipodlinux.mov
Watching a movie on a 3" screen simply won't cut it for anyone. Except, maybe, on a plane or bus ride. Not for very long though. Maybe that's just me.
Unfortunately, due to the paradigm surrounding portability, smaller device = smaller viewing area for video.
Now, what I would like to see is a portable video projection unit the size of an iPod, or similar device. It would cast the video onto a wall, or other surface. It's very important that the device be able to stand on its own (using a stand of course). I don't think I'm alone in not wanting to support it like that.
Secondly, it needs to be able to interface with many different types of formats. There's no way I'm going to buy separate viewing files so I can watch something I've already bought on my PVP.
Finally, the device MAY include a speaker, however, it MUST include an interface for headphones, or external speakers, along with the ability to disable the internal speaker.
Do all this, and, they'll sell wonderfully.
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And even if they were going to, they wouldn't tell you anyways because that would devalue current their current stock of MP3 players. Theres your NaCl.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Right now, the iPod does its "one thing" very well: play music.
Adding radio would be bad for it since that would detract from Apple's goal to have the iTunes store be the center of all Internet audio traffic - whether that be music, books, podcasts, etc. Right now, they may not *host* all of those files - but they are the gatekeeper, and can use it as a sort of Long Tail approach: if they are the way to all online audio, and the only way out is through iTunes or the iPod, then they control the audio future.
As for the video side, the biggest issue is "how to do it right" which Mr. Jobs is right to ask. Video would be good for a minority of iPod users. Would I like to see it? Sure - but again, I'm probably in the minority who, while traveling, don't mind looking at a little screen (right now, I rip my DVD's to my PSP for the 4 hour plane flight - when I'm not reading or playing my DS, or, even more likely, trying to sleep).
Video will take some time, I think. They're building some options into the iTunes store now (movie trailers, music videos, and the like), but distribution is still an issue, even over bandwidth lines.
My own video dream would be a Tivo like device, where I could order movies or TV episodes I've missed (say, $1 an episode or $15 for the whole season). A device in the living room would either do it all for me through a Tivo like system and either store the movies in my local computer system, let me download them to the movie device and upload to my computer later, or burn them to DVD's. (You know - like the Tivo should, if the damn guys would update their OS X software to support 10.4.)
Until then, Apple's got a good thing going, and they don't want to muck it up. I'm sure they could have a video iPod out within 60 days just with some changes in the chipsets (I remember an Ars Techana issue over the kind of chips they use now, and how the new genereration of the same chipset supports video with better power options. For all we know, they're used in the iPod Nanos now, so a firmware/software upgrade would add basic video support).
Perhaps in time the iPod could be used with a special cradle that plugs into the TV so you can take your iMovie made shows over to other people's houses to show off the videos.
But for now, leave the iPod as it is - it does 90% of what I want it to do now, and the other 10% is so specialized I can supply that need myself.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
While I know many people seem to be resisting Bluetooth, syncing via WiFi is a little inefficient. Besides, almost all new laptops have BT anyway, and most new Macs (they all have the option).
goggles will be see through, and the user interface will be braille coded.
radio may be dead if you live in the middle of nowhere and get one pop station
but i live in midtown manhattan, so i get unbelievable listening choices over radio... everything from classical to jazz to country to bbc to classic rock to one station that plays reggaeton nonstop all day, would that ever appeal to me
and for such a listener as me, i chose the iRiver IFP-180T simply because it has a radio tuner, and would never buy an iPod, because i can't believe apple wouldn't devote the 50 cents it would cost to put a radio tuner in there
seriously, apple: do cost-benefit analysis of a radio tuner... how much does the circuitry cost? what kind of new listening choices do you receive in return?
seems like a no-brainer to me!
and please, enough with the "radio is dead" refrain: just because you can't get a good station in east bohunk arkansas doesn't mean that those who live in a major city should be denied the 50 cents of added circuitry... besides, you couldn't imagine that even in a rural area a radio tuner might be useful during say, a crisis or disaster when electric is hit?
and it's not even like radio is peripheral to the function of an iPod: listening to music!
if sony could figure that out with the walkman in 1980, why can't apple in 2005?
i seriously do not understand why radio isn't included... and every "in my rural area the local pop station sucks" argument against its inclusion is steamrolled by how little it costs to add the dang thing
radio is NOT dead
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
nm.
I wonder if no one is buying handhelds with video (aside from the PSP) because they are waiting for Apple to do it with the iPod?
The iPod may work for movies/videos but cell phones connectivity is more suited for news/information.
ZZ
The coolest thing about the ipods with photo capabilities are that they have video out and let you do slideshows from your ipod to your TV. I have no interest in browsing photos on my ipod, but being able to show photos from a recent trip so easily is awesome.
...
Now you see iTunes with video podcast support. How far behind are movie/TV show sales?
The video ipod's draw won't be so much in watching videos on the tiny little screen, but in sending them out to your TV.
Hmmm, Quicktime now does HD decoding, ergo iTunes does HD decoding. How hard will it be to put those algos in a video ipod? How cheaply (and efficiently, size-wise) can Apple fit an HD video decoder into an ipod?
Kind of the idea that Mark Cuban was touting recently -- what's the distribution method of the future for movies? He says, hard drives. Well, Apple just so happens to sell lots of hard drives... with nice white interfaces wrapped around them. And they've got the most popular, legal media distribution store on the planet.
C'mon folks, 2+2 =
P.S. I had to post this through an anonymizing service, because Slashdot's fucked moderation system has deemed me a troll. This is based on a couple downmods received, versus how many +3, +4, +5 posts I've had in the past few weeks? Is there any logic to their system at all? I have Excellent karma and a huge track record of non-troll behavior. Another reason I've stopped subscribing to this place.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
re:"Devices that do video... have not been successful yet"
Never mind that PSP behind the curtain. Nothing to see from Sony, total flop - PSP? What PSP? They suck, it'll never sell. Nobody wants to see movies on the PSP. People can't buy anything anyway.
Hey listen to me - I'm all knowing Steve Jobs - wagga-wagga, mumbo-jumbo, boogaligi-boo! Wooooo - reality distortion field wooooo! Wayne's World - Doo-dee-la-do, Doo-dee-la-do, Doo-dee-la-do....
I'm getting my PSP next month when Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories comes out. Proably get a puzzler game, and either Tron or Evil Dead. I like the idea of movies in my pocket rather than an over-heating laptop cooking my testicles into sterility so I can get my DVD-fix.
Thanks for the denial Jobs, we return you back to our regularly scheduled reality - already in progress.
I'll tell you why there will never be a video iPod:
No one wants to sit there and hold an iPod up so they can watch a video. Think about it, whenever we watch video, the source is something like a computer monitor or a TV screen -- stationary things.
Now imagine trying to hold up and be able to view it comfortably for any period longer than five minutes. It would just get tiring. Who wants to hold an iPod to their face for two hours?
-Eric Smith
Video iPod, radio iPod, bluetooth iPod...
How about an iPod that just plays my music? Like one that can play FLAC and Vorbis files.
I suspect Apple will NOT be the first to support video or figure out the best way to sale and market video. I believe it will be on the PC/Microsoft side, as they already have a DRM system in place and there are already major PPV first run movies available via Movielink and CinemaNow.com that are in WMV format. All they haft to do is tweak the license to allow export. Apple may suprise, but it's doubted. Bluetooth iPod is a laugh. It should be Wifi A/G iPod, as it can handle the bandwidth fairly well. Also, the Rokr, in my opinion is less then decent, but I guess it was a toe dip for Apple in that market. I'd go with a the Windows Smartphones that can even support subscription content via WMP 10. I did own an iPod but gave it away until Apple learns to PlayFair with FairPlay. Apple, though little, is monopolizing their DRM scheme. You all can take that to the bank and cash that statement.
802.11 protocols (11b, 11g, 11a) all consume too much power: you would suck the battery dry in no time. Of course, if you had the external power cable connected, then the battery wouldn't drain. But once you've connected the external power, you are probably using a powered USB2 or Firewire cable, in which case you're also connected to your computer.
ergo, wifi ain't practical at this point. The good news is that chip manufacturers such as Intel and Broadcom are making WIFI mac and phy chips smaller, cheaper, and more power-thrifty every calendar quarter. There might be something really cool next year.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
The post may well be right, but the industry track record is such that I look at control items already wired in the user interface with a certain amount of skepticism.
A lot of these decisions aren't final until hours or minutes before announcement. I always wanted to peep in Phil Schiller's e-mail the last couple of days before a show. Sooner or later he's going to show up in a neck brace from demo-day whiplash.
Free Adam Smith! (Or best offer.)
Bring back the Newton, Steve!
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Could this be related to the discussion about decreasing quality of content to watch and the countless efforts of the movie / entertainment industry to make it impossible to play media you bought (at very arguable prices) on the device of your choice?
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
Video devices get used to watch prOn, and when that happens SIZE MATTERS!
Yet.
But when WE do it, it'll be the right way."Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
just for the fun of it, i converted a full length feature into a 3GP file (just under 50mb) and uploaded it into my Motorola V635i.
I don't know if the battery would last the whole movie, and I'm not sure I'd watch a full length feature on such a small screen, but I gotta admit that video playback is a fun toy to play with.
I think Apple should add video capability to an iPod, just cuz they probably can and it wouldnt be complicated. Plus Quicktime plays 3GP as well.
Devices that do video... have not been successful yet. No-one's figured out the right formula.
There's a lot of good reasons why this hasn't taken off. While Apple might be able to get a nicer than average player, they will have a few snags:
1) The existence of MP3 players was preceeded by a number of people having collections of digital music and a need for a way to play them.
2) It's relatively trivial to rip a CD. It's not exactly legal to rip a DVD, and downloadable video is till in it's infancy and has all kinds of DRM issues.
3) In a person's average day, how often do they have an opportunity to watch video on a portable device where there's no better means to do it. That is, in most situations, I could play video on my TV, my desktop, or my laptop with superior quality and no noticeable sacrifice of convenience.
Have you ever tried to put a DVD on your computer. Beyond the fact, that you're violating the DMCA, it takes hours to pull the data off the DVD and then re-encode it in a compressed format. You'd better have a good reason to go through that hassle, and frankly most people don't.
Now if video was built into a device that you already had, it might make sense. But I just don't see any good reason to buy a portable video device for it's own sake.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Right formula = DRM the MPAA will accept?
If you're reading this, stop it.
iCam, the very portable and beautiful camcorder. It's small, feels great and has the most intuitive user interface ever. Everyone from geeks to grandmas use it and love it.
Heck, they won't even sell so called "explicit" podcasts... what a bunch of prudes. I mean if I want to listen to some huffing and puffing on my own private headphones, why shouldn't they turn a buck off it?
IIRC there wasn't any big rush from the masses for portable mp3 players until the iPod came along...I guess that figured out the formula for *that*, so why not iVideo with a pretty white shell as the formula?
What made the iPod so successful? 1) Integration, 2) Ease of use, 3) Design purity.
So let's apply that to the mythical video iPod.
1) Integration - Nearly there. A couple more generations of storage mediums and digital transfer interfaces will get us the required storage and speed.
2) Ease of use. Quite a bit is needed here. There isn't even a clear idea on how people want to enjoy movies. One at a time? Snipits? (unknown). What about enjoying them while doing something else, like background music? Is that possible? One thing I would hope for is special goggles that go with it that present a large videoscape in front of you and have the audio cues necessary for multichannel sound. Both of those are possible today. Not in enough resolution yet.
3 Design Purity. I am pretty confident that Apple could come up with a good hardware design that would appeal to large numbers of people.
See? Not that hard. Just need to wait a few years.
-FlynnMP3
iPorn has a nice ring to it. Shit, did I say ring? I mean sound!!
I have an Archos Gmini400 (now updated to Gmini402) which does music, photo, video and games for the same size and weight of an iPod (at this time, the iPod Photo was still unknown...). I have to admit the UI is far from perfect and that the games suck as phones' games. But, seriously the rest is cool. And the AVout to show pictures or movies is perfect when I travel and want to show my far-away home to the family.
You may want to check the other products from Archos like the AV500 which can record your TV signal, or the AV700, for its big wide screen.
In a person's average day, how often do they have an opportunity to watch video on a portable device where there's no better means to do it.
PSP advocates have mentioned car (as passenger), train, bus, plane, waiting for appointment with health care professional, etc.
I could play video on my TV, my desktop, or my laptop with superior quality and no noticeable sacrifice of convenience.
Laptops are much bigger than even the portable DVD players that the PSP advocates love to deride as too large.
Plus, why make a radio fit in when you can get a perectly good portable radio for a tenner?
Man, GPS is something I wish Apple WOULD do, since no other vendors have a solution. Not one single vendor has a software that runs on OSX which will let you load maps into a consumer GPS device. I've e-mailed Magellan and Garmin and they both pretty much said "use windows." Ridiculous. I would really love to see a GPS with Apple quality integration...
:)
Digression aside, I do agree with you. I'm glad the iPod is a music device. That's all I want, music from my personal collection. No radio, no video. And that's what I have.
They need to start supporting ogg at the very least.
Using iTunes software (with the QuickTime Vorbis component) to transcode to .m4a won't add too much noise. Generation loss from lossy audio codecs becomes noticeable only after multiple generations, especially in a noisy environment such as outdoors or in a motor vehicle.
I run.... far.
:)
Music, no matter how much I can fit on it, gets repetitive. I want to be able to access local radio, AM and FM. Especially things like NPR and talk radio that is new every day. Long runs go by quick when you have something engaging to listen too.
I was dicussing why they dont do radio yet, and I guess they'd rather force you to podcast it than just allow it real time.
I'm not convinced this is bad, as i think the tivo is cool too... but i have a gallery of stations and programs I listen too now, and i dont want to wait to listen to them later (IF) they podcast.
For that reason ilook at other MP3 players right now.
For the time being, i use a am/fm radio. I'm so 1970's
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
"Devices that do video... have not been successful yet. No-one's figured out the right formula." ...that Apple was the pinnacle of innovation. Are you trying to tell me that the innovative geniuses at Apple can't come up with the video player that everyone will want?
The iPod rules the gym. No doubt. Being the gadget geek that I am I notice what people are using, and a lot have iPods. But I need a radio simply because my gym and many others use FM to distribute the audio from the TVs. I love watching TV with my cardio, so I am using an iRiver flash unit. I will still own an iPod, but if Jobs gave me an iPod with a radio I'd buy it even if it didn't add capacity just to use it at the gym.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
If you're going to connect it to a TV, you're going to have a coaxial, component or s-video dongle, and if you're going to have that apparatus plugged in you might as well plug in power while you're at it since video hardware sucks power like mad, and if you're carrying that stuff around then it's probably not too much to carry a 12" laptop.
Of course there are all the other solutions people offered... Never heard of any of them? Yeah, that's what Steve Jobs is saying. Real big market there...
There isn't a good formula because the screen size/device size curves don't intersect. Compromising screen size for device size will make the screen too small. Make the screen big enough, and the device becomes too big to be portable (think portable DVD players). Either way, a large chunk of people won't buy it. It won't be until this can play motion pictures that this problem will be worked out. By then, the iPod would have gone the way of the dinosaur in favor of Apple's newest MP3 player.
Then, there are the codecs. Knowing Apple, it'll probably be MPEG2 and Quicktime for MPEG4. I have doubts on the inclusion of Xvid, or any MPEG4 codec other than the latest Quicktime for that matter. None of them have really been popular enough as encoders (you don't see people ripping their DVD collections to Xvid the way they do their audio CD's), partly because they're annoyingly complicated to use correctly.
Finally, the question remains as to how useful a portable movie player would be. Unlike music, movies require active attention. That means the movie feature would only be of any use when people have nothing else they can do. Train/plane rides, road trips (for everyone except the driver), while waiting in line, etc. Not very useful at all, especially compared to when people can listen to music passively, which basically means whenever, where ever.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Webbrowser/RSS feedreader, Voiceover on speed, and an MP3 encoder. Boom. Instant podcast from any news site.
. . . and view photos, and be an alarm clock, and play games, and store contacts, and store calanders, and store notes, and record voice memos, and be a removeable hard drive, and run linux, and could you imagine a beowulf cluster?!?!?
Oh yea, it plays music, too.
There will be a video iPod by the end of 2006.
So I have a portable mp3/video device - the iRiver H340. I agree that watching movies on a small screen is not practical, but as already mentioned, music videos are reasonable. It's perfect for plane flights, except when the smelly guy next to me is hanging all over my seat.
I'm not sure where videos fall in the whole DRM thing. I don't think they flash a disclaimer on MTV stating copyrights. Least I haven't seen one.
...is a device that lets me DELETE songs :(
Even with Lossless codecs 100gb is a lot of music.
Compact Disc Digital Audio has been out for about 20 years, or roughly 1043 weeks. Buy one CD every three weeks (say through one of those music clubs) and you have 347 CDs. Given that each CD is about 0.3 GB when encoded using Shorten, FLAC, or similar codecs, you're up to 104 GB.
That said, you could transcode to 192 kbps AAC or something else that's totally transparent in a noisy (outdoor or motor-vehicle) playing environment when copying songs to your portable player.
MacGPSPro
Reality has a liberal bias
Portable devices have tiny screens. I like to watch movies on big screens. So why would I buy a portable video player? There's nothing more horrible than spoiling a good movie by watching it on a tiny airliner screen embedded in the back of someone's seat. I don't see why a video iPod would be any better. Maybe a portable device that projects onto a big screen would be cool. Except it wouldn't be cool, if it generated enough lumens it'd be so hot it'd burn its way through the table.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
(Separate reply for a separate issue.)
What song do you have the most versions of and what are the differences?
That would probably be "Korobeiniki", a famous Russian folk tune used in the game Tetris for Game Boy. Because it's been out of copyright for probably over a century, it's been covered dozens of times by different artists. Yarr.
Other than pornography from the golden age, the only thing I'd really enjoy video-wise on an Ipod would be-- drumroll-- NETWORK TELEVISION. I'd love to subscribe to TV shows from apple's webpage and have them on the iPod. Most people get some sort of break during the day-- now imagine instead of leafing through that three-week-old People Mag with the crossword puzzle already solved in the breakroom you could watch last night's sitcom or drama on your iPod? It'd work great. And it wouldn't be a movie so you wouldn't keep comparing to the large screen... you're going to delete it when done, anyway. I'll hang up and listen to your answer off the air, thank you.
Am I the only one that read this as "No one has created the market so that we can come in and steal it with our massive marketing power"?
I want a device where it's really simple and quick to update it with what I want to have on it for the next few days or a week.
How do you know what songs you are going to want to play over the next week? Some people are more spur-of-the-moment about their song choices.
In just the same way that there were various 3rd party dock appliances for the dockable iPods (external speakers etc.) I'm going to suggested that keeping the iPod nano simple, and small, will enable other dockable hardware to be produced to add the functionality that people seem to be asking for.
eg. Video - Create a module which has a larger colour screen, but when combined with the IPod nano has a similar size of the original IPod.
Bluetooth expansion - can be used as a 'store' for photos captured by a camera or phone.
Adding radio would be bad for it since that would detract from Apple's goal to have the iTunes store be the center of all Internet audio traffic - whether that be music, books, podcasts, etc.
Speaking of traffic, can you get road traffic reports or severe weather alerts on podcasts? You can on commercial radio. Remember that a lot of radio is still live, and without Verizon Wireless Broadband Access or the like, live Internet audio is not mobile.
1. iTunes has a "hidden" component for handling video. 2. The Sony PSP can connect to and use a local network. 3. About a year ago, Jobs talked about Apple & Sony working together on the future of video. The Sony PSP as the "video iPod"? How big of a stretch would it be to load video from a computer running iTunes to a memory stick in a PSP if the capability was more obvious? My PSP will play content from QT 7 and AAC files, but I haven't moved anything to it wirelessly yet. Sony released a ceramic-white PSP in Japan about a week ago. It won't play UMD movies from Region 1, but if you need an idea about how a "video iPod" with a decent screen would look like, you could do worse. If it was an Apple-branded build with no UMD drive & replaced it with a 20G hard drive, I'd consider buying one. http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000997051360/ Just saying, is all...
1. Add video capability to iPod.
2. Engage the Reality Distortion Field.
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Mine's got a standard S-video out. It plays regular DVDs, has a big enough hard drive to store a lot of video, and the screen is actually big enough to comfortably watch a movie or TV show, plus it supports HD resolutions. I can even set up the S-Video out as a secondary monitor and watch a movie or TV off of it while I work. As far as I'm concerned, it's the ideal portable video device, and that was a significant motivator for me buying it.
I don't see any need for it to be smaller. For any place that I actually want to watch video, a laptop will fit just fine.
The Shuffle doesn't have a color screen, though of course it doesn't have a B&W screen either. If your music already doesn't fit on your iPod, you'll need a GUI on your PC anyway. So use iTunes....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There are lots of good alternatives to the iPod. I picked up an iPaq 1945 and it does everything I would want a PC in my pocket to do!
;)
* mp3 player using an open source player. I've mapped it's startup to a hardware key that also allows me to turn off the screen and lock the buttons while it's playing. This particular player also allows me to change the skin so I even installed an iPOD skin just so I could mock the sheep who all bought one. And it supports shoutcast streams as well.
* A decent video player. I can shrink DVD movies down so that 2 fit on a 256 MB SD - CARD. DiVX support isn't there yet but that's just a matter of time. I can play WMV, RealPlayer, AVI, MPEG 1 and 2 which covers the better part of my collection.
* internet connectivity - all I need is a WiFi connection or with bluetooth I can use a GPRS phone and connect via dialup to the net. From there I can read email, surf and even listen to shoutcast streams.
* above all that I also have some cool RTS and arcade shooters, word and excel, GPS if I wanted it, camera if I wanted it and my appointment and contact book.
All that for $200 CDN! Not to shabby! And best yet, if I want to write an app for it, the tools to write stuff for it are FREE!
And you can even install Linux on it...
Maybe they'll do music videos soon. When you buy an album, they could bundle an (optional) music video that goes into the "Music Videos" tab on itunes, and opens in Quicktime.
Then I guess you could have a Music Videos menu on your ipod if you want to watch them on the go. They could be re-encoded to the fit the ipods small screen and thereby use less space, but I imagine that would take too long to do everytime one syncs their ipod. Unless they have some fancy pants codec that allows you to strip information fast and efficiently.
Being Apple, they'll wait until they can do it "right" before doing it. So we might be waiting a while to see that feature.
I'd like to take a second to address everyone who's pointed out that "the iPod does one thing really well."
Granted, most "divergent" devices try to do everything and fail at all things. But they never even had one thing perfect in the first place.
Why do people conclude that by asking the iPod to do more, it would cease to do its one thing less well?
That said, a video iPod would be totally stupid, and I have no idea what the folks clamoring for one are thinking.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
With Samsung just coming out with their 16 GB flash drives would it be crazy to think a 64 GB Nano would be far off?
Yes, radio and TV are much different experiences. If I want to watch TV, I want a screen that I can actually see; those little handheld 2" screen PCs don't do anything for me. It's too small to see a baseball or a hockey puck or read news-channel-scrolling-text, and talking heads look almost as good on radio as on small TV (some of them look a lot better on radio...) There's a fairly small set of programs that look much better on small TVs than on radio unless they're formatted for it (which podcasts could be, admittedly, while broadcast TV won't be.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yeah, I know, you were primarily trying to joke about the name (and there's also the potential for an iPod Mega or an iPod Giga, which could also be a name for the Shuffle as opposed to a big machine...)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Who said that simplicity sacrificed features? iPod is intuitive; it always has been. If there were an iVid, it'd be intuitive. It would still play music and videos and whatever else. That said, iVids would be a mistake; existing devices like it are a small niche. Radio would be nice, but would it be worth it? Bluetooth 2 would be very nice. I'd love to sync my iPod with my computer wirelessly as well as broadcast music. All in all, I love my iPod, and it loves me.
The Apple 2 was the only one of these which was fully documented - it came with full schematics and Apple encouraged development using the expansion slots (bus). Apple even provided a source code listing of the monitor ROM (BIOS). It was also the only one of the three which was easily upgradable in memory (just add/change memory chips) and the only one to support color and bit mapped graphics. It was the first to offer a reasonably priced floppy disk drive and to take advantage of a switching power supply. The very first "killer app," Visicalc, was introduced first for the Apple 2.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
everyone knows it.
One of the followup posts compares Bluetooth speed to USB1.1 - it's actually 721kbps throughput, so it's really much more like Appletalk (aka Localtalk) or typical IR than like USB. Maybe Bluetooth version N+1 will be better. Zigbee is another low-speed-low-power radio solution, and it's got similar speed limits. Perhaps one of the UWB standards can deal with it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
iRiver has not nearly the immense popularity that iPod possesses, but they have made a successful mp3 player that has an FM tuner, a picture viewer, a video player, and a browser to organize files inside of it. (However, this is exclusive only to Korean iRiver h320-340's. US firmware versions does not support the browser or video features; you must upgrade to a Korean firmware to enable this. Doing so will of course void the warranty)
:P
http://iriveramerica.com/ Look for the iRiver audio jukebox models.
I say that if iRiver greatly enhances the features already present in their mp3 player, and with the right advertising choices, it can become a great competitior with the iPods. Also, adding in lossless music codecs (FLAC perhaps?) would make it flawless.
People who strive only for ease of use and trendy looks, however, will continue to purchase iPod products. It is true that lots of people aren't quite as geeky as others. Geekiness did play a factor when I bought my iRiver
I heard there is a thing named MP3, which can dramatically reduce the size of your music files on computer.
"Except that-- on our directory-- you know, we're not-- we're not allowing any pornography."
I'm not saying that you can't find some rauchy/titilating stuff on the site, but woe unto you if Stevie J finds it.
Quote Source: ABC News via BoingBoing.
Actually, it doesn't even do that all that well. The iPods (except for the shuffles) are somewhat infamous for having the worst audio quality of any mainstream mp3 player. You'd think that a company with so much experience in audio products could finally solve the problems after being well known for the past 4 hardware revisions. These aren't subtle "audiophile-only" issues either... they are pretty obvious to anyone.
Known audio flaws...
1) All iPods: distortion/crackling when using any EQ settings. Wouldn't be so bad, except the bass rolloff problem means you pretty much need EQ to get good bass. Other mp3 players with the same CPU as the iPod don't have this problem, so its either in the software or the analog audio circuitry. Only workaround is to turn off EQ and live with flat sound.
2) Color iPods: All of the iPods with tv-out have a serious buzzing/ringing distortion problem when using headphones with impedance of less than 32 Ohm (including Apple's in-ear phones). It can most easily be heard in piano solos, but exists in all music. There is NO way Apple could have missed this in testing, since it happens even with their own headphones! It is believed that the problem is due to bad grounding in the new 4-contact headphone jack which is needed to support tv-out. Headphones with impedance over 32Ohm (mostly large "can" types) mask the problem, but since they are less efficient, you have to crank up the volume on the iPod, which increases hiss and distortion.
(not to mention all of the software bugs such as magically disappearing playlists, songs, and album art; the lack of serious on-the-go playlist editing capabilities that most other mp3 players have; the recent firmware update that killed smart playlist auto-updating without syncing first; and the iTunes 5 bugs that erased many people's collections and make their PCs unstable)
Ironically, the shuffles are the only iPods with decent sound quality, because they use a 3rd-party integrated chip with no Apple customizations. I sincerely hope Apple gets tough on these issues when they design their next generation hardware, but based on their continuing to ignore these problems after many hardware and software updates, I have the feeling they just don't care. I certainly won't be buying any of the current iPods until Apple opens up and gets these issues fixed.
(I expect to get modded troll for this...)
Not all of us listen to 98 Degrees and other crap on the radio. I agree with you- that stuff is crap.
B/C Apple would rather you buy music from their store to fill up your iPod, rather than listen to the radio.
A bit of "Apple doesn't offer it, so I don't want it." Why's a radio so tough? Flip a music/radio switch, the Next Song button become Next Station. Not a difficult interface. And why would *I* want iTunes to be the Gatekeeper of all my entertainment? As for video... well, yeah, I'd love to watch Lord of the Rings on a 1 inch square screen. :)
I personal enjoy watching anime on my PSP. I take a lot of buses and the PSP is the right size to fix in my purse and get it in and out ok. Plus it saves taking to some of the crazy old ladies. (Some times they even watch with me! *weird but true*)
I thought when I got my PSP I'd spent alot of gaming but really I use it as a portable tv and a small web browser when we're in a hurry but need a map of where we're going. As the PSP doesn't refresh we walk out the door and no worries about did I copy the map right or whats on the back of the paper I used to print it.
Having said all that I have a 4th Gen B&W iPod with alot of audio books on it and some music. It plays music and Audi books well but give the fact I have a hard time with that SUPER bright/battary killer or too dark to see in indoor lighting screen. I really think that iPod should stick to what it was designed to do. Play songs. It very good at it, lets not mess with the design to make it more complexe then it needs to be. (We have OS to do that *lol*)
Life is like untied shoe laces; it always tripping you up and getting in your way.
I don't want to watch video on my iPod. When I'm using my iPod, I need to watch where I'm going.
OTOH, I spend at least half of my music-listenting-time on music streamed from my desktop to my stereo via Airport Express. If I could subscribe to TV series and/or movies via iTunes and play them the same way on my (HD)TV, it would blow away my DVRs and DVD rentals. I wouldn't even care (much) if I was prevented from saving them permanently.
I'm not sure 802.11g is up to the bandwidth challenge, or that an HD-capable device on the scale of Airport Express is possible today, but that's what I'm waiting for...
http://www.chimoosoft.com/gpsconnect.html
http://www.macgpspro.com/
http://www.gpsnavx.com/
http://www.gm4jjj.co.uk/z3801/z3801.htm
http://www.truenav.com/
http://www.gpsy.com/
Right now, the iPod does its "one thing" very well: play music.
;-)
And play variable-speed audiobooks. And display photo slideshows. And display electronic calendars. And store contacts. And function as an alarm clock. And play solitaire. And store to-do lists and memos.
It doesn't do email yet, but I'm sure that's coming in the next firmware update.
This boils down to just a few simple matters...
1. Video codecs are ever changing and there is no real standard for encoded video. Anyone who has downloaded videos knows that the different groups use different encodings, often, and that sometimes these encoding do weird things. This goes more so for older downloads of the show that is several years old, because most the encoding schemes that groups use have changed in that span. I am sure a good many people remember when VCD and the whole MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 were still big.
2. Space becomes an issue with video. You are no longer getting thousands of programs, typically, with 20 GB drives. In most good encodings today your average 30 min show is 175 MB and your average hour show is 350 MB. Movies range all over the place, but since they want to keep things CD friendly you will usually see 700 MB or 1400 MB movies. Of course the 1400 MB are usually split to two 700 MB.
3. There is also the issue of the CPU power necessary to rip and encode movies. Most home users can rip their CDs to MP3s without too much hassel, and without too much time. Movies take longer though, and people are often not willing to let their computers work (assuming they would even know how to do it) for that long of a time.
4. The lack of legitimate downloads available. This is key. Since broadband isn't reaching everyone as quickly as some would hope, the download time for legit videos would be enormous for many home users. Those with broadband could possibly benefit, but setting price points becomes an issue unto itself. Also you deal almost exclusively with studios here, since not many movies or TV shows have a single star who could/would sign over rights where the studio would not.
5. Finally, easy integration with easy technology is of course a must. The problem is there is not a wide variety of consumer grade media players available. Most media players are playing to a mostly niche market who openly look for the devices and have TONS of media to stream over a network. Without many big electronics makers building these units, there is not a lot of support for individual consumers who want to buy their products from the "trusted" Sony's and Toshiba's.
These reasons outline some of the biggest points preventing the small portable video players. I should probably also point out small screen size for some users is an issue. Personally at the $500 or so some of the current devices go for, I would much rather spend the extra $300-$500 to get a laptop and have extra functionality with the much larger screen size.
I think there is a long way to go before the portable video player becomes a truly wanted item that is actually marketable outside a niche market.,
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
I have a cowon iaudio x5l, with the following features:
20 gig of storage
built-in fm tuner
video playback
picture viewing
text file viewing
superior audio quality(compared to ipods)
audio recording
usb host mode(looks like a computer to usb devices, nice for dumping pics from camera, moving files off of a thumb drive, etc.)
THIRTY+ hours of battery LIFE(figure this one out apple, lol).
With devices like this readily available, anybody who buys a regular ipod is either a) solely reliant upon ITMS for their music, b) just wanting to be 'hip' with their obvious ipod, c) stupid, or d) all of the above.
I live in NYC and just about every person with an mp3 player is visibly, demonstrably, using ipods, and are so focused on being cool that they don't upgrade those crappy earbuds.
Do yourself a favor before buying a full size ipod, check out cowon, check out iriver, heck, even take a glimpse at the creative zen vision if they ever get around to shipping it.
For the record, I've owned a 1st gen ipod, a 2nd gen ipod, and an ipod mini.
I ignored the Apple 2, the Lisa, the Newton and several of Apples more ground braking projects simply because these are not Apples most successful projects.
While the Apple 2 was by no means a failure, it was hardly a huge cash cow either.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
until how he sees push TV to cellphones works out. It's being tried now several places. Let the other guys do the initial market research and tweaking, see how the sales go is my guess on how jobs is thinking. The big question is screen size, that and content. There's a big big difference between what is needed for strict audio and combined audio/video. When you compare global sales of cellphones compared to PDAs you will see there's no comparison,cellphones are winning hands down, and a decent smartphone today is the closest you can see to what might be a video enhanced wireless connected ivideopod thingee. And those cost as much as a cheap laptop. Until they can get it down to a couple hundred bucks and still be decent quality I can't see apple going there. Look how long it took them to crack the 500$ desktop scene, and they still don't have a "normal" 500$ desktop.
Anyway, jobs just plain don't like anything like pdas. this has been obvious for a long time. Why exactly, not sure, but he doesn't like them-yet.
I'll bet Apple would like to experiment with video iPods, and they could probably design a revolutionary device if they thought they could take it to market. However, the current copyright regime in the US makes it nearly impossible, and it's only going to get worse.
Imagine being able to have one-click DVD ripping to your video pod and unrestricted TV show archiving (with commercials edited out) via your EyeTV or Tivo. There's no technological reason this can't happen, but the media companies will fight it tooth and nail. They'll fight it with legislation, bullying, and threats; not by competing in the marketplace.
The fact that there are so many video codecs to support, and most of them are patent-encumbered, makes the situation even worse.
Everyone loses, nobody wins.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
In three years when every mobile phone comes with an mp3 player (not to metnion h.264 video, a gaming platform, pda apps, flash storage), ipod sales will likely plummet. It'll be too hard to convince a consumer who already owns mp3 player (their phone) to buy another mp3 player. Like it or not these devices are going to converge. I'd bet that Apple sees the cold hard reality of this and will be resigned to focus on what they're best at. Going up against Creative and friends is one thing. Competing with Asia and Europe's mobile and electronics giants is another thing all together. W800>ROKR As for portable video players. You know those guys who brought portable TV's to the beach in 1986... that's about the size of that market. With a laptop and good 3g phone, all your portable video viewing needs are taken care of.
no one's figured out how to watch pron in private on a city bus.
shucks.
y'all suck.
People don't give the C64 line (Pet, Vic20, C64, C128) enough credit. I guess it's because Commodore isn't around anymore.
The Pet was useful out of the box - I'm not sure how the Apple II was any better in this regard. And it did hit the shelves months before the Apple II making it the first "real" personal computer available. It *did* support graphics, not just text. Some of the features of the Pet:
- a keyboard with a separate numeric pad (almost completely unheard of at the time, even as an option)
- a 9" integrated Blue and White monitor
- a main board with a powerful new 1Mhz MOS 6502 processor
- lots of room for an additional RAM or Processor board
- 4K of memory
- power supply
- real storage device (cassette tape)
- several expansion ports including an RS232 (serial) port
- ability to handle and create fantastic graphics
- upper and lower case text
- an operating system that was burned onto ROM and loaded on boot
Interestingly enough, the OS was Basic. And it was actually licensed from Microsoft in 1976.
The Pet was considerably cheaper then the Apple II - initially $499 and then $595 when demand outgrew production - versus the $1295 Apple II with 4k of memory. You could buy a Pet (which included the tape drive, etc) PLUS a floppy drive (when released, roughly the same time the floppy was released for the Apple) for less then an Apple II with *no* peripherals.
You could upgrade the Pet with memory chips in a similar fashion to the Apple II, but it was not as "user servicable" as the Apple. But the same process was involved - plop in more chips.
But you're right about one point - the Apple II had color which the Pet did not.
Commodore sold a lot of Pets but they sold an ass-load of Vic-20's and C64's - the C64 was wildly more popular then the Apple 2 ever was. They sold 30 million of them - more then any computer system ever and still. Commodore was the first computer company to do over 1bn in sales - largely due to the Vic20 and C64 sales.
People still use the 64 for a wide range of hobby activities. Demo coders still write for it for fun. Musicians use the unique SID chip for music - either in C64's or you can get a MIDI synth based on the SID from a few companies out there.
I realize that the Apple II was out for a few years before the most popular of the Commodore machines, the C64. But the C64 completely usurped the Apple II. Apple didn't have an answer to it for several years. Nobody did, really.
If Commodore had made better business decisions and gotten new product to market more efficiently, they could have been the "Apple of today." Or maybe even more, since the Amiga was arguably a better system then the Mac - it was technically superior and had a GUI system that was both functional and efficient.
Commodore brought a lot of unique computing ideas to the table.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Why would anyone want to watch videos on an Ipod-sized screen? You can already watch videos on a laptop, and a sizeable percentage of Ipod owners already have one. And while you obviously don't want to lug around your laptop around so you can listen to music, you probably don't mind lugging it to watch videos--because the screen is about as small as is comfortable for that purpose.
The thing that doesn't exist is an iTunes-like service for purchasing videos. That, I'm sure, is inevitable.
Apple doesn't want you listening to the radio.
A few days ago, I was browsing the "Radio" directory of iTunes, the one where they list a whole bunch of streaming radio stations. Whilst they have a good selection of genres, they only have a half-dozen to a dozen distinct stations in each. Not a huge variety.
I thought, if Apple released an encoder, lots of broadcasters would sign up and the Radio directory would be a major drawcard of the software. Just like their Podcast directory. Millions of people have iTunes, so that's a huge audience. Apple could revolutionise Internet broadcasting.
But they don't want to.
Apple doesn't want you listening to streaming Internet radio, because every minute you're listening to it, you're not listening to music that you bought off their Music Store or ripped from your own sources, and if you don't buy from their Music Store, you're probably less interested in the iPod as well. Streaming radio is just a distraction. (Although they might see some merit, if they find a way to identify the currently-playing track so listeners can buy from the Music Store on impulse, Live365-style.)
Now swap "Internet radio" with "AM/FM radio" and "iTunes" with "iPod" and you can see their thinking. (Although you've already paid for your iPod and Music Store sales don't add up to much for them.)
While I'm not at all sure that people want video in their pockets, to be played on tiny screens and held about 18" from their faces, I think besides the industrial design problem, and the small but significant technical problems, I think those who have pointed to DRM as the problem are on to it. There is no content for anybody who is not a video hacker of some ability. Sony wants you to use a castrated DVD. No dice. Otherwise, those in the studios don't care whether you get your movie on there from a DVD you own or from an .iso file. It's all THEFT, they say. So it's clear that we won't have any decent video iPod until we have good content; and we won't have that until the present studios are destroyed to the last vice-president of development, and their entire legal staffs. And don't forget their lobbyists. That's why there's no content available.
Jon Rubinstein, head of the iPod division added that, in Apple's experience, customers just don't want radios on their iPods. "Believe it or not, we don't get a lot of requests from customers" for a radio, he said. "We're very hesitant to add new features unless we feel a significant portion of the customer base want it."
A lot of customers thought radio is so common a feature and Apple should be clever enough to notice that.
They need to feel our need. Guys, please write to Apple and let them know we want it!
As a Person who works in the Pro Audio Field it drives me nuts looking for a MP3 Player that will even do most of the stuff i want it to do. I see the iPod as a thing for people that just want to plug and play. But why not make an iPod for us people that WANT all the bells and whistles crammed in it? You already keep making smaller ones, and with color screens. Why not a Pro Audio one?
Here's a list of things they could implement in this version of the iPod Pro
AUDIO INPUT JACK: I don't want to plug an adaptor in to use it. I don't want to share with the Headphone jack. How am i suppose to monitor my mix thats being recorded when i'm using the headphone jack to recoard? I just want it right there. Balanced 1/8th" input is all i ask. would be nice for SPDIF but hey i'm not that picky, and if i'm recording on it i probobly don't plan on it being high quality. Also record in multiple formats. Ogg, Wav, MP3, etc.
Add OGG Support: Maybe I'm missing this. Haven't looked at what an Ipod plays lately.... (not with the iPod Photo's and Nano's.
FM Transmitter: Heck i wanna hear the Weather sometimes... instead of finding a paper/going online etc. Or if i'm in the mood for something that i don't have on my iPod (Which would be hard because i have everything from louis armstrong to System of a Down) but its still possible.
3rd party support: I know its not going to happen. but i can dream one day an iPod will work with winamp without a 3rd party plug-in made by a student in grad school on his time off. or better yet instead of Winamp or any other audio program just pop up as a Hard Drive and let me transfer stuff onto it that way. (Long shot i know. wouldn't fit their business plan, but hey I can still dream)
Customizable EQ: Not sure if they offer this.... I mean just a 13 band EQ would be fine. I'm not asking for a full 31 band... but something more than just a "Treble" and "Bass" option... or pre-made ones... I like to tweak my music. Let me have that freedom. Also let me save it as a pre-set.
I know i'm dreaming. But until i find something that meets my needs i just don't walk around with one.
Anyone else have any other ideas for what Apple should put on an iPod to finish out the audio options?
I think the main reason for people being unwilling to buy pocket size video players is the tiny screen. What would be the content that you must have as a video clip, have to see "on the road" and can be watched on a screen of the size of a large stamp?
There is none. Actually I'm kinda suspicious about the photo ipods; does someone actually upload their photo gallery to an ipod just to be able to watch them while away? On a such a small screen?
1. Eliminate the need for a cable, the way the Shuffles and some other MP3 players already have.
2. Waterproof 'em.
- AJ
Prior Art.
Just a way to prove that they were in fact using the technology before others. No matter how accessible it is for the user.
Of course, the PSP platform has a lot of deficiencies that a video iPod would presumably correct. Primarily:
- The perception that the PSP is a games platform. Of course it's true, but my elderly mother has an iPod, but I can't see her buying a handheld games console.
- Lack of downloadable movies (at fullscreen quality). The "Apple iFlicks Movie Store" or whatever it's called would be pivotal in getting such a device going. Looking at the rumour sites and the opening of iTunes 5 resource files, this might be already happening.
However, the iPod originally wasn't particularly innovative ("Lame.") but it got the formula right. So, the video iPod could still change the whole market merely by getting the formula right this time.Part of the nicety of radio is that it's happening 'right now'. If something goes whack on-air, live, then it happens. If there's a major event going on - you'll hear about it.
What good is a podcast going to do you, if it's going to be yesterday's podcast that you have to copy to your portable before going out running in the morning ?
Given - some people enjoy that just fine. However, it's not quite like radio.
I find the iPods really cool. However until they support Ogg Vorbis and FLAC I will not buy one. The majority of my music collection is in Vorbis. I'm sure I'm not alone in this situation.
>> While the Apple 2 was by no means a failure, it was hardly a huge cash cow either.
// was a HUGE cash cow! It allowed Apple to become the fastest growing company in history in terms of revenue back then, and for a long time it financed Mac development because Macs didn't sell in large numbers initially and was very expensive to develop and build.
The Apple
The portable video device market isn't a "Well sometime in the future" deal. It's here NOW. Don't believe me? Sony was awfully surprised at how popular UMD movies suddenly became. Why? Let's look at what the average Joe has for portable video options:
1. Portable DVD player. It's bulky, it chews power, it's expensive to get one with a screen, the media is widely available but also bulky, if you travel internationally you have to worry about region headaches, etc.
2. Hard drive based video player like Archos etc. These are nice, often run a long time, store a ton of video. But getting video onto them is a chore. Disregarding DMCA issues, transcoding video is a pain in the ass. It takes forever, there's a million different options, and it's very user unfriendly in most cases. I've been encoding mpeg4s since before The Matrix hit theaters, and believe me the situation has gotten worse in terms of complexity, not better.
3. PSP. This is where the money is going. Why? It's got a bright high-res screen. It's not too bulky to fit in a carryon bag, and a whole flight's worth of video fits in a pocket (the batteries to run it are another matter). The UMD is plug and play average person useable type stuff. You buy one, you put it in, the movie plays. Sure it's expensive and lacks alot of DVD features, but IT WORKS! That's what people want. Developers are jumping ship on the PSP due to its flaws, but Sony doesn't care because suddenly UMDs are turning into a cash cow. They've already got two titles with over 100,000 units sold in 2 months. It took their first DVDs 9 months to get there. They're now estimating movies will make up the majority of UMD sales pretty soon.
So, where does this leave Apple? Pretty screwed unless they get something out in a 6-12 month window. Sony is eating up the market and rapidly becoming the standard with a proprietary physical and logical format. That's BAD! If Apple wants to have a chance they need a video iPod now. Even if it's just to make the market pause and look at them. Ideally they need several key features:
1. Content content content. They need to get video over itunes, or strike a deal for release on SD card or similar. They can't afford to rely on ripping like they do with CDs, it's a headache of epic proportions, and it's not happening.
2. Some form of portable storage to get new movies on, as well as a HD to store some on. This will need some DRM finesse, but if anyone can manage it, it's Apple. The aforementioned SD card would be a good start. There's few movies you can't get at least TV quality on in a 256 or 512MB space with modern mpeg4 and h.264 codecs. 256MB SD cards are cheap as dirt these days, distributing movies on them is a no brainer and will probably have comparable media cost to the UMD, which is a caddy-bound propritary disk. SD will probably drop in cost quicker due to volume and density increase.
3. TV-friendliness. At least TV output. Preferably also TV-input. To solve the problem of content, you need a way for the average guy to get content on there. TiVo is immensely popular so this should be a no brainer. Make your HD based iPod Video a PVR. You can get away without the fancy scheduling software (maybe have it as an option when hooked to a PC). If you just have a VCR-style "Push button to reccord" interface, it will work for alot of people. Sure reccording video at 1x speed is slow, but it's a world easier than transcoding and you can do it from virtually any source. There might be issues once everything goes digital but that's to worry about later. Apple can even bow down to Macrovision, enough DVD and VCRs have workarounds for it anyway, like regions.
I'm not sure who's asleep at the wheel over there, maybe it's Jobs, but they better wake up or Sony's going to give them Walkman Revenge up the ass for catching them asleep in the digital music player market a few years ago. Once we're locked into something like UMD, you can kiss fair use goodbye. Sony's not going to stand up to MPAA pricing like Apple does to the RIAA, they're on the other side of the fence!
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
I wait for the day when an ipod can read cue files that are used in conjunctoin with an mp3 to get around the gapless problem.
make moolah ;)
Which is really the point. MP3 was different. It was universal. It was "associated" with content. And it was, legally or otherwise, readily available. Video - not so much. You've got 20-30 different formats; and while your average knowing asshole will spend half an hour trying to figure out how to decode the copy of "wedding crashers" they got off usenet - the same populous that found such grace in MP3 will not. Apple needs content. And trust me - they're working on it. But until they reach a comfortable level (as they did with i-tunes); your not going to see a vid-pod any time soon. And, to add ice water to the fire - they movie/tv industry is learning from record label mistakes. They KNOW downloadable music is a sad, unprofitable comprimise, and they are very unlikey to make the same mistake. Some of them twice. There's an interst. There's a HUGE interst. But there's no market. And the black eyes of the past are likely to insure that market does not arise for some time. And the attorneys are all smiles.
Did anyone notice that the bolded quote on the linked story has been toned down from the quote in the body? The "They're greedy" body quote which has been widely reported, has turned into "we".
Bolded quote:
"If we want to raise prices on iTunes, it just means getting a little greedy - consumers won't like that. It will just be a message to consumers to go back to piracy and that's not good."
Body quote:
"If they want to raise prices on iTunes, it just means they're getting a little greedy - consumers won't like that. It will just be a message to consumers to go back to piracy and that's not good. If the price goes up a lot, they'll go back to piracy and everybody loses."
Steve Jobs wants to keep things simple!
duh...
Isn't that the exact essence of everything he does and has done before? Keeping things simple?
Anyone who'd expect otherwise is just being plain silly.
Claim: a keyboard with a separate numeric pad
Fact: The keyboard was by far the most reviled part of the PET. Commodore was a calculator manufacturer, and the PET keyboard used the same (poor) style key mechanisms as the cheap calculators Commodore produced (aka "chicklet keyboard"). It could include a numeric keypad because the key spacing on the rest of they keyboard was significantly smaller that the norm. Touch typing was extremely difficult, if not impossible.
Claim: lots of room for an additional RAM or Processor board
Fact: Well, there was physical room, but that was it - there was no internal access to the microprocessor bus (all expansion was intended to be external to the unit, so expansion was difficult). The principal means of I/O expansion, via a (non-standard) IEEE-488 bus, was difficult to work with, and resulted in expensive peripherals.
Claim: several expansion ports including an RS232 (serial) port
Fact: The original PET did NOT have an RS232, or even serial, port. At the time, I built quite a few pseudo-RS232 hardware interfaces which allowed one to "bit bang" the parallel "User Port" to talk to a modem.
Claim: ability to handle and create fantastic graphics
Fact: The PET used character graphics, and so was limited to what the ROM provided in this regard. It was better than the TRS-80, however. The best graphical program for the PET was probably "Toker II," and the amazing thing was not the graphics, per se, but just the fact that it could be done on a PET.
Claim: upper and lower case text
Fact: Only when not using graphics. One had a choice of uppercase and graphics, or upper and lower case text. (POKE 59468,14) AIR, something which was uppercase in graphics mode was lowercase in text mode.
Claim: The Pet was considerably cheaper then the Apple II - initially $499 and then $595
Fact: That was the pricing for the 4K model, but good luck finding one. Commodore only shipped a few. At the time, I worked for the largest Commodore retailer east of the Mississippi (NCE Compumart), and only ever saw a handful of 4K PETs. The vast majority of PETs were the $795 8K model.
Claim:You could upgrade the Pet with memory chips in a similar fashion to the Apple II, but it was not as "user servicable" as the Apple. But the same process was involved - plop in more chips.
Fact: Absolutely untrue. The original PET used non standard static RAMs (6550s) available only from MOS Technology (the chip manufacturer which Commodore owned). All RAM was soldered directly to the motherboard, not socketed. On the 4K PETs, Commodore even went so far as to drill through the PC board locations where the additional memory chips might have otherwise been installed in order to prevent user expansion. Apple used industry standard 4K and 16K Dynamic RAMs, which were not only readily available from multiple sources, but significantly less expensive than static RAM. Every Apple 2 could easily be expanded to 48K simply by installing the appropriate chips in the socketed motherboard.
Claim: You could buy a Pet PLUS a floppy drive for less then an Apple II with *no* peripherals.
Wrong. Commodore's first disk drive, the 2040, cost more than the computer itself, originally selling for $1195 - as much as a 16K Apple 2 (1979). It couldn't handle random access files and was unreliable. It was also significantly slower than the competition, including Apple, North Star, and Cromemco (the latter being two popular S-100 disk controllers). The Apple Disk sold for $595, a breakthrough price at the time. To be fair, the 2040 was a dual drive, but that was an extravagance at the time.
The C64 didn't ship until 1982 (5 years after the ones I mentioned!) was basically a toy and wasn't competitive for serious applications. Yes, it sold lots. It was cheap (not inexpensive
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
twice shy?
(I hope I don't dupe myself; when I tried to post this a minute ago, I just got a non-message from comments.pl - odd)
unless you have a collection with a strict size that is. I am guessing that your collection will grow beyond the 100gb by the time apple releases an 100gb ipod. My prediction is that a 20 gb ipod nano will start replacing the original by late next year.
A computer is a tool, but I am not. I use Linux
"No-one's figured out the right formula" Jobs says.
Perhaps Apple shouldn't try to do everything themselves. The controlling attitude towards their platforms has bitten them every time. (Almost killed the Mac, it killed the Newton, etc.)
Why not open the iPod up for starters? Even with a very simple API that for example allows you to reprogram the shuffle algorithm, it would be very popular.
Let the customer decide a few things for themselves for once.
- Erwin
Apple being a perpetual innovator, I doubt we will ever see built in terrestrial radio. I know Jobs has already turned down Sirius in the past, but I would expect a satellite radio iPod at some point in the future. I just couldn't imagine if they had to choose one over the other that they'd choose FM. The other thing is, how are they going to fit it in the new iPods? They're getting smaller and smaller and to sacrifice size for the sake of radio seems like it goes against what Apple is intending. Just my $0.02.
Finance tutorials and more! Understandfinance
Yep, and after Wozniak left, Jobs spent as much time as possible locking down all the hardware. Thanks Steve!
//gs was the last great Apple computer.
The Apple
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
If a company put real live divx support in a player and made the firmware upgradeable, the video players would do much better. All the available players use bulky, difficult media formats that are no longer the standard for long play media.
.. in order of importance:
- have a longer battery-life
- be smaller/lighter
- use (removable) flash instead of HD - in same size
- support OGG Vorbis
- be able to play video/photo's to a video-out (instead of color-screen)
A timeless cry from one end of that pendulum.
The flip side of this sentiment would be to look for something we could make that has a badly convoluted, trying-to-do-too-much interface now. Apple (or whoever) could then simplify the device, producing something with the iPod's attention to simplicity and pleasure in actual use.
My perennial candidate would be alarm clocks. Current alarm clocks are almost spectacularly badly designed -- both for their basic functions and because they're trying to be little radios and ambient noise makers and so on. Look at whatever buzzer's on your night stand right now, and think about how many finicky buttons and switches and wheels and sliders it has, all of them badly labeled and next to impossible to work with when you're sleepy and your glasses are off. (The radio frequency wheels in particular are inconceivably stupidly bad. So many of them have volume and tuning wheels you can't even tell apart. Eck.)
How Apple would manage to treat Alarm Clocks as an adjunct to the whole iLife-style bundle of technology apps is an open question, but there are lots of ways to handle it, seemingly. Use your iTunes library for the wakeup music. Add alarms in the underused (and underdeveloped) iCal. And so on.
Steve J, or someone at a watch company, please make me an elegant alarm clock. I'm pretty sure there's a colossal market that would buy one for $5 more than the competition if only it was a pleasure to use -- and you have NO competition when it comes to user interface design. Make it small enough to work as a travel alarm -- doesn't seem too hard in prospect.
Seriously.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Ehm i'll gues it's a bit outdated technology The next device should be the size of a PDA And be able to have bleutooth keyboard and a monitor. So we can get rid of th PC's laptops phones mp3 players, remote control, television and all these electronics. It might as well have a small camera, but it should have a GPS inside. And most of all it should be able to cool my cola or heat my cofee. So after this device there will be no needs for anymore gyzmo's. And people start doing invent other useless but funny toys.
You sound like the typical teen I run into these days. You're claiming that roughly 4GB of music would be "not crap" in a person's collection.
Now, I don't go crazy and use lossless or anything. I encode albums to about 100MB each. 4GB is roughly 40 albums. You honestly don't think there are more than 40 albums of music ever released? Hell, pick the best album for the year going allllll the way back to the stone age (1965) and you've already hit 4GB.
For those of us over 20, it's pretty easy to build up a music collection numbering in the hundreds of CDs. Before I went all mp3, I owned over 400, all of which I liked, all of which I listened to. That's 40GB of mp3s right there. I stopped buying CDs in around 1998. I'm well over 60GB of mp3s now, and I'm constantly deleting music I no longer listen to very much just to keep my collection sane.
See, some of us have been listening to music for a long time. I've spent the past 15 years of my life with a walkman/discman/mp3 player, and probably listen to that alone 2 hours a day. Add in another 2-4 hours a day on the computer at home. That's nearly 2000 hours a year. Even with 600 albums, I've still heard most of what I have dozens of times by now. By the time I'm 50 it'll be much more so.
100GB is about 1000 albums for me. If you honestly don't see how someone could enjoy 1000 different albums, you're either 16 years old and only know 5 bands, or you're the perfect Clearchannel customer: Listening to the same damn 5 songs all day long.
Either way, it's trivially easy to prove you wrong. You must have incredibly limited taste in music to think that anything over 40 albums, over the past 70-odd years of recorded music, is crap.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
DUH.. you'd also have to wire the nano's screen to the camera because since you glued it to the back, you can no longer see the camera's LCD %)
Seems like they've reached step 5 on the Apple Product Cycle. They've gone from "We won't do it" to "Nobody else has done it right yet":
So we can expect a product soon :-)
full colour and sound too http://ipodlinux.org/Video_Player
Once you graduate from college and a free T1 line and get a job and have a life
I envy your job. If Monster.com, Dice.com, and CareerBuilder.com continue not to turn up any entry-level IT job opportunities in Fort Wayne, Indiana, what should I do in order to get a job and a life?
You have no idea how tired I am of these crazy convergence devices that play mp3s, watch movies, take photos, check emails, play games, cellphone, organizer, calender, does GPS... but doesnt do any of them well!
You have no idea how tired I am of having to lug around devices to do everything. Fortunately, I have found a way around my problem with the Treo 650:
I need:
1. Cell phone
2. Organizer
3. Dictation machine
4. Internet access
5. SMS
I want:
1. Video
2. Games
3. MP3 player
4. Basic camera with basic video/sound recording and cam-phone pictures
I got a Treo 650 and put in a big ass SD card. I have about 500 megs of MP3s on it, which is plenty for a portable. My headphone adapter doo-hickey works fine.
It does phone stuff. It does organizer stuff. It takes video/pictures acceptably. It does dictation (with an add-on program for a minimal amount). I can then email the dictation to my secretary from anywhere. Obviously, it has internet access.
It plays mpeg video very well (for free - google TCMP).
It does SMS. It does reasonable games (Scrabble (though the Scrabble-bot is stupid) and backgammon. I'm not a Half-Life gamer, just need something to kill some time occasionally, and it does it well.
I hated carrying around an mp3 player, a cassette dictation recorder, a camera, a Palm Tungsten, and a cell phone. This is much more convenient for me and I am thrilled with what I got for it. Is everything absolutely perfect? Nope, but it is good enough for me.
Those who have more sophisticated needs may need a specialized device, but it works for me. YMMV.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
People are still creating wonderful SID music on C64 machines. http://remix.kwed.org/
The ATARI 400/800/800XL etc line of home computers had a loyal following, but the C64 was widely used for games, word processing, business, and hobby programming.
I remembered how much fun the Commodore 64 was, back in the day, so I bought some on eBay.
And after playing with them for a while, they are still fun after all these years, and they work well, too.
Posts like this that make me remember why I feel in love with Slashdot way back in 1998 (I lurked before getting a UID). Too few of these posts around today, but maybe some of you higher UID users will bring us back to our roots.
Thanks.
blog
It's a colossal market, totally being underserved by complacent companies whose user interfaces were designed in a funhouse mirror.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I don't understand why they haven't come out with wireless networking on the iPod yet. They ability to use shared iTunes playlists on a given wireless network would seem to expand the usability of both products, and make Apple that much cooler, even in the eyes of PC uzers.
You can kiss a nun... Just don't get into the habit.