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Apple to Face iPod Clone Attack
chr1sb writes "The Age has a commentary piece outlining how Apple's domination of the online media market is continuing to grow, but speculating that significant competition from the likes of Nokia and Motorola will rapidly relegate Apple's presence in the market to a corner, just as clone manufacturing of IBM PCs dominated the initial success of the Macintosh. From the article: 'The iPod/iTunes system will move into a niche with Macintosh computers because Steve Jobs has again stuck with closed architecture and total control. This will happen quickly because mobile phones are being turned over about every year.'."
Judging from what I have seen, no. Cell phone companies seem to want to LOCK people into buying songs over their networks. And, the two phones out that work with iTunes limit you to 100 songs. What would replace an iPod is an iPod with cellphone features. I don't need games on my phone. I like having the camera, but it is a pain to get pictures off it (I have a RAZR).
Give me something like a Treo, except in the size of an iPod or RAZR and I'd be happy to donate my iPod with video to someone.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
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I've gone through three portable ogg players, and found while they work and were compatible with OV to give me that warm fuzzy patent-free feeling, the battery life while playing ogg tracks was abysmal. I ended up using them as MP3 players just to get more listening time (3x the battery life on the latest samsung I had if I only played MP3s.)
In the end my newest player is an iPod, since all I was doing with the others was playing MP3s anyway. It rocks.
The important quote is buried towards the end of the article:
One device in my pocket or two? It's a no-brainer if you ask me.
This year they [cell phone makers] will start releasing phones with the same storage as iPods -- up to 30 gigabytes. iPods themselves will have to become phones.
This makes perfect sense. We all know cell phones are amazingly easy to use with simple and consistent interfaces. I can't wait to run out of batteries from listening to music so I miss important phone calls.
There is also the consistent leapfrogging Apple seems to do. This generation of iPods might be able to be almost feature-matched by the next generation of cell phones, but by the time the next generation of cell phones come out the iPod will be a VCR/TiVO as well as a music player.
I'm sure journalists then will be saying the iPod will die because the next generation of cell phones will play videos.
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Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
And just FYI it's not that the codec for Vorbis requires more power to decompress (well not significantly), but that custom mp3 chips beat generic chips for power usage. These day even Apple are moving to generic chips in order to play AAC so the players should all suck the same amount of power.
Er... Isn't that exactly what Jobs is saying by having private file formats and DRM?
Nope. Apple doesn't have a monopoly. They simply have no competition. The reason they have no competition is because other companies spend their time whining instead of building a better product.
Apple, meanwhile, just builds better products.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
If they want to kill the iPod, they have to kill iTunes, the iPod and MusicStore in one blow. The iPod success is not just a result of better hardware. It's the whole package, the iLife integration, the fact that it simply works without any hassle.
I organize all my music on my Mac, plug in the iPod, and whooops, shazam or whatever, it's all in my pocket without any technical fuzz.
This may not be the right crowd to voice this opinion in... But in this case I don't want umpteen technical options, and I can live with Apple as a music industry near-monopolist. As long as it works. If someone does it better, fine. Good luck. A colleague just told me that he finally could use his iPod without iTunes due to some hack. Nice! To me, that is a solution without a problem.
Techie stuff is work. Music is play!
And I'm not waiting for an iPod-wannabe (aka iPod-killer).
I'm waiting for something new.
-- somewhat_distant
According to Kohler's Wikipedia stub he has been at it for 35 years. He is ubiquitos here, turning up in the middle of our TV news with some of other spin graph to punctuate the too familar droning to the day's 'numbers'.
He is trying to become his own industry, in pale imitation of the likes of Crikey who have actually been prepared to do the hard yards and enjoyed some deserved success. But I've yet to hear Kohler say anything perceptive. Certainly this piece lacks any suggestion of coherence.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
Lets see: The article claims that this year phones are going to be launched with 30gb storage, the same as an iPod.
Mmmm, what they really mean is that 1 phone is going to be launched, possibly this year, in japan, that is going to cost a fortune, eat batteries for lunch, not going to tiny while having the storage of the smallest 5th gen iPod.
Doesn't exactly sound like it is going to sweep the market. In fact the mobile phone market is incredibly fractured with not a single manufacturer having the kind of market share that apple enjoys in the mp3 player market. Let alone that a single new model will achieve anywhere near the penetration that iPods have.
Oh but there is the anology to the PC's where IBM clones pushed Apple into a corner. Yup that is true.
Except that how does this relate to mp3 players? The "clones" arrived first in this case. It was the tiny asian "clone" companies that launched first and only later did Apple join the party and even later did the real big boys like Sony get involved. If anything this is the exact opposite of what happened with PC's. This would have like if Compaq and the other clones had their PC market gobbled up by IBM.
For some reason when it comes to IT most people seem to loose common sense. Surely we all here remember how the N-cage was supposed to take over? Nintendo better watch out with its GBA.
Didn't happen.
Some people point to camera phones as to how the mobile phone can replace single purpose devices by combining them into the phone.
Except that this did not really happen. The camera phone did not replace regular camera's. Or do you really record your kids birthday party on your mobile phone? No the quality seperate camera market is still there. What the camera phone replaced is the throw away camera and incredibly cheap, good for 1 holiday, market. What it mostly did however was expand the market. There are now simply more cameras about then there were before.
I think the same will be true for mobile phone MP3 players. They will partially replace the very cheap players and partially expand the market so that people who never owned a portable music player before will have one now.
The iPod is as threathend by the mobile phone as the SLR camera is by the camera phone. Or the GBA is by the N-cage. Or the computer is by the PDA.
Offcourse the PDA is under threath by the smart phone and one day it may be true that the mobile phone will be so powerfull that it can replace the iPod. Looking at current tech I think that is still years if not decades away.
But a headline off "Business as usual" does not sell ads does it now.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"Nope. Apple doesn't have a monopoly. They simply have no competition."
This is not accurate. Apple has a potential monopoly because they have secured almost 90% of the market and refuse to license their DRM. That's monopolistic behavior. Can you imagine if Microsoft, with their massive market share on PCs didn't license WMA/WMV, and insisted those formats be used with its systems?
It's important to separate logic from fanboy rose-colored glasses. Apple has made an incredible product, but has already been slapped in France (who cares, I know), and the US judiciary has already approved a motion to go forward with antitrust action against them if someone should so choose.
The question for Apple is this--if they open up their DRM, will people still buy iPods? I think the answer is absolutely yes, and they should stop being so stubborn about something that could potentially cripple them in the courts. If they thought scratch-tastic Nanos were an annoying issue, hundreds of lawsuits around the world will be worse.
The thing is that I, as being the owner of SE W800i walkman phone, easily can imagine how it may affect iPod market share in the future. In fact it definetly already impacts Nano share, just that the markets are currently not overlapping too much (the persons that would be most likely to buy nano are choosing crappy STYLESTYLESTYLEOMGLOUDRINGTONES phones that isn't exactly the target market for SE K750/W800 devices).
The phone has 512 mb of memory and a dedicated button that launches pretty good interface for mp3 player. And the convience to be able to listen to whatever you want and don't discover that you have missed calls or sms's later is excellent. Also I am not a constant listener - I prefer to listen at home on my slightly more adequate system (of course the main problem is that Beyerdynamic headphones are a bit too bulky to walk around with them and then you would need a device that could supply them with adequate power... (iPod cannot)). But for occasional listening to some tracks while on commute or just heck for it - it's perfect. I was thinking about Nano earlier (again, small and suits my needs to drop a few favorite albums in mp3), but alas...
Instead of making ad hominem attacks on everyone who disagrees with you, why don't you add something of value to the discussion?
The iPod has dominated the personal music player (PMP) market since its introduction in 2001. In this quarter alone, iPod sales are expected to approach 9 million units.
With sales numbers like those, it's easy to see why other companies have been trying (unsuccessfully) for the last five years to take market share away from Apple. It's equally easy to see why Apple has the R&D budget to stay one step ahead of its rivals.
What you don't seem to grasp is that the iPod devices drive music sales on iTunes. Apple can afford to break even or to lose money on each iPod sale because the average iPod buyer loads the iPod up one $.99 song at a time through iTunes.
To compete with Apple, a company would have to develop an business model in which PMP sales were subsidized by later music sales. That means creating a viable iTunes competitor. So, how do you convince the record labels to sign on with your music store and how do you get prices from them that are as good as what they give Apple? You don't have an installed base of millions of PMPs, so they aren't looking at a tempting market that they need to reach. Many other companies have already tried to compete with iPod and failed, so what makes your venture more likely to succeed?
But let's suppose that you have pictures of all of the major record execs having sex with donkeys and that's how you get the same music availability and pricing that Apple does for iTunes. Now how do you convince your company's management that you can out-iPod Apple? How do you get them to give you the massive sums of R&D money needed to build something that is as pleasing to the consumer as the iPod? How do you make them believe that your efforts will be any more successful than those of Creative Labs, Archos, Samsung, SanDisk, or the myriad other players, most of which came and went with little fanfare?
Now how do you convince your vendors to provide you sweet deals on everything for lithium-ion batteries to headphone jacks? How do you get the prices for components that Apple does? Toshiba knows that they will sell 30+ million hard drives through Apple, so they are willing to give Apple the best pricing possible. How do you propose to get that kind of pricing? By saying "we're going to sell a lot, too"?
I've owned personal music players from Creative Labs, Rio, and Archos because I was loathe to give Apple my money. But the fact is that the other players were large, clunky, and poorly constructed when compared with the iPod offerings. Go into any Best Buy and look at the personal music players. The iPod simply looks like a product from five years in the future when compared with the competitors.
While I expect that some well-heeled competitor will come along to challenge Apple, I don't expect it to happen soon. The only way that I see it happening anytime soon is if a court rules that Apple's iTunes/iPod bundling is illegal and orders Apple to open up its DRM and allow competing products to use iTunes for music purchases.
Hopefully, that was a lot more thought-provoking than the "Waah!" stuff that you posted.
There'll always be a market for standalone mp3 players, but I think the article is right to suggest that that market is going to get squeezed by mobile phones, mainly at the low end.
My Wife's new mobile phone has half a gig of memory in it which she can store songs on, and she can upgrade it with a memory stick if she wishes. The phone came free with a new phone contract and she's not paying any more that she was on her old plan.
So she's basically set up with an mp3 player without having to spend any more money than she would have anyway. Sure, she'll probably get a memory stick to boost the capacity, but that'll still not cost her that much, and considerably less than an iPod nano with a similar capacity would.
Now, I'm sure all of you with high-capacity iPods are scoffing at my Wife's meagre storage space on her phone, but many people just don't need that high capacity. My current mp3 player (A Rio Carbon) holds 5Gb, and I don't have any space problems on it. It'll not be long before phones with a similar capacity are commonplace.
So for those who don't require high capacity, a phone with mp3 playing is going to be an obvious choice; especially as you then only have one object to carry around.
I think it's interesting to compare it with low-end cameras and PDAs; Camera phones nowadays are approaching the quality that they can be a reasonable replacement for the low-end pocket point-and-shoot cameras, and phones now do many of the simpler functions of a PDA. Those who wish for a large collection of music at their fingertips will stick with their iPods, but many others (and I suspect this is a large chunk of the market) will migrate to mobile phones.
The reason people buy iPods and love them so much is the same reason people buy pre-packaged vacations or use travel agents. Sure, you could go book your tickets with an airline, find a hotel and book that, research a dozen locations to go to at your destination and when they are open, and do all the logisitcs, or you can just have somebody else do it. Sometimes its worth the fee to save your time.
Sure, my iPod cost more than a lot of other stuff on the market, and it doesn't have video, but it's so freaking easy to use. Now, I love playing around with tech toys like the next guy, but ease of use is ease of use. Pop in a CD, rip it and file it away without worrying about setting up the files and folders correctly. If I hear an artist Ilike, I can download their latest album in 4 or 5 clicks instead of driving over to Best Buy. Pop my iPod in, and it puts all my new music on, updates my playlists, puts my photos on, and updates my Outlook calendar. Simple. I didn't have to do anything. I didn't have to open up 4 programs like I would have to with other playesr or a cell phone.
So why would I possibly buy one of these merged cell phones and music players. All of their synching software I've seen in bloatware with extremely slow upload speeds. Very few allow native mp3 playing, so you have to run their converter for half an hour. And given my level of trust for the cell phone industy, I can only assume there is some low level spyware involved so that I can get some fun text messages telling me I'll enjoy the next Black Eyed Peas single. Then I can hop in my car where my cell phone won't play to my radio, so I hve to use headphones. My battery will be dead by the time I get to work. Gee, what a fun end-user eperience that will be.
All of that being said, I really do want to see what a rael iPod killer would like like. My bet is it will probably come from Apple themselves (PowerPod?). In the mean time, I'm happy with a product that I get a kick out of playing with that is also simple enough for my mother to use (seeing 60 year old woman who can barely surf the internet be able to plug in a Shuffle and use it correctly is amazing).
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
I will not buy a cell phone with music capabilities. Or, if not given a choice (something the cell phone networks seem to just LOVE to do), then I will disable/ignore the music features.
When are the cell phone companies going to realize that most of us just want a simple voice communications device? We don't want music, video, web, still camera, video camera, etc. etc. in our phones. All of these features are seldom used and clutter up the interface, not to mention sucking battery. We want a compact phone with as much battery life as possible and the best sound quality possible, and that's IT.
I disagree that iTunes music store is excellent.
1. iTunes music store has a selection of music no better than what can be bought on amazon.com (on CD) - it should have stuff that is out of print - particularly if it is out of print but was once available on CD.
2. iTunes music store should let you redownload music you've bought for no charge.
3. iTunes music store should offer apple lossless downloads - this is particularly important because if I wanted to switch to a non Apple player in the future I would want to be able to reencode from the raw PCM and not have to do any transcoding (or worse be locked into, or even theorecticeally have music my orphaned by Apple)
Until these issues are fixed I only buy from emusic.com (for price and -APS encoding) or on CD (small price premium for freedom)
I don't know what the big deal with iPods are and why you need a seperate device. Decoding MP3's is pretty trivial now days and thanks to Samsung and Apple, 4GB's of storage space in a cellphone will be pretty trivial in the next year or so. With highspeed digital cell networks becoming more common, music could be directly downloaded to the customers device without syncing to a PC. That right there is a BIG deal because it makes things even easier for the consumer.
Do people really think that apple having "easy" to use software is so special? Nothing Apple does is really all that unique, it's just a matter of quantities of production and spending the time to develop the interface right.