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Why the iPod is Losing its Cool
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian Unlimited has a provocative article on the recent decline in iPod sales: 'Analysts warn that the iPod has passed its peak. From its launch five years ago its sales graph showed a consistent upward curve, culminating in a period around last Christmas that saw a record 14 million sold. But sales fell to 8.5 million in the following quarter, and down to 8.1 million in the most recent three-month period. Wall Street is reportedly starting to worry that the bubble will burst.'"
Q4 03: 336,000
Q1 04: 733,000 (holiday quarter)
Q2 04: 807,000
Q3 04: 860,000
Q4 04: 2,016,000
Q1 05: 4,580,000 (holiday quarter)
Q2 05: 5,311,000
Q3 05: 6,155,000
Q4 05: 6,451,000
Q1 06: 14,043,000 (holiday quarter)
Q2 06: 8,526,000
Q3 06: 8,111,000
We have yet to see a year-over-year decline in sales. It is of course to be expected, that pundits seeking attention will continue to troll with "the sky is falling" articles, just like we'll keep hearing about how every also-ran is an "iPod killer".
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'm sure the Apple faithful (*) will violently disagree, but the parent's use of the word "fad" is not poorly chosen. Recently local MBA students (**) in a marketing class surveyed hundreds of kids in local high schools regard digital music players. Stress "digital music players", they did not ask about iPod, they did not lead the respondents(***). The kids were pretty well informed, there was a lot of comparing and contrasting of various players at school. iPods were the most popular device, no surprise there, but there was a surprise. The most popular reason for choosing the iPod over competitors was fashion, a status symbol. It was not ease of use, although ease of use was identified as a category iPod wins in. For technology and features Creative was the winner, the lack of radio was a negative for the iPod.
The team that did the survey and focus groups was very quick to point out that this was just a class project, small scale and localized. However it was similar to a pilot program that found interesting results and could be used to justify a larger national study.
(*) I own an iPod, I love it, I would buy another. I own PCs and Macs and use iTunes on both platforms. However I am not religious about music players or operating systems.
(**) Working professionals who have real jobs in industry, under the supervision of a marketing professor who does this sort of thing for rather large firms. This was a class project, not a consulting project.
(***) I was not involved in the project but did I sit in on the presentation of the results. My recollection is that the questions went something like:
Do you own a digital music player?
What models did you consider?
What model did you purchase?
Why did you purchase that model?
etc.
You missed the point, again. iTunes, by default is set to import CDs to AAC (I forget which bit rate). Changing to mp3 requires the user to go into the scary "Advanced > Importing" tab in the preference pane. MANY people, if not most, don't even notice that their ripping to AAC instead of MP3, since they use the "import" button on their CDs instead of choosing the "Convert Selection to [whatever]" option. The point is, to switch to mp3s you have to:
Only a very small segment of the population are going to go "out of their way" (even if it's a fairly small trip) to switch, and most don't even know it. By the time many people do realize that they're encoding AACs, they've been already working out fine for them on the iPod, so they have no real desire to switch. On top of that, when they DO get interested in learning the difference, they have the entire internet, as well as Apple Computer saying, "AACs are better than MP3s" (which they are).
So no, I would be willing to guess that a good 75% of ALL CD imported tunes on digital music players are AACs. The MP3 is dead, most people don't even know it.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
You need a special client to load it and it only loads AAC.
In your overbearing zeal you either don't know what you are talking about or you are lying. In addition to AAC files from iTMS you also have the choices of mp3, AIFF, and Apple lossless. That is just the audio music formats. You also have video and spoken audio (audio books) as choices. In your excitement to declare the king is dead you should be more careful about your accuracy or face being dismissed as an untrustworthy voice motivated more by spite than knowledge.