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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!
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.
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."
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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
Second most popular? Hell, I didn't even know sandisk made an mp3 player.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Sansa(TM) e270 MP3 Player 6GB: $279.99.
APPLE iPod Black 30GB: $279.99
Baaahhhh!
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