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How iPods Took Over the World
An anonymous reader writes "The Observer has a piece today about the iPod's ascension to dominance of the mp3 player market. The author argues that it's largely the result of clever business tactics and the iTunes music store." From the article: "The second thing about the iPod: it puts you, not them, in control. Basically, the record labels are devotees of the Henry Ford business model: 'You can have any music you want so long as it's what I want to give you.' But using the cyberspace jukebox, you're no longer at their mercy. You don't have to pay for the four filler tracks on every album. You don't have to buy albums at all. You can put country next to classical, punk next to jazz, Barry Manilow next to Placido Domingo (wait, that's a joke)."
The iPod is popular because it looks cute and has an eye-catching marketing campaign of silouetted beautiful people dancing.
Nothing more.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I have both an IPOD, then a PSP, which I bought from a user fed up with both.
t m
I don't even touch the IPOD anymore, the PSP gets all the action... because it has wireless and that big beautiful screen, and a coolness factor. Even though it doesn't have a harddrive, it has the network, which is a bigger harddrive.
Everyone who comes over plays with the PSP. Nobody cares about the IPOD anymore. Even though I have it full of 20gbs worth of music. Playing LocoRoco demo on the PSP is so much more fun...
The main problem with the PSP is SONY, which have a psycho anal retentive grip on the platform. If they would open it up, put an HD in it, upgrade the wifi from b to g or even better, nothing else could touch it. They could even dump the space taken by the UMD and put 6 slots for more Sandisk or Duo mem cards.
IPOD enjoyed a brief window of coolness for a moment, then like all gadgets, was passed by... there's cooler things out there. There was nothing special to me about it, I already had a RioCar. As far as I was concerned, Apple just ripped off the idea from EMPEG, who ripped the idea off from car hobbiests who blazed the trail sticking homebrew boxes in their car to play mp3s.
Apple never innovated anything. They just steal ideas and then mass market them.
http://patft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-adv.h
No, it just works better than anything else that's easily available. It does not take too much probing to find annoying flaws in IPod and ITunes that are solved in programs like Amarok.
People don't care about Ogg Vorbis. People don't care about DRM if they don't notice it (and if you use an iPod along with iTunes and regular CDs, you realistically don't unless you're trying to give songs to your friends).
Hmmm, what could be more natural than plugging your IPod into someone else's computer? Remember tape swapping? IPod brings a nasty surprise by erasing all of it's contents when you try to SHARE. Getting your music back is a painful operation, not simply a button press. This punishment of sharing, evil on it's own, will also punish people who lose their music due to other failures.
There are many other annoyances which users of ITunes do notice. The most significant is not being able to sort by Artist and Album. Others are less important but almost as annoying as a whole.
For some reason, all other players fail on one count or another.
The main reason other players fail is Microsoft. WMP is a well documented dissaster of DRM and poor quality software. Even when other players include their own interface, they all want in on the Works for Sure, Napster/Purge M$ DRM service d'jour. Absent M$ and DRM crap, these players work well enough, especially if the user only bothers with CDs as you suggested.
Someone just starting out would do well to use free software for their entertainment.
The main obstacle to free software adoption for music is FUD and a false sense of dependence on M$ formats for "work". The free software user is less likely to have pirated crap because no one needs that crap anymore.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
whenever I mention that the first iPod generation is technically a bad thing (batteries, low transfer rates) and is user-unfriendly (I don't say iTunes wasn't intuitive, I just say it's not nice of apple to force people into using it) I get score 0 (troll)... why is that? even wikipedia knows this!
m s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#Common_criticis
so just because you like apple, dear moderator, doesn't mean my anti-apple comments were wrong. you like apple, I don't... a friend of mine likes microsoft, I don't... I like Linux, he doesn't... to me apple is a worse company than microsoft (because of an even more closed business model)
may their products be good or bad, I won't buy them as long as apple works like the church in the medieval times...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
It's costless if you happen to already have an expensive OS and an expensive portable music player. It's never been free software, which is why it's annoying the people who use it.
[your friends are stupid] ... You, sir, are an idiot. ... an idiot who is spouting FUD. Care to continue along this vein?
No, I think I've wasted enough time talking to you. My consolation is that you have wasted far more.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.