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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."
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
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.
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.
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I have an Archos AV400. It does TV-in and TV-out as well as music, USB hard drive, etc.
It solves the problem posed by another poster about ripping and saving a DVD to the device. You can record straight to the device and watch it back on the LCD (for encrypted DVDs saved to the archos you cannot TV-out) or to TV-out.
I have all Family Guy episodes, all three Star Wars DVDs (for the wife), mulitple TV shows recorded via Tivo's "record to VCR" function, several GBs of music, and backups from my home network.
Yeah, it's a bit bulkier than what the iPod lovers expect but I wouldn't trade it for an iPod ever.
I would generally agree with you... except for the Newton. That was pretty damn groundbreaking... unsuccessful, but groundbreaking.
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.
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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. -
>> 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
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
Take a look at this picture of a Xerox Star desktop and tell me again that Apple invented overlapping windows and the desktop metaphor.
Actually it is a screenshot of ViewPoint, Star's successor, released in 1985. The Star designers thought that non-overlapping windows would be more userfriendly and that the workstation's 17-inch screen was large enough so there wasn't much of a need for overlapping windows. They changed their mind when they released ViewPoint.
Anyway, I don't disagree with your post. Just nit-picking ;)