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Zune Sales Not So Bad After All
pyrbrand writes "Despite the iFanboy jabber that Zune sales were horrific, CNN has a story to the contrary. Turns out Zune was the #2 Digital Audio player in its first week of sales. Not a bad start for the challenger to the iPod throne. As others have pointed out the Amazon sales rank may have been thrown off by Zune sales being divided between the three colors."
Aren't the sales for ipods also divided between all the various models and colors?
Yes - every SKU that is different is a different product. So, for example, the red nano is one product. The black nano is another product. The black and white 30GB video iPod are two products. And so on.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
You must have read Mr. Gruber's thoughts on these Amazon Zune sales, as he said the exact same thing about the record player.
Or... let me think... DJ's with thousands of albums that they want to convert to CD or MP3 for DJing instead?
Indeed.
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;P
In fact, when I posted this comment there were 10 iPod moddels in the overall top 25 (not just electronics) and no Zune. Certainly this changes regularly, but come on... There are even 2 other players in that first page list. The black Zune doesn't even show up until the third page (63). You have to look up the others directly...
Brown 285, and White 484
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=209024&op=Rep
The real story here is that someone is buying the brown one.
But seriously, maybe it's selling well, but only if you count the first day sales (and not too many more days) does it compete with an iPod.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Any DJ that would take a tremendous leap backward like this should be stripped of his PA and his pseudonym. It would be like Eric Clapton trading his guitars for a copy of Guitar Hero 2.
The future isn't here until I can type "car keys" into Google and have it say "You left them in your pants last night."
If you want a decent player, get a Cowon A2, X5, etc. They use Linux and play it all.
Oh please. If I'm buying a music player, there are a few considerations:
Does it sound good?
Is it easy to navigate?
Can I transfer music realtively easily?
I don't give a tiny rats ass whether it's Linux or MS or Apple or some other dude. I don't care. And the unwashed masses buying these things care even less than I do.
Not sure if this fixes the problem completely, but I noticed the bug referenced in your sig was marked as duplicate--the referenced bug has since been closed (fix committed to CVS on the 6th of November)
The first week, the Zune was indeed in the top ten at Amazon - it's only after that the sales dropped like a rock to the current place below 50th. So what the article is saying is not inconsistent with what was observed from Amazon sales rank.
So the article is only telling us what we already knew from reviewing Amazon sales - sales were good the first week, when the media blitz worked but before word of mouth cooled opinion.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
After the first week boost, the Zune feel rapidly while the Sandisk stayed where it was - right in the middle of the iPods in the top fifteen or so MP3 players.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You won't comment on this "totally unbiased" article, but you have no problem commenting on another "totally unbiased" article called "How iPods Took Over the World", huh? Why is that?
Camoflage when the drop down an airliner's toilet?Nice reference, and heres that story again
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html;jses sionid=32DA4C09BEB07855088A6F20EBB8C4DE?topicId=11 211166&sid=1
--- Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity
I'm talking about electronica DJs. Many still use vinyl, but are moving to CD's (CDJ Equipment) and some laptops (eugh).
There are filters that recreate the LP sound for any digital media (in fact it's just a low pass filter cutting at 16 kHz, a filter to get the dynamic down to 60 dB from the 96dB a CD offers, and some sound engines also offer the additional random crack).
The problem with people not liking the CD sound is that of education: During your whole childhood you had the HiFi LP as the right sound. Now something with a different characteristic comes out (more dynamic, higher frequencies), and of course this sounds "metallic" and "hollow" to you (because metallic, hollow sound needs more dynamic and more high frequencies and is not easily reproduceable with an LP). What you are actually hearing is the more natural recording. It's no problem to cripple that down to the LP sound at all.
Also, how you can think Bamafan77 was comparing the Zune with ODF is beyond me. Your reading comprehension is very poor. Bamafan77 was comparing "Zune/iPod" with "Office/ODF" and his obvious point was "having choices." ODF and Zune will hopefully bring real alternatives to the dominant Office format and dominant iPod DRM.
My day job has me working retail, and I'll have to say that the iPods are running circles around the zune. We've sold 1 zune since the first shipment came in and we've already gone through about 40 ipods. I DON'T think Apple has anything to worry about.
compare defectivebydesign
Light reading for when you wish to learn more and stop babbling stupid stuff: Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. When reading, keep in mind that it is a theorem, not a theory. For all practical matters, it is mathematically proven, and states that: "Exact reconstruction of a continuous-time baseband signal from its samples is possible if the signal is band limited and the sampling frequency is greater than twice the signal bandwidth."
I'll add it is not only possible, but in practice extremely easy for the [0-20Khz] range, given the current state of electronics.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
"Zune is basically going to pretty much kill off all non-iPod players"
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Not likely. Despite the title of the article, go take a look at the actual sales rank of the MS-Zune players on Amazon. The black is #52, the rest are significantly below that (greater than 250). Sansa has a player in the top 10, and a 2nd one at number 11, Creative has a player in the top 20, Sansa has a couple more scattered around the top 100. Apple has players everywhere on this list. Everywhere.
Again, I urge folks to look at the actual Amazon site instead of reading articles about Amazon.
Here's the link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/electronics/
Keeping in mind that the holiday is when a big portion of sales, unless MS drops the Zune prices down by about 40%, this this is headed for the bottom pretty quickly. While that's obviously my opinion, all you need to do is watch the trend of the player. Just the novelty of this thing should have kept it in the top 10 until xmas. But to fall to #52 in just a week is pretty amazing.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
"For all we know, the numbers are 70% Apple, 9% Zune, 8.99% SanDisk."
You're close. According to this Seattle PI article, in unit sales it was iPod 63%, Zune 9%. In dollar share, it was iPod 72%, Zune 13%. No numbers are given for Sandisk.
Here's a shocker - the submitter works for Microsoft.
Because I work at RadioShack and none of the 30 stores in our district have sold any. Where as my tiny store has sold over ten iPods in the past week. I live in Madison just off State Street, and EB Games on State (The Biggest shopping street in Madison) hasn't even sold any to any of the music crazy wealthy students yet.
apple has consistently been dropping the prices of their ipods. i think a more likely scenario for the price drop was to leave space at the top for a "super ipod" or the true video ipod that's been rumored. they dropped the price of their whole "full-size" line rather than just the 30Gb which indicates a larger plan than just undercutting the zune (which had yet to announce a price). it might be possible that they did it to drive the price of the zune down as one factor of their decision, but it's certainly not as clear as the grandparent implies.