Slashdot Mirror
Did Apple Sabotage the ROKR?
JPigford writes "The Apple Blog makes claim that Apple sabotaged the success of the ROKR so as to sway public opinion of MP3 cell phones in general...ultimately to drive more sales to the iPod. By mandating a 100 song limit on the ROKR and having the product flop, Apple was able to put a bad taste in the mouths of consumers so that not only do they drive more iPod sales, but they keep competitors from fighting back with their own MP3 phones."
Hate to point out the obvious, but apple does like control over products using it's services. Is it really that far fetched?
Their name is still connected to this product, by way of iTunes. So, logically, if people's only experience with iTunes comes by way of the ROKR and that experience is a negative one, logically that's going to lead customers to respond by going elsewhere for music and for a portable music player.
The idea that people might get a ROKR and say "wow, this is cool, I want to buy an iPod now" seems more plausable - as does the idea that more people than you might realize are going to shy away from the all-in-one gadgetization of the phone (with cameras, mps players, video / TV etc.) I am one of those people who would rather have three devices that do their respective functions very well than one that does three different things in a mediocre way.
While it's entirely possible that Apple did help sabotage it, I think it's more likely that it was a crappy product that's caused it to fail so far...
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Have you held a ROKR and RAZR at the same time? It's like Motorola can make a gadget pretty, or functional, but not both at the same time.
What's most puzzling is: It's all the same OS. Their cheapest and most expensive phones have an almost identical menu structure. Making a Java/iTunes app shouldn't have taken as long as it did.
Lastly. A RAZR is free with a 2 year contract. A 512mb shuffle (which holds more songs) is $80. The two of them together in the same pocket is a better solution than the ROKR....and will go longer on a charge!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
There's as much of a chance (if not a greater one) of Apple damaging the iPod brand image as there is of driving people to standalone iPods. The potential gains don't seem worth the immense risk. I'd chalk this one up as a crackpot conspiracy theory.
Regardless of Apple's intent (real, false or perceived) Motorola didn't have to accept the ROKR design nor build it. Motorola's also at fault and clearly didn't do enough consumer testing to learn that the product wasn't desirable before going to production.
Apple made OSX 10.0 as a way to drive people to Windows.
Seriosuly, how did this post make is to the front page of slashdot? Its a first attempt, they will get better over time, especially as technology improves. That aside, apple certainly doesn't want its good name attached to things that flop. Its bad PR.
But "sabotage"?!? Motorola isn't a couple of kids with a lemonade stand, and it's not even a huge corporation operating outside its normal business. Surely they have enough experience with portable consumer electronics to have dealt with Apple with their eyes open.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
While I'm not sure if I believe it, it does make sense in a way.
At the same time, however, I'm sure a lot of uneducated consumers link that phone directly to Apple and then assume if it sucks then the rest of the stuff can't be as good as everyone claims either. It would have been quite a risky move on Apple's part so I'm going to leave this as speculation for now.
To me it seemed more like they just rushed it out the door without really trying too hard, just to get the idea into people's heads and see if it would take off...
What a great way to try and cover for a perceived perfect track record.
Any misstep, just start the rumor (or have your zealot minions do it for you) that any mistake was on purpose. Apple really CAN do no wrong.
There are no alien abductions, there are no chemtrails, we really did go to the Moon and all the big problems in the country- from 9/11 to Katria relief- are the result of chaos, sloppiness and stupidity unguided by secret cabals or ninja assassins or Skull and Bones members.
MS has a monopoly. T0o many computers == wintel and to be fair other companies like say Dell and of course Intel are very happy to help MS keep that monopoly.
Because of this monopoly however any decision MS makes will be very closely watched to see if it doesn't have an "evil" angle.
Apple is tiny and controls the desktop in about the same way that say Greenland controls world politics. Not at all.
Nobody would give one shit what Apple does with its desktop because nobody needs them or feels they don't have a choice but to use them. Same way the whole world watches the US and nobody watches greenland. So Apple can get away with charging for service packs. Imagine if MS did that. Apple gets away with some pretty bad customer support, just browse slashdot, all because it is just to small for people to be really affected.
With MP3 players however Apple has achieved if not a monopoly then at least a dominance. Nobody could possibly feel forced to buy Apple for their player because the alternatives are to hard to use or impossible to buy. (the whole linux vs windows argument).
We do however get to see Apple behaving very MS like. Stupid idiotic restrictions seemingly designed for nothing else then just because they can.
If you ignore the fanboys, always a smart move, then most Apple users will agree that Steve Jobs only saving grace is that he has never had the success of Bill Gates. He can get away with decissions that Bill Gates would be roasted alive for. Steve Jobs decides to cripple a product in order to boost sales of another? 99% of posts will point out that this is a sound business decision. Bill Gates gives a couple of million to disease research? 99% of posts will question what his real motives are.
IBM is a current favorite for their support of Linux and general coolness. Can you imagine that not too long ago it was MS that was the new upstart fighting the monopolist IBM?
While I am not saying that all companies are equally evil I am saying that Apple/Steve Jobs is easily just as evil as MS/Bill Gates. He just has more charm.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Motorola does NOT make phones for consumers, it makes them for carriers.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
There have just been way too many of these quasi-paranoid suggestions over the years to take any of them seriously.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Not to mention the battery issue.
Of a small rechargable battery, a good cell phone can give you about a week of stand-by time without recharging. Even if you use it a lot, you should only need to charge it about once every day or two while avoiding it every completely running the charge out.
If you let it run out, you could miss an important call, so this is important.
An MP3 Player's battery's life cycle is measured in hours of playback, and when it runs out, it's no big deal. You just need to hook it up to a charger for 1-4 hours sometime before the next time you want to listen to it.
Make the same device to both functions, and guess what your biggest problem is going to be.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Apple clearly limited the product to 100 songs on purpose. Whether or not they wanted to "sabotage" the MP3 phone market is another issue, but clearly the decision to limit the ROKR to 100 songs was a result of Apple's greed and stupidity. I think Apple was looking to establish itself in other markets outside of the PC-enthusiast market, and figured their meal ticket was the ROKR. But they didn't want the ROKR or similar MP3 phones to compete directly with their iPods, so they purposely limited the first high-profile MP3 phone, the ROKR, to 100 songs so that people would get the idea that MP3 phones are okay, but you need an iPod if you're a *real* music enthusiast. But the product bombed due this limitation, and it didn't work out. An example of greed and stupidity at its finest. Seriously, Apple doesn't deserve a free pass here. Most companies in the computer business have been afflicted by greed and stupidity at one time or another, and Apple is no exception.
My blog
Yes, but a device which does both functions all day long would probably only last about half a day (at best) per charge cycle, unless you used a battery which was bigger than an entire iPod nano... in which case you didn't really save a heck of a lot of space by combining the gadgets.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The problem isn't that integration is necessarily a bad thing. It's that the companies doing the integrating design for the lowest common denominator. Thus, you get a lousy PDA, a lousy MP3 player, and a lousy camera built into a phone that periodically crashes when you're making a phone call.
Those camera phones? They're fine for people wanting to just send a quick pic to their friends---hey, look, I'm in Rome---but I don't know of anybody who would consider any of them good enough for taking photos that they want to keep. That's why few people complain that all you can generally do with those photos is email them to other people (for a price). They don't use the phone to take pictures for their memories. They use the camera's phone for photos that don't matter. If they're on vacation and want photos to keep, they either take a separate camera or buy a disposable.
Single-purpose devices are consistently, more reliable, offer better functionality, and offer interfaces tailored to a particular function. Integrated devices are consistently less reliable, offer watered-down functionality (usually for political reasons within a company), and consistently have clumsy interfaces.
No, thanks.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I call BS.
The Apple Blog isn't doing any original reporting of its own -- it's just riffing off an article from Wired about the business relationship between Apple and Motorola. And it doesn't seem like they read that article very closely, either.
The Apple Blog asserts:
... which makes it sound like Apple pulled the limitation out of thin air. Apple Blog goes on from there to speculate about Apple's motivation for doing so.
But if you read the Wired article, the actual claim made is nowhere near as conclusive as Apple Blog indicates it is:
The Wired article makes it sound like the 100-song limit was less an arbitrary business decision and more a decision based on limits inherent in Apple's FairPlay DRM. Apple's never going to allow an iTunes client that does not use FairPlay, so if there's something about FairPlay-for-mobiles that means you're stuck with 100 songs, that could mean that there was no predatory action on the part of Apple to "sabotage" the ROKR. It was just "the cost of doing business" for using FairPlay.
If Wired had conclusive proof that Apple made an arbitrary business decision to limit the ROKR to 100 songs, they would have sourced that allegation -- i.e. run a quote from someone who would be in a position to know. But they didn't. If they had inconclusive evidence that Apple might have done that, they could have sourced the assertion to someone more tangential via the old "A source who asked to remain anonymous told us..." approach. They did not do that either.
What that indicates to me is that either (a) Apple Blog knows something Wired does not, in which case they should source their assertion independently of the Wired article, or (b) Apple Blog's speculations are ungrounded. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide which is the case.
Read my blog.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
It is speculation on a Blog. It is a post going to a blog from a person who writes on said blog. The blog has loads of ads. Lets do some math. Write inflammatory Story + Submit to Slashdot + Get a few people to click ads while reading said story = Profit.
/. posting peoples blogs so they can get some more money.
Nothing to see here, just another example of
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Apple didn't sabotage the ROKR, Motorola did. USB1 - it's 2005 and a new device came out with USB1? That's insane! It takes about an hour to fill the thing up!
OK, so it takes an hour. No problem, I'll just plug it into my computer before I go to bed and I'll wake up with a fully charged phone full of new music, right?
WRONG! The phone does NOT charge while connected to the computer!
What also sucks about the SU^H^HROKR:
When playing music, UI becomes unacceptably unresponsive. Like 2 seconds of lag between pushing a key and anything happening.
Despite the fact that you can play MP3s with it, you cannot set an MP3 to be your ring tone. What if I want my kids voice to be my ringtone? I will NEVER pay for a ring tone.
I couldn't get it to display any jpg I uploaded to it. It only wants to display images that came with it or were taken with it's own camera.
The built in amp wont drive my headphones very well (Etymotic ER4) so I tried plugging in my own headphone amp (Headroom BitHead). However, the ROKR headphone detection circuit has too low of a threshold and it cannot detect that an external amp with high impedence is plugged in: so the music continues to come out of the speakers! I had to wire a 10K resistor in parallel to get it to work. Then I discovered that the ROKR powers the headphones the entire time they are plugged in, not just when it is playing music. If you forget to unplug your headhpones when not listening to music your phone will quickly run out of juice.
The buttons have a weird shape and are hard to push without pushing the wrong buttons. I find it very diffcult to work the five way stick without pushing it in.
When you hold the phone between your shoulder and ear, nobody can understand what you are saying.
The shape of wall wart combine with the folding action of the terminals means that it is difficult to plug it into a standard power strip and if you get it plugged in there is a good chance it will loose connection as the terminals fold.
The UI is awful. There is no consistency. Sometimes it is "Back" sometimes "Exit" sometimes you push the left button to go back, sometimes you push the right button to go back.
Drivers within the phone have "crashed" disabling the BlueTooth. My phone told me I needed to reboot it!!
It's junk, I will never buy another Motorola phone.
Every day IU have to read about how bad my phone is.
I don't know what the problem is, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it.
It's a phone that plays MP3's and has half a gig of memory... to use anyway I like.
I can synch my address book and iCal via bluetooth and iSynch...
It takes decent photos and does video capture as well... with audio.
I don't have a lot of time to listen in headphones since I am self employed and
growing a business, so the 100 song limit is fine. In fact, I only put 60 songs on it so I have just under 200 megs left over for file storage.
I never expected this to be an iPod in a phone.
I expected it to be a phone with a JME Version of iTunes.
But every day I go online, it seems I am told I am a fool for buying one.
Every day I am told that this phone is sooooo bad.
So can someone please tell me why I am supposed to no like this phone?
Because I sure as hell don't know why.
But I do apologize for having bought one.
I'm sure you all know far better than I every detail about the ROKR E1.
More likely Apple wanted to test the waters to see how well such a product would be received without making an all out gambit in the market. This way, they can try it, but if it fails, well "we didn't have anything to do with the design, it just licensed our DRM". If it does well, I fully expect a slick-as-hell phone *designed by Apple* to come out, perhaps as part of a full size iPod offering...