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."

Comments

Doesn't add up.

[H_Fisher]

Has Apple done such a thing before?

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.

Re:Doesn't add up.

[dirk]

Well, they didn't sabotage it in that it doesn't work right, they just put so many limitations on it that people would want something with more functionality (ie the iPod). It works, and it works great with iTunes. But how many people are going to want more than 100 songs at a time? My guess woul dbe almost everyone. And in that case, they have to go to an iPod since they already purchased songs from iTunes. So basically the ROKR will get people in, and then they realize that it is WAY too limited, so they immediately have to upgrade to something usable.

It amazes me how much like MS Apple is in it's tactics. They are easily as manipulative and evil as MS, but they seem to get a free pass from most on /. because they aren't MS. Imaging for a second if there was no MS and Apple was the monopoly? How much worse would that be for consumers?

Re:Doesn't add up.

[Gothic_Walrus]

"But how many people are going to want more than 100 songs at a time? My guess woul dbe almost everyone."

My 512MB iPod Shuffle (which I received for free) can hold maybe 150 songs at most. That translates to eight and a half hours of music with the 128kbps AAC compression, and that's more than enough for bus rides or walking to classes and then swapping out songs when I get bored with the mix in a few days.

100 songs is more than it sounds like.

Re:Doesn't add up.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

this does add up my friend, another article like this was available the day after the crappy rokr came out. apple likely plans on releasing a phone that they design themself in the future.

How does that add up? You claim they intentionally made a crappy product branded with the itunes name and they made it crappy to promote sales of a new phone they plan to release with the itunes name? It's called poisoning the brand and it is not a good thing. People that buy a crappy itunes phone are unlikely to buy another. And will advise others against it, even if all the drawbacks of the first one are solved.

Re:Doesn't add up.

[Xzzy]

Yeah, no kidding. I can usually make do with a single audio CD's worth of music for a few days before needing to swap out.

If the ROKR is failing, the only reason it's doing so is because the cell phone market is absolutely saturated. Everyone that wants one already has a phone, and phones aren't fashion items anymore. iPod is.

Re:Doesn't add up.

[Dasher42]

You know, Apple doesn't tie up large sections of the industry in backwards, proprietary technology. They're cutting edge. They give back to open source projects. If they do something wrong, you can find other replacements and not feel starved for support. So what if they want to tweak the capabilities of their product line?

Apple and MS just don't remotely equate.

Re:Doesn't add up.

[Golias]

If the ROKR is failing, the only reason it's doing so is because the cell phone market is absolutely saturated.

DING DING DING DING!!!

Look at that! Somebody finally got to the crux of the issue.

I think the ROKR looks like a nifty phone, but there's no way I'm buying one because my current phone (also made by Motorola) required that I subscribe to two years of T-Mobile service in order to get it at a sensible price. That was only a few months ago.

To buy an ROKR, I would have to break that contract (paying an obscene early-exit fee), and sign up for Cingular (another good service provider, but considerably more expensive than my current plan.)

Ultimately, that would mean hundreds of dollars just to make this minor upgrade over my current Motorola phone (which I'm far from 100% happy with, by the way.) I'm far better off waiting another year and a half for my current service contract to expire and see what's out there at that time, or else just attaching a shuffle to my current phone with hot glue if I really need an all-in-one device so damn badly.

I'm sure I'm far from the only person out there in such a position.

Re:Doesn't add up.

[Lumpy]

exactly.

that is why I have a treo 600 in my pocket.

I have a mp3 player that works great, interrupts the song with a ring during a call and allows me to answer by pressing a button on my stereo headset nd take the call with the headset. I get the bonus of getting rid of my palm PDA with it and have that legendary stability of palm (the reason why I got the 600 instead of the 650)

plus I can watch tv shows and movies from my replayTV or computer on it as well.

so it doesnt use itunes, big whoop to me and many other people.

this phone is not the first mp3 player/phone to ever exist even though they are trying to market it that way.

Maybe, but Motorola helped.

[Matey-O]

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!

Unlikely

[Doomstalk]

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.

i also heard...

[CDPatten]

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.

C'mon

[Otter]

I can believe that Apple didn't want to cannibalize their own line, and made their deal with Motorola with that in mind.

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.

Does everything have to be a conspiracy?

[Quiet_Desperation]

The X-Files was a good show, folks, but it's time to move on.

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.

Re:It's probably true

[Golias]

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.

Re:It's probably true

[dgatwood]

Because despite using the same CPU, they don't all have the same physical interface. A cell phone sucks for playing MP3s. It also sucks at being a PDA. A PDA could play MP3s well. A PDA could emulate a phone fairly well, but those tend to result in hideously bulky PDA phones instead of a phone program on a PDA with a headset attached (which would work fairly well).

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.

Bad "journalism"

[jalefkowit]

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:

Apple mandated the artificial 100 song limit on the ROKR.

... 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 Motorola team soon discovered that working with Apple means making compromises. A key part of the iTunes package, for example, is FairPlay, Apple's digital rights management software. Ostensibly, DRM exists to benefit the music companies, but it's an equally handy control mechanism for the tech outfits that develop it - companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Apple. FairPlay would set limits on the new phone: It couldn't play music from any major online store but iTunes. It couldn't hold more than 100 songs.

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.