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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.'"
Apple got it's dominant position largely through a clever (and cool, and the early) advertising campaign. They're firmly fixed as the 'cool' mp3 player to get.
Everyone else who's tried to take on Apple has (as the article notes) has tried to differentiate themselves through technological features (doesn't work 'cause most people don't understand) or price (doesn't work 'cause people don't want a "cheap and nasty" music player). Differentiating by making iPod users seem like sheep is a pretty effective idea.... perhaps! (I am sure the inevitable replies will correct me).
The rockbox news is far more interesting - vendor supported rockbox would be a cool thing to have (wish Rockbox worked on my 3g iPod - soon I will have ogg goodness). But (according to the article), its just a rumour, not a confirmed fact) - the submitter should perhaps have linked to another article?
(Oh, and this was my favorite poster - allthough I think the "shackled" image is more appropriate for an iTunes Music Store mp4 than an ipod itself)
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
I hear Al Gore puts all his music in a Rockbox
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.
I... don't know who to support! It's Apple vs open source software! My world is crumbling - fanboy fighting fanboy, zealot fighting zealot. Cats and dogs living together!
SanDisk is the second most popular mp3 player? I thought Creative held that (with about a 5% market share).
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
Dear Rockbox,
Oh no, not that! Nobody has ever accused iPod owners of being slaves to fashion before! I'm sure everybody in the world will now rush out to buy your heroic piece of shit music player now. What ever will we do???
Love,
Steve Jobs
P.S. Why not just make unlicensed stickers of Calvin pissing on the Apple logo while you're at it? The rest of your ads are almost, but not quite, that cool.
The only "proprietary" format is the DRM from the Music Store, and maybe ALAC lossless (I don't know if ALAC is open or not). It plays industry standard MP3 and AAC files just fine.
As long as you don't care about buying music online, there is nothing proprietary about an iPod.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
What was the executive meeting for that one? "Hey, boss! Let's insult the hell out of our target market!"
and uses a 'street graffiti style' to create the illusion of a 'counter-culture uprising against the iPod'.
And nothing says "street cred" like a modern Western corporation. Hey, I be down wit dat, um, dogg... or word, or whatever. Shizzle-something.
The writer says, 'SanDisk is the first company to market its player as an ideological rather than technological alternative to the iPod.
Thanks SanDisk! I was just thinking this morning that, gosh, there simply is not enough mental illness^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ideology in this world.
I "accidentally" stumbled onto the iDon't website the other day when I was researching Ogg alternatives to iPod.
It's not so much that the iPod is without it's flaws, but for them to masquerade as a "revolution" counter-culture and have me find out that it's a sponsored astroturf really pissed me off. Not only that but the link to the SanDisk player on the site, also went to a SanDisk-sponsored page Anything But iPod.
I can judge for myself based on the qualities and features of a player for myself, but blogs are getting more and more worthless every day since big media will simply continue to masquerade with a false list of "satisfied customers" for everyone to see. A previous employer of mine has actually added astroturfers to their PR team that do nothing but spam forums with their excellent experience with the product they secretly happen to sell.
sigh...
If you're half as beautiful naked, you'd be 4 times as beautiful with twice as many clothes on.
You mean proprietary formats like mp3 and AAC? While iTunes only sells protected AAC and audible tracks, you can in fact use your normal mp3 and AAC encoded files on your iPod.
I think what you mean is you'd rather have Microsoft Plays-For-Sure DRM'd files instead of Apple's FairPlay DRM'd files, which is something totally different.
"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
Don't be a sheep and copy everyone else. Be an individualist and buy a completely unique looking MP3-player that resembles nothing else :-P
he only "proprietary" format is the DRM from the Music Store, and maybe ALAC lossless (I don't know if ALAC is open or not). It plays industry standard MP3 and AAC files just fine.
mp3 & aac are both proprietary formats too.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Their propaganda site www.idont.com used to have a message when you logged in with Javascript disabled that said "You're a sad individual who needs to get with the program." Really. This message was surrounded by a bunch of slogans like "Think For Yourself" and "Resist Conformity."
They've changed it to say "This site requires Flash and a sense of humor" but I thought the earlier message was a lot more funny.
Edith Keeler Must Die
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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Good luck with that advertising campaign, Sandisk.
...
adjusts iPod earbuds for slightly more comfort. Goes back to happily munching grass
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
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.
Apple's terms haven't been popularity, "counter-culture" or anything else. Yes, that's helped, a lot, but the biggest thing about it is it is easy. It's a music player. Nothing more. It's not a strange new fangled USB device that connects to the computer in some weird way, and you have to load weird software and jump through hoops to get it to work. Apple integrated everything it could, made it as simple as your CD player, and then sold it.
It's cool for geeks to have an iPod cuz they're expensive, but for most of the world, iPods work. I've known people who have bought most others and spent days figuring it out. With an iPod you go home, install iTunes, rip a CD, plug it in(or sit it in the dock) and that's it. You don't have to click through 15 menus to copy music over, you just connect it with the computer and it does the rest for you.
Not trying to sound like an Apple Fanboy here, but it looks like SanDisk is only targeting geeks with this. The counter culture thing is cool, but when you tell your friends you're gonna go get a sandisk whatever it's called, they'll say "Oh, that's really hard to use. I just sold mine on ebay and got an ipod" what's all that counter culture crap gonna do for you?
I don't say this to say "Apple Forever!" I'm saying that everyone else needs to make it simple. I'm tired of calls from friends and relatives who got an MP3 player and can't get it to work, the others I tell to get an ipod and poof, no trouble. Just cuz you have an MP3 player doesn't mean you know what an MP3 is, what a computer is, or how or why the CPU is not the big black box that everything plugs into with the Dell logo.
0.o
Sansa(TM) e270 MP3 Player 6GB Price: $279.99
Sansa(TM) e260 MP3 Player 4GB Price: $229.99
Sansa(TM) e250 MP3 Player 2GB Price: $179.99
A bit high there. My music collection won't even fit on their highest end product. Not to mention any videos you might want to load. They do realize it takes a little bit more than direct attacks against "the fad" to gain customers over.
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
Apple has made a career out and a fortune out of portraying their competitors as evil and dominating, and people who buy their competitors' products as boring and conforming. It is only fair that when Apple dominates a market, others do the same thing to them.
Neuros has chatted with the Rockbox developers too, last fall: http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/NonArch os#Upcoming_Models
I remember skipping the first 2 generations of iPods as completely irrelevant. (I already had a nice in-car MP3 playing stereo system, as well as a nice MP3 music collection on my shared LAN at home. I couldn't really grasp why I'd want to spend hundreds on the ability to take yet another copy of those same files around with me in my pocket - especially since most of my music listening happened at home or in the car.)
Then, a friend of mine actually invited me to play around with his new 3rd. gen. iPod, hands-on. I was immediately fascinated. The scroll wheel made it so easy to navigate the menus, and everything was on an easy-to-read display screen. It even had some basic PDA type functionality (contacts and calendar synching), making it more justifiable to carry around than I anticipated. Then I realized one could even boot a Mac from one of these things and use it for emergency recovery in case of a drive crash. A quick look at the available accessories for it made me realize another key point; the iPod was the industry standard! Anything you could imagine wanting to add on to a portable player was available in an iPod friendly version. They even had clock radios with iPod docks on top of them.
Then it struck me. If you can't find some use for an iPod, you're just not trying hard enough. That's the beauty in these things. Photographers can take one around as a mass storage "vault" for their digital photos, instead of juggling a handful of memory sticks or cards. In the current form, you can watch podcasts with training videos for software products like Photoshop, or just the latest comedy skit while you're on the bus or train. It can totally replace music CDs (or even CDRs full of MP3 files) in your car. Take it camping with external speakers... 21st. Century Boom-Box! Battery life is excellent and they "just work", as Apple always promises of their products.
You know what would really kill the iPod? A better product! iPod has one heck of a marketing campaign, but let's face it that isn't the only reason for it's sucess. I'm a techie just like most of you, and I'm borderline anti-Apple. I been wanting an mp3 player for a while now. After about 18 months of researching it, I went with the iPod for numerous reasons.
.db file has been edited by a 3rd party, it might not recognize the file anymore.)
1)It has by far the most accesories of any portable player.
2)It's by far the thinnest of any Mp3 player. The closest resemblace to the iPod is the Samsung Z5. The only problem is the 4Gb Z5 isn't much smaller than my 30Gb video iPod.
3)Quality. Before video was a factor, the only serious competitor to iPod was the Creative Zen Sleek. I'm glad I didn't get one. It started out nice, but let's just say it wasn't built for durability. Consumers were posting all over the net (it should still be on CNet and Amazon) about rattling noises. It seems that the earphones jack wasn't soildered properly, and thousands of people where having problems about it comming loose and falling inside the player. That's a great way to steer people away from Apple.
But it wasn't only hardware quality that was in question. The "Plays For Sure" nonsense was wreaking havok, and several people weren't able to install the software on Windows 2000. If that wasn't bad enough, the people that COULD install the player complained about being forced to keep the songs on their harddrive (no manual update like the one present in iTunes).
Now before I hear any of the usual iPod propaganda, let me dispell some of the most common rumors:
1)You do NOT have to purchase music from iTunes. It sounds obvious, but I actually heard a saleman in Radio Shack tell someone that the only way to get music in the iPod was to buy it. You would think he was just trying to sell more pre-paid cards for iTunes, but once I spoke with him, he actually didn't know. As a matter of fact, you don't even have to use iTunes at all.
(Disclaimer: I must warn you that I've heard stories of 3rd party software corrupting iTunes.db. It works fine with everything else, but once iTunes detects the
2) You do not have to buy QuickTime Pro to import movies. That was true once upon a time, that was changed in iTunes 6.02. However, iTunes is still slow, and neither iTunes or QuickTime can encode muxed videoes with audio, so you're better off using a free alternative.
3)There is an easy way to get your music back off of your iPod, but it isn't free.
Let's face it people : The iPod isn't perfect by anyone's standards, but it's the best player on the market by a landslide. If you want to bring Apple's domination of the mp3 market to a halt - give it some decent competition. Creative started now, so hopefully after a few years they'll have all the kinks ironed out. Until then, I can't recommend anything else.
Hey guys,
/. was for nerds? How come every discussion of the iPod, which is still every other day, we have the same arguements. Again and again. And again.
Whats with us, I thought
Examples like "iPod locks you to iTunes music store/iTunes the program", and that "iPods can actually play many open formats, like mp3......." etc? God, its 2006, "the consumers still pissed, can't take it anymore so i'm writing a list...", how so many of us dont know what the iPod CAN and CAN'T do?
I love my iPod dearly, wouldnt part with it for 10K, still rocking on my 15GB 3G, with like 2 hours of battery life.
---
From where I sit, I welcome the competition.
It's rush-hour on a Friday night. The train carriage I'm in has an odourous ambience of smug techno-arianism and revolting self-ordained hipness. I look over either shoulder and realise the source of my discomfort. All my fellow passengers have little or no surface features. To put it more clearly, they are in fact all silhouettes striking obtuse dance poses in what appear to be exaggerated representations of a person enjoying music in the privacy of their own home... the entire carriage is full of 2-Dimensional Private Dancers..
One of these creatures hands me a single white earpiece and says something like "Do you feel it?". I hear what appears to be RadioHead's "Ok Computer" coming from the earpiece. Barely suppressing a sudden onset of nausea, I sidle away. I reach into my pocket and crank up an Ogg Vorbis rip of New Order's 'Bizarre Love Triange' on my iAudio and breathe deeply.. i'm going to make it. Down the other end of the carriage I make eye contact with the only other three-dimensional being on board. She smiles nervously and points to her Sony Discman..
SanDisk, Bring The Humans Back.
yamiPod can play, rename, and retransfer music off of an iPod for free.
http://yamipod.com/
Shots: A Populist Parable
there's an awful lot of people looking to get away from iDRM
I've bought music from iTunes. If I stop buying iPods between now and the end of my life, I've got to either lose that music on the go, or re-buy it (and add that cost to replacing my iPod).
The MS system isn't as slick - but at least I know I'll have more choices of vendors to buy from in the future (who might actually try to compete with each other) and sooner of later one of them is going to produce something much better than the iPod of that time.
Sansa(TM) e270 MP3 Player 6GB: $279.99.
APPLE iPod Black 30GB: $279.99
Baaahhhh!
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