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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."
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
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.
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.
Prove me wrong.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
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
They're a big corporation with a good legal department. Both those clues could simply point to Apple keeping their options open.
I might get flamed for this but I don't really see Apple as a ground breaker. They'll come out with a video player when theres an established marked for one. Theirs will be 10x as cool and work 10x better and therefore the market will expand greatly by their entering it, but they won't create the market. Thats about what happened with the Ipod, it wasn't by far the first portable audio player, it was just cooler and better (and had much better marketing)...
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
iTunes != iPod
It makes a lot of sense to have video in iTunes where you have the bandwidth to command and your full monitor to display.
The trademark thing had to be expanded to include images anyway, may as well add video to be safe. Not that it won't happen some day, but I'd bet on the desktop first.
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.
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
Right formula = DRM the MPAA will accept?
If you're reading this, stop it.
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
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.
. . . 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.
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.
The only way for non-MTV watching people such as myself know what's new to download IS the radio. But with that aside, what about talk radio? The news? NPR! I will never buy a portable music player without a radio. A little news radio would do the American youth some good.
"Haven't you ever heard of the Emancipation Proclaimation?"
"I don't listen to Hip-Hop!"
seriously, apple: do cost-benefit analysis of a radio tuner... how much does the circuitry cost?
If a radio tuner takes up negligible space, no engineering or manufacturing effort, and costs $0.50 to include in every iPod, then it would cost Apple $2.5M every quarter if it sold 5 million iPods in the span. Assuming Apple makes $50 per iPod sold, it would have to sell an additional (i.e., to people like you) 50,000 iPods each quarter just to break even on the effort. Now, note that space, engineering, and manufacturing all cost real money, and a very small radio tuner (you wouldn't expect the form factor to change just for this, right?) just might cost more than $0.50 each.
If there aren't significantly more than 200,000 of you every year, then your radio tuner would probably not be a standard part of the iPod. Hope this helps.
I'd argue that looking at a market and finding why the existing products suck and create something that doesn't is much more ground braking than beeing the first to launch a sucky version of an obvious idea. It takes huge amounts of skill to repeatedly make such high quality designs as Apple.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
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.
I don't listen to either.
I have one way to get home. If traffic is bad, I sit longer.
As for weather, if I can't look outside the window, or if I don't already know there's a hurricane coming towards the town through normal news reports, then I'm fucked. I don't see radio giving me extra benefit.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
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
For my 170GB of losslessly compressed, mostly classical music, I bought the CDs because no significant amount of classical music is available online, and if it were, the codec would suck.
Out of that 170GB, I'd say maybe 10GB is crap, and even that I keep for a reason. The rest is either good or essential -- my "essentials" playlist, which I use compressed on my 60GB iPod, is around 90GB. (A 100GB iPod would fit my collection comfortably if it were compressed to 256k AAC.)
When you're not dealing with the artificial 4-minute song format collections grow quickly.
What song do you have the most versions of and what are the differences?
I have five recordings of Bruckner's 7th: Chailly, Harnoncourt, Szell, and two by Masur (with Leipzig and the NY Phil). I have some specific reason, usually a great reading of a particular moment, for keeping each in the collection. Other than that, I don't have more than three versions of any work, and even duplicates are kind of rare.
Is there anyone else that works at Apple beside Steve Jobs?
/., he seems to do and make every decision with that PUBLICALLY run company. The fact that there is a relatively small group of dedicated Apple followers (sometimes I consider them apologists) does not change the fact that EVERY SINGLE business decision that Apple makes is directly related to increasing the value of the company for the stockholders. Not because Apple has a decent PR and marketting firm and you think it is cool and hip to be different. I'm sure there is a very tiny percentage of stock holders that are really dedicated to the company and its products but the overwhelming majority of the people are in it only for for financial return and stability, in fact, these people probably do not even know what Apple stock they may or may not indirectly have because it is through managed through a fund or grouping of stocks. Anyone is disagrees with that concept is seriously misguided.
According to a select few on
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.
The iPod is aimed at people who want control of what they are listening to. There are plenty of small radios on the market. When you listen to radio, you are at the mercy of THEIR playlist. When you listen to the iPod you CONTROL the playlist.
With Podscasting, YOU can control what and when you hear.
The iPod is not a radio. It is what it is and it is excellent at what it is.
Classical music in FLAC..?
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.
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.
The early prototypes of the Xerox Star did have overlapping windows. From the page that I linked to in my previous comment.
I'll spell it out for you: they had overlapping windows, their testing showed it was confusing, they disabled the feature. Claiming that Xerox copied that feature Apple, as you've just gone and done, is complete nonsense. Even in the first commericial version of the Star that shipped "without" overlapping windows, that only applied to application windows, because property windows did overlap the application windows.
Apple is not a ground braker in that they create markets where none existed. They are a ground breaker in that they launch a product that completely redefines an existing market.
Apple I and II* -- arguably the first personal computers; the Apple II wasn't just the first, it also had features such as self-configuring expansion card slots that allowed expansion cards to be inserted and *just work* (it took IBM and Microsoft to invent driver and interrupt hell)
Apple II floppy drive -- cheaper and better than any competing device, and yet Apple was able to make incredible profits on it
Lisa/Macintosh -- first mass market computer with usable GUI
LaserWriter* -- first Postscript printer, first high resolution printer both affordable and usable by consumers
Newton* -- first PDA, first mass-market device with working handwriting recognition
QuickTime* -- first software-only digital video, first cross-platform digital video
QuickTake* -- first consumer digital camera (if Steve Jobs had been leading Apple then, Apple would probably still be a market leader in digital photography; Apple really dropped the ball here).
QuickTime VR* -- first whatever it was (and much imitated)
NeXTStep -- innovative in so many ways that it's not funny (and NeXT is part of Apple's DNA), and incidentally the platform on which the Worldwide Web was invented
iTunes Music Store -- first whatever it is that iTMS is
* Created/Defined a new market.
You're not alone, but in reality, you are part of a VERY small demographic as far as Apple is concerned. MP3, AIFF, AAC & WAV are what the bulk of the consumer public is used to... particularly MP3 & WAV. Say OGG Vorbis to a lay computer user and they will probably say Gesundheit or "I don't speak Finnish".
Pooty tweet