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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.
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.
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.
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.