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SanDisk Baits Apple And Woos Rockbox
An anonymous reader writes "CNET reports that SanDisk is courting open source developers to port Rockbox to its popular MP3 players. SanDisk is currently the world's second most popular MP3 player manufacturer after Apple. Rockbox is an open source OS for most major MP3 players. The article also talks about SanDisk's subversive new anti-iPod advertising campaign which calls iPod owners 'iChimps' and uses a 'street graffiti style' to create the illusion of a 'counter-culture uprising against the iPod'. The writer says, 'SanDisk is the first company to market its player as an ideological rather than technological alternative to the iPod. To do so is to fight Apple on their own terms.'"
I vaguely remember the days when culture had something to do with people, not just competing marketing departments...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Differentiating by making iPod users seem like sheep [idont.com] is a pretty effective idea.... perhaps!
The funny thing is that anyone who changes their mind based on this stupid marketing campaign really is a sheep.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
Apple got its dominate position by creating a effective and user freindly UI to a useful and stylish bit of hardware. If the underlying UI & Hardware weren't up to the task, the ipod would have fallen flat when the first generation of users didn't like them. I owned a pre-ipod player, it had a painful UI, so despite its slick hardware, I hardly ever used it and bad mouthed it to freinds.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
"Fighting Apple on their own terms," they say? I see it as more of a "sinking to their level."
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Since it has that sort of stink of knee jerk "anti-corporate subversion" advertising (see David Foster Wallace's E Plurabus Unam), it fails to astroturf. The graphic mentally reinforce "ipod ipod ipod ipod" in the viewers subconscious. In the end, it just makes you feel sorry for all of Apple's competitors.
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
Siding with Microsoft and a conglomeration of other Plays For Sure companies sure sounds like stickin' it to the man and independent thinking to me! *shakes head*
It is obvious that these companies don't get it. Instead of trying to compete by offering a compelling and highly integrated product they've moved on to what is essentially name calling. Next they'll say that every time you buy an iPod Jesus cries and kittens die.
Just produce a must-have product and the sales will take care of themselves! Until that time I'll keep buying iPods because that is what iPod+iTunes is!
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Psychologists have consistently shown that people actually prefer fewer choices to more choices. It just makes life easier and more straightforward, even though it is counterintuitive.
Part of Apple's strength is that there aren't ten trillion different models with model numbers to purchase, only 3 that come in difference sizes. Has anyone seen Creative's lineup of MP3 players? They have an MP3 player for every occasion.
Copying one part of Apple's marketing strategy alone is not sufficient to match their unparalleled marketing genius.
Your knee hath jerked too soon. First, engage brain.
The primary target market for Sandisk is people who don't have an iPod. Why? Because they already have a fucking mp3 player. Their targeted market segment (with this campaign, especially) is the people who can't afford an iPod, or who don't want to patronize Apple because of the lingering air of fanboyism that permeates their products.
These people will likely respond favorably to being led to believe that they are not sheep (though clearly anyone who buys based purely on advertising is indeed a member of the sheeple at large.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Currently the SanDisk line required Window XP and WMA 10+
:-))
So let's say it's tito raging against staline, or Franco against Musolini.
If they offer a rockbox version and find some distributors willing to support music and video distributions in some open format i'll be able to aplaud.
Right now I'll keep my PMA400 (archos PDA+Player Linux based
Slightly off-topic, but I'd like to mention (regarding your search for Ogg alternatives to iPod) that Rockbox runs awesome on my 5G iPod. Originally I would have preferred that apple would have stepped up and provided the Ogg support on its own, but the features and UI of Rockbox are actually better than the stock Apple firmware. There are some bugs and missing features to contend with (lack of video playback), but if necessary you can have rockbox boot back to the original firmware!
what the hell is a 'junk character', anyway?
The funny thing is that anyone who changes their mind based on this stupid marketing campaign really is a sheep.
You know, now I think about it, perhaps such a negative (and as others have pointed out, blatantly astroturfing & subculture mining) campaign won't work so well.
I do partially agree with you - I think anyone who changes their mind and buys a sandisk based on this stupid marketing campaign really is a sheep, but I think someone who sees this campaign and just thinks about it a little more next time they buy a mp3 player is not....
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Apple got it's dominant position largely through a clever (and cool, and the early) advertising campaign.
Apple got its position by having the foresight to think of their product as a "premium" device. They put in lots of storage capacity, made the thing as small as possible, made more than half the case out of metal, and designed an interface very carefully. When that was done that had a player that was much more expensive than the competing players but much more useful, and the market responded.
Consider that the supposed "iPod killers" today still often have plastic-only cases, are often twice the volume, and usually have a confusing interface (see the Zen Vision:M).
tried to differentiate themselves through technological features (doesn't work 'cause most people don't understand)
Nonsense; people know quite well what an FM tuner and a stopwatch and a voice recorder are. They just don't care, or not in large numbers (and various add-ons exist for the iPod anyway). I told my dad that other players included a built-in radio, and he told me that the reason he wanted an iPod was that radio now sucks.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
How can we trust, then, that their reviews are both accurate and meaningful if they do not review iPods? That means their reviews are effectively unable to compare to an iPod because they cannot review an iPod to the same standards as the rest of the MP3 players on that site.
GPL Deconstructed