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Why Sony Should've Put Its Weight Behind Hi-MD
An anonymous reader writes "OSNews has an article making a case for Hi-MD: 'Currently, .mp3 players are all the hype. Everyone has one, and if you don't, you're old-fashioned. I do not have an .mp3 player. I tried to have one, but for various reasons it did not please me. I'm a MiniDisc guy. I've always been. MiniDisc has some serious advantages over .mp3 players, whether they be flash or HDD based.'"
Now you are saying that Sony should push MORE single source products? Everybody hates them for Beta-max, Blu-Ray and ATRAC-6, and you are looking to be MORE single source?
Do people actually care about mini-discs? Hell no. Although the mini-disc player preceded the mp3 player it is still lossy and is a useless unsupported media format. The compact disc has been around since 1982 and because most folks don't care about audio quality these days the CD will be the defacto media format for years to come.
Multiple codecs. Voice recording. FM radio/tuner.Without an external perpherial that does it.
You can record on an iPod
iPods come with voice recording straight out of the box? Wow. Belkin must not be getting many sales with its voice recorder.
the iPod is also not tied to iTunes.
Wow? Last time I touched an ipod you couldn't play music on it that wasn't synced via iTunes. I guess now you can use an ipod like a hard drive and just throw your music on it so it can play! When did that change?
the iPods are really quite rugged - and there are thousands of different protective cases available.
I wasn't really debating that at all... but if you wanted to go that route - click here here here... and there're lots more that you could find.
and you appear to be perpetuating these misconceptions.
And you appear to be a mindless fanboy.
Well said. I think it's a combination of people really liking the seamlessness of the "iPod experience" and not needing or caring about the additional features like audio recording, FM radio, etc. Besides, the majority of those features are available to people who want them as optional accessories for the iPod. And most people don't need ALL of them, they just might want one in addition to the iPod's core featureset. Which is easily done by adding an accessory, a process that's perceived by many as less complicated than learning how to use a competing device from the start. (Because it makes the initial learning process much less intimidating.)
Frankly I think iPod-bashing has just turned into a sort of holier-than-thou sport here on Slashdot. It's done with such fervor by some that I have to wonder if it doesn't spring from some deep-rooted insecurity.
As for the whole Hi-MD thing, it's no iPod killer. It would take a backpack, or at least some really stuffed pockets, to hold the same amount of data that an iPod would -- a regular iPod, not a Shuffle or Nano. And a MD based player isn't going to be small enough to pick up the people who want something as small as a Shuffle or Nano, so there's no competition there. One of the original selling points of the iPod was that you could keep your entire music library available at your fingertips, anytime. That remains true today, except it doesn't get said as often because people are used to it. Even though you can replicate the capacity of a 40GB iPod by taking one MD player and 39 extra discs, that's nothing like the convenience of having it all inside a cigarette pack unit. I can just imagine some of my friends trying to find that 1 disc out of the 39 scattered around the passenger-side footwell of their car, for the correct one that has the song on it they want to hear. It's not a pretty sight.
Sony basically killed (by not marketing) Hi-MD for the right reasons: it's doomed to be a niche format, popular mostly with geeks and amateur recordists. Its capacity is an order of magnitude too small for the form factor to be a true "iPod killer," and Sony's brand name in MP3 players to anyone who's familiar with their past attempts is worse than Yugo is to automobiles.
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