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iPod nano Owners In Screen Scratch Trauma
wellington map writes "TheRegister reports iPod nano users have discovered that it is unbelievably easy to scratch the screen, which quickly makes the colour screen all but useless for viewing album art and photos stored on the machine. Apple's discussion forums are already host to hundreds of threads on this topic."
Always wait until the second generation to buy from Apple. This has been true for years, and it is apparently continuing. iPod nano 2.0 will cost less, have more space, and probably a better screen.
:)
:)
It hardly ever pays to be an early adopter. Let other people work out the bugs, then enjoy the fruits of their labor
(Posted from a Rev. 2 15" Powerbook G4
My other car is first.
You'd think with all Apple's advertising resources, they'd have had "Tim from marketing" put it in his pocket for a day just to test it.
Obviously not. It does seem something of an oversight to launch the product way before the covers and cases are available too. I wonder how long it'll be before we see a 2G nano with modified screen coating...
It scratches... but not from just being put into my pocket. They're making a mountain out of a hill. (not an ant hill... it is a problem) Buy a case. Simple!
http://www.sandstorming.com
This thing is tiny, and is clearly designed to be put in a pocket (only geeks clip gadgets to their belt). If you put it in your pocket, the screen quickly becomes scratched to the point where it's unreadable. How is that acceptable? Should the letters on your keyboard wear off the first time you type with sweaty hands, too?
Hmm. I have noticed threads in the past discussing similar failure modes with other Apple products: PowerBook paint chips, PowerBook palm stains, PowerBook warping, iBooks getting dirty, iPod battery life, mouse ergonomics. Perhaps with the emphasis on industrial design, Apple has given real-lift usability testing a back seat.
In their software, too, there are similar issues. For the most part, OS X is an ingenious, very user-friendly operating system, arguably the best implementation out there of a desktop Unix. But there are some rough edges. For instance, keyboard navigation is incomplete and inconsistent across applications (e.g. Cocoa vs Carbon). Perhaps Apple would have noticed that issue in usability testing if they had included more keyboard navigation users, and specifically, people who spent much time doing keyboard navigation in Windows.
Really, I would like to see Apple succeed, but to do that, they may need to focus more on the usability and reliability of their products.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
All this bitching is useless. Protect your investment.
Feh.
The concept that you don't want to piss your customers off with such an obvious flaw is a very rudimentary one in the business world. Flaws such as that are found with the most basic of testing. Given Apple's problems with class action lawsuits in the past, one would believe that they would be taking care of obvious blunders such as this and put more effort into engineering their iPods thoroughly.
There are other music players out there, ya know.
Right you are, and when it becomes very well known that the iPod Nano scratches this badly, many other people are going to be aware of this as well.
Personally, I don't care if my iPod gets scratched. It's a music player, not a mirror in the Hubble space telescope or something.
The market will very likely not share your apologizing view, which is why so many people find it amazing that Apple could screw something like this up. You should take a look at some of the pictures going around. This isn't a matter the screen not being imune to scratches, it's about displays that are barely readable after a month of carrying around in a pocket.
I'll add that I've been a big Apple fan for a while. However, it's discouraging to see these obvious flaws pop up in Apple's work when I think about how badly I'd like to buy a Yonah Powerbook next year. Something like this isn't excusable from an engineering perspective even if its first generation.
I have never figured out why owners of Apple products refuse to hold Apple to a high standard across the board.
If Apple does some things right (and they certainly have in the past), good. They should be credited for this. What I don't understand is why people get unbelivably defensive whenever someone points out a flaw in Apple's products. I've skimmed the Apple forums involved, and all I can say is that the end user doesn't really care about the physics involved. All he cares about is that if he buys one of the earlier iPods, his product continues to look nice. If he buys a Nano, however, it looks like shit in short order. I think that it's *perfectly* reasonable for someone that buys such a product to be able to air criticism on those grounds.
You can argue that the scratches aren't so bad, that you don't need the screen, that people should "take better care of their product" (why they didn't need to with earlier products, though, is an interesting question), but it comes down to the fact that some folks are not happy with their experience. End of a story. Customer happiness is all that matters at the end of the day.
So now Apple can take a look at seeing what it can do to fix the problem. I doubt that it's so difficult to fix, given that they managed to do earlier iPods successfully, so I don't think that the iPod Nano can't be successfully fixed by Apple. So sit back and wait for them to churn out a fix.
The Register also referenced the Cube, which was a good point. The Cube had a case that often looked damaged, even straight from the factory. Apple's response was apparently to claim that the cracks were actually some sort of non-serious molding defect, IIRC, and a lot of Apple fans poured out and started accusing anyone that expressed unhappiness with their product. You don't win customers by acting like that. You tend to piss people off. All that the customer cares about is that his new, shiny product, which he bought to look new and shiny, does not, in fact, look new and shiny. Start dancing around the issue, and you start losing repeat customers. You can't keep a company running in the long term by simply attacking anyone that is unhappy with their experience.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Very true. But if the sales are more than 0.5% lower than their potential because of using cheap materials (assuming a $0.50 solution to the problem and $100 profit margin), Apple will take longer to recoup their costs. Advertising and R&D are sunk costs, and Apple needs to consider their total profits (profit margin x units sold) in order to recoup them.
Don't forget that $100 profit has to cover:
* Packaging
* Shipping
* Retail margin
And hope to recover the costs of:
* Advertising
* R & D
I could be wrong, but isn't profit the money a business gets AFTER costs such as these are considered?
The cool solution, which Apple probably now has to use to get their reputation back, is sapphire. That's what scratch-resistant high-end watches use. Put an 0.15mm sapphire layer on top of the polycarbonate, and you can dump the thing in with your keys without worrying. It's not that expensive for a phone or music player sized screen. Some of Nokia's high-end phones have a sapphire screen.
Of course, doing it right might cut into those 40% profit margins at Apple.
I'm looking forward to the Rolex(tm) Edition iPod nano, with 10k gold-plated clickwheel, obsidian faceplate, and quartz lens (the back will probably be polished titanium). It'll weigh about 2-3 times what the nano does now, and cost ten times as much, but it won't scratch.
Seriously, guys. It's a cheap gadget. It's a REALLY cheap gadget. Last time I checked, you couldn't BUY removable flash memory for the same $/GB as the 4GB nano. Unless you're in the Vertu (fancy-schmancy cellphones) crowd, just expect that an uber-cool gadget that you can afford might have a few flaws. It's still a good value on the grounds of functionality. If you want a super-flashy fashion statement, either wait for another vendor to copy what Apple has done, or protect what you have a little better.
--Jasin Natael
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.