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Video iPod Apple's First Bad Move?
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has had a lot of success with the iPod brand the past few years. The NYT has an article up wondering if, just maybe, this week's release of the video iPod was too soon." From the article: "Everyone from Microsoft to Comcast - in other words, the usual suspects - is working on or looking at similar pocket-size recorders. At least two companies, Pace Micro Technology of Britain and Samsung of South Korea, have said they plan to introduce models early next year. There is also TivoToGo, a service that can forward recorded shows to various mobile devices, even Sony PSP handheld gaming units ... [anyway,] the video iPod only has it half right: if it took material from the television as readily as it did from the Internet, it could be a blockbuster. But then who would pay $1.99 to download an episode of 'Lost' from iTunes if the iPod could also hook up to your television and record that same episode free? Unlike its musical forebear, the video iPod may not be ready for prime time. "
i want to put my pee pee in your poo poo hole
The article doesn't understand about the Apple fans who have drunk
the koolaid. They will buy the Video iPod, which gets scratched by
cloth & paper. Then they will tubes & protectors for it. Then they
would buy replacement batteries (the originals last only for 3
months) from Apple Store. Then they would buy videos regularly
from the Apple Video Store. They would even buy Videos of Steve
Jobs from the store.
Apple cannot lose with an audience like this.
Apple is dead, woohoo!
iPod mini 4 gig (end of 2003)
"Too expensive" ($249)
"It's ugly"
"Will cannibalize iPod sales"
"Not enough storage"
"Big flop.. Apple is through"
The ipod mini, so great they discontinued it within 2 years...
The ipod nano might be a flop. The original ipod was a flop and they had to radically change things. The shuffle hardly set trees on fire either.
The video ipod won't get very far, the sort of video files which are convenient to download for anyone other than technogeeks with high-speed broadband usually get played on mobile phones anyway.
It's funny how the apple zealots want to create their own siege mentality as well. Most of the ipod's success is based on marketing, it's that good an mp3 player. Like with Microsoft, the marketing department is more important than all the others.
I've got an 'nano' 4 gig and honestly I'm rather unimpressed with it. I figured it was finally time to ditch the 'bulky' cd player for something slimmer and less time consuming to operate. So I ripped my whole collection to mp3, which is ~30 cds or so. I used the lame preset that is one notch up from 192kbps vbr with the -new flag (- V 2 New) it was great, for about a week until I realized how easily the damn thing scratched. I refuse to give in to the mafia charging 20-30.00 dollars for a piece of silicon rubber to cover it up and I find myself being rather careful with it as opposed to my '50.00' cd player which i just tossed in my bag whenever. Now around that time I started to notice that certain tracks would skip during playback. I wouldn't particularly be pissed off about it, but it turns out about 1 in 20 skip because of the way apple does clock speed optimization on the iPod. Apparently, every single model does it on vbr tracks that jump from digital silence (32kbps) to 320kbps frames in a short period of time, but the nano and mini are particularly egregious offenders and do it all the time. There is a thread on hydrogenaudio about it (at first I thought it was just my headphones had a short). A 'temporary' fix is to change your eq setting so the processor is kept at a higher clock rate, problem is, all the presets suck, and you are stuck with apples terrible eq presets, you can't make your own (which wouldn't be a big deal, there is a lot of them, but the apple presets boost without changing the pre-amp setting so if a recording is out of headroom it clips and sounds terrible, soundcheck usually alleviates this problem). Whether apple will ever fix the problem is unknown at this point, as it has existed since the 2nd generation mini was released like ~8 months ago.
... and takes a cell phone battery. Even if you could only fit ~1GiB on a disc, I would buy one (provided the media was cheap). People overestimate the amount of time it takes to change a disc, and compared with the amount of time you spend 'managing' your files with metadata and what not, it's trivial. I'm not sure whether or not the reading mechanism power draw makes such a device unfeasible, but barring that, I can't see why somebody hasn't come out with such a format yet.
The worst aspect of all however, is the fact that you're locked into apple's terrible 'iTunes' software. Sure, there are some other ways to sync to your ipod but apple changes the database format so frequently they never really work right (like foopod, etc.). If you don't let itunes control your 'playlists' the ipod won't sync metadata back to your iPod and if you switch it from off to on without changing anything it will copy *everything* back to the iPod, it doesn't even check to see if it's on there already (this probably has to do with the fact that the player doesn't even read the metadata off the file, it's all encoded into a database). Whenever you completely fill up the iPod, it stops at some random spot between 30 and 100 mb and tells you 'there isn't enough freespace to copy the whole library', even if there is, and you have to hit update again. If you change any metadata on the file, iTunes will copy the whole track to the ipod again.
The battery life is pretty dismal as well, and the amplifier is woefully inadequate for all but the highest efficiency headphones (i.e. the shitty ones that come with it).
People say the clickwheel is what 'sells' iPods but truth is its just slick marketing. The clickwheel isn't that great compared to just a plain scroll wheel and the incompatibility with almost all existing formats makes its featureset dismal compared to other offerings (though they to, have their flaws, which are significant). I'll never buy anything from apple again. you fool me once, shame on you, you fool me twice, shame on me. I think a good format would be a minidisc style dvd or hddvd that plays back FLAC, WAV, MP3, MPC, OGG, AAC,
Lord knows that Apple would never make a product that crashes all the time and has idiotic memory management :)
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Well, yet another person spouting off w/o any experience. Yay. Shutup.
No, I've been around enough to remember what you are talking about. But Slashdot was taken over by Apple Zealots some years ago, and the "Linux & OGG on the iRiver" crowd is non-factor around here nowdays. You could figure that out if you checked the posts & moderation on this story -- there's only an extreme minority who has anything negative to say about the iPod.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
"people tend to have a psychological aversion to watching TV on the computer"
Really? A psychological aversion? Where's that in the DSM-IV?
"definitely not the monitor de jure"
I'm pretty sure that "de jure" isn't even the same language as the phrase you're looking for...
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I still totally fail to understand this psychological aversion. A Tivo is a computer. Do people have a psychological aversion to using Tivos?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!