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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.'."
I have got to stop getting so surprised.
This will happen quickly because mobile phones are being turned over about every year.
Given the buying habits of people I know with the devices, so are iPods.
Funny, this post shows up right after I ordered an iAudio U2 after looking at the Vorbis Hardware wiki. Since Ogg Vorbis is the nerd's audio format, we nerds must have a Vorbis-compatible player, and Apple's offering, while stylish, doesn't have that. Unfortunately, a lot of portable Vorbis compatible players have limited storage size (mine is 1GB), but I'm never away from my laptop long enough to hear more than that much, and so can fill it up with new music when necessary.
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.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Yes, and an Xbox will have to become a Playstation, lions will lay down with lambs, and Apple will be forced to give up on OSX and move to Windows.
I have a phone already. I have an iPod.
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.
Begun, this iPod clone war has.
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.
When will people get over the Killer App mentaility? The iPod wouldn't sell nearly as well without network effects. I'll explain:
:(
iPod connects to iTunes, which does an excellent job of managing your music.
iTunes connects to the iTunes Music Store, which is a cheap(ish) and easy way to get tracks, as well as easily manage podcasts and subscriptions - if TV shows were available in the UK, I'd be using iTunes to get them, almost definitely.
iTMS connects with pretty much ALL the major music companies, so that when you buy tracks from X, it suggests Y and Z, which you may be interested in.
The combination of all of the above leads to Apple not only having market share, but DESERVING market share - their products are good, and if anyone comes up to me wanting to get into online music, I suggest iPod everytime.
However, as others have said, Ogg Vorbis support should be in iTunes, and either converted within iTunes or playable on the iPod. I can't see it happening anytime soon though
That only works if they can work with peoples existing music collections.
People have already bought a massive amount of music through itunes. Thus for those with an itunes locked in collection, it will need to be compatible with Apples DRM. So sony and motorola have to either partner with Apple, figure out a way to migrate Apples DRMed files to their service without an Apple partnership, or go after those individuals which have yet to purchase music through itunes, or who went with one of the competing services.
LetterRip
Er... Isn't that exactly what Jobs is saying by having private file formats and DRM?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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
The problem is that battery's won't keep up with both devices. My Cellphone can last 3-4 days with moderate usage (although if I do mobile web on it, the battery usage goes up). If I used it as a MP3 Player which I can already do, the battery would crap out in an hour...
To truely integrate a iPod and a cellphone, it would have to be as large as my last analog only cell phone which was quite large (I lived for a while without a phone). The reason is for the battery. The biggest thing holding a converged mp3 player and cell phone back is the battery. Only fuel cell tech or an advancement in bettery technology will drive this.
Gorkman
There is a plug in for iTunes that enebles playback and encoding of ogg files
http://www.illadvised.com/~jordy/
The long and short of it is, unless you can point to a million customers who would buy an iPod if it supported vorbis, and wouldn't otherwise, it's simply a non-issue to Apple. You are a vanishingly small proportion of their potential market.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
On the contrary, Apple got this market precisely because it had/has the best UI.
Argue whatever you like about particular pet features/compatibility, but Apple is #1 because they saw what an UI mess most MP3 players (both software and hardware) were and simplified them both so that normal people were capable of operating them without having to know anything about the underlying technology.
Very few competitors have even matched the simplicity of operation, and none have surpassed it yet. Until they do, consumers simply aren't going to be interested in jumping ship without massive financial incentive. And I don't see how anyone can undercut the iPod by a significant margin given Apple's huge volume discount on parts and continued willingness to forego profit for market share.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
It says:
"The only place you can easily buy material for your iPod, as opposed to stealing it, is the iTunes online store."
and refers to it as a "closed system".
Total nonsense. You can "easily by material for your iPod" on CD. Or, you know, from that dodgy Russian MP3 store.
But it's by no means a "closed system". I have 2,000 songs on my iPod and a total of 12 are from the iTMS.
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.
Author of "Attack of the Clones", a.k.a "It's April 2 and I don't know what to write about, so I'll write one trashing the iPod and you can all listen to it on PODCAST which I advertise on the bottom of my page".
When Nokia and Motorola make a phone that's as easy to use as an iPod (have you seen mobile phone menus?), is as simple as an iPod (have you seen mobile phone navigation?), is as reliable as an iPod (my brand new Sony Ericsson crashes every 3 days, my previous Nokia would crash every two weeks or so), with the battery life of an iPod (how long does your phone last while playing sounds? mine lasts about 1 and half hours max), the capacity of an iPod (this one I belive will happen sooner than the rest) and the tight integration with iTunes, which is god's gift to music store software and jukeboxes, then I'll believe an article that an Australian hack in Melbourne wrote on the day of the Melbourne Formula one.
Who needs that much space. Yeah right. I have heard that one ever since I bought a HD floppy.
There have always been devices that do it all and there have always been devices that do one thing only.
There are washing machines that can also function as a dryer. Funny thing, do you know you can still buy JUST washing machines + a seperate spin dryer + a seperate warm air dryer?
Yes thats right, spin dryers still exist despite the fact that nearly every washing machine can do it that function nowadays. Just not as well as a true purpose spin dryer.
Oh and the whole camera phone argument is faulty. NOBODY uses a camera phone as a replacement for a regular phone. The camera phone is the replacement of the throwaway/rented camera. Its function is to be always with you for those moments when you do not have a regular camera with you.
In fact that is the function of all the extra's on the mobile phone. Games? Fun for when you got your phone but not a real game system. Calendar? Usefull for when you do not got access to your real calendar. Music? Nice for when you forgot your real music player.
Offcourse some people will be happy with the limited capabilities that their phone offers them. Just as some people are happy with a 10 dollar MP3 player they got from the bargain bin.
That is not Apples market. Apples market is what used to be the Walkman->Minidisc/CD-man market. They effectivly replaced sony for portable audio.
Oh and if you think your phone MP3 players is not going to have DRM your insane.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
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.
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.
Apple is so safe with the iPod that it's not funny. Just look at how many people they're licensing the dock interface to. It's available in new cars, in aftermarket cart stereos, it's in all kinds of accessories. The prevalence of the dock connector simply makes the iPod more desirable than its competitors, and the fact that it's proprietary gives Apple a lot of safety.
Microsoft has implemented their "play anywhere" USB interface, and some car stereo makers are starting to implement it. Eventually, it will provide an alterenative to the iPod dock, but it looks to be somewhere in 2007 before it achieves any uptake.
The catch is that the "generic" MP3 player makers will be fighting each other on price, while Apple will be able to maintain much better margins on the iPod. So the iPod will eventually drop some market share, but it will remain profitable for Apple. Meanwhile, Creative and iRiver and all the others will be beating their brains out trying to undercut each other.
He who owns the interface owns the market. I didn't say it's good, it's just a fact of life.
Easy to use software *IS* special!
"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."
And that *is* unique. The UI on most cell phones suck. I don't know one software engineer with a cell phone who wouldn't pay a reasonable amount of money to get the firmware source code - even if only for the UI part of things - so that they could hack a decent UI onto the thing.
I haven't seen one cell phone with a decent UI (or I'd own the thing, no matter who I had to sign up with to get it).
-- Terry