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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."
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...
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...)
That's the dumbiest fucking thing I've ever heard. Just by doing a best of each decade or best of albums for popular bands your over 4GB.
Stupid comment, and no he doesn't have to prove shit to you.
Oh and whoever modded this up is a giant dildo as well.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
shhhh.. you're ruining the deluded Apple love-fest.
The only reason the ipod nitwits don't own a PSP is because it's not made by Apple. In a year and a half, Apple's going to come out with a video ipod (of similar size, but with less features as the PSP), and all the people here are going to be creaming in their pants and hailing it as a revolutionary, groundbreaking product, the likes of which we've never seen before.
They did that when the cingular itunes phone was released-- never mind that the treo 600's been out for 2 years now, works great for music, and has more storage capacity. it even does internet radio.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.