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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.'"
Sometimes I cry
While I masturbate
While up late
Sometimes I cry
While I masturbate
While up late
Everything so beautiful
Beautiful
I start to cry
Tears in my eyes
A product shows consistent quarter over quarter growth for five straight years.
That same product experiences its first quarterly drop in sales(almost in half) and then declines again the next quarter. And throw in Apple warning iPod sales are likely to be weak in the upcoming quarter.
Wake the fuck up dummy.
The majority of iPod users use MP3s, which aren't affected by DRM. And DRM isn't anything at all new to iPod, either. There's no reason to assume the correlation that you take as a given. ... you should put in the extra work and have it at least make some kind of sense.
I think his pointing to the fact that some people have not bothered to set up their iPods is good evidence that there's too much work needed. How many $100 gadgets have you left in their box? Throwing away $100 says a lot about the effort required to make it work for the user.
Like someone else pointed out, iTunes and iPod are not easy. Easy is being able to plug the device in and use any client to talk to it through a standard mass storage protocol, without having to transcode your files. iPod does not do this. You need a special client to load it and it only loads AAC. Amarok or the free player of your choice and a cheap, multiformat player beat the shit out of the traditional iPod. Zune, of course, will be worse.
Availability of decent players is a problem that's going away. Want ogg, mp3 and usbfs? it's finally here and more are on the way. It costs about as much a Shuffle but offers more, like screen and menus. Yes, I've tried it and it works well. The device, like most, was stamped out in China. There will be more where it came from.
The real killer will be when devices such as the KDE phone mature. Apple has a head start and, limited by all the usual greed heads, they will make a nice phone. Eventually, free software will win out there too. Compare OpenZaurus to Windoze PDA's. Free software brings stability and features to embedded devices which are as obviously superior to their non free counterparts as free desktops are to non free counterparts. $140 laptops spell the end of non free software, devices and culture. The future is free and it will be much, much better.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
trendy faggots made the iPod big. Now that ALL trendy faggots have bought their iPods, the sales ae going down. Go figure. Creative rules!
The iPod reached its peak cause there aren't more people prepared to buy an overpriced device because of its coolness. Especially when 2GB MP3 players costing less than $100 are on the market. DRM is irrelavant because everyone loads the iPod with MP3s downloaded from the Internet. The iTunes serves to preserves relations with the content industry, so they keep making their money of piracy, by selling overpriced hardware. But that business model is going to have to change, as everything else in life. So Apple has to find another cool device to sell and please the Wall Street.
Because of overheating exploding batteries.
Duh.
Rating this post a 5: Informative just proves the moderation system here is still broken. You have decided you don't like the iPod and have built a huge pile of reasoning behind it, but you clearly don't speak for the majority.
iPod was just a big hype.. that was all.. and now its gone... Was like a blonde's fashion accessary...