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New iPod Owner Onslaught Overwhelms iTunes
Billosaur writes "In the post-Christmas rush to power up and use their new iPods, an onslaught of downloaders brought iTunes to its knees, according to CNN. Monday and Tuesday saw users posting message after message about slow downloads and the iTunes site denying them entry. The heavy traffic was apparently more than the system could bear, what with the large numbers of people receiving iPods and iTunes gift cards. Perhaps Apple was underestimating just how successful they were going to be?"
The Microsoft Zune store was working just fine.
Huh.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
It's September on USENET all over again.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
iTunes got slashdoted, iDoted.
2/3rds of the gifts I bought this year were iPods and iTunes music gift cards. I think I am not alone in this and the traffic shutdown on iTunes shows it. Apple has done a great job with their service and I don't mind paying for it. My wife did have to wait until yesterday to buy the rest of her Tunes though since the site was so hammered.
Laborare Est Orare
Similar here. It'd be easier to count the number of relatives who *didn't* get iPods as christmas presents. That'd be me, my mother, and my two year old nephew. Everyone else closely related that I can think of has a new nano, shuffle or iPod, and they're anywhere from 8 to 71 years old.
Best competition? There's stuff from Sandisk and Creative, as well as Microsoft's Zune. But none of them have the marketshare of the iPod, or the vast amount of accessories. Whether or not the store is "as populated with songs as they say it is" is really a matter of opinion. It suits my needs, but mine may not be the same as yours. You're free to install iTunes and browse the store anonymously (without creating an account) for free. You can even preview the 30 second clips without an account, though the system will nag you every 4th or 5th preview to log in. If money's a factor, you can always go the route I did - go to the Apple Store online and look in their refurb section. Everything on there is backed by the same warranty as the new stuff. They used to have (and may still have) first gen (black/white) 2Gb nanos for $99, for example.
Apple sells a ton of iPods, and then gets press about how many iPods they sell. You can't just do a news story about Apple selling a lot of iPods for the holidays, that's the story we hear every year. You need a situation where they sell so many damn iPods that their service is overwhelmed. That's a story. And you're further reinforcing the idea that "everyone" owns an iPod and nobody owns a Zune. Yeah, it was a pain for people for a day or so. If I read a story about how many iPods were returned because people had trouble with the iTMS, that's something else. But do you think those iPods went back? Doubt it.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I bought my wife an IPod Nano and an I-Tunes gift card. I am so sorry.
Which is why Creative is losing huge amounts of money. While DIVX might be popular among people who don't pay for things, it's not something that NORMAL people use. And by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots.
Creative stuff is generally big and bulky - not exactly the mass market stylish and simple product that Apple's been churning out with the iPod.
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Inside Apple's iPhone
Oh, and for the record, DivX is a specific implementation of MPEG-4. The iPod also plays MPEG-4, including MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) which gives much higher quality for the same bit-rate (look for anything encoded with X.264; there's a lot of it floating around).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Maybe so, but this definitely shows that those rumors of apple's iTune sales being way down were total crap.
MABASPLOOM!
If money's a factor, you can always go the route I did - go to the Apple Store online and look in their refurb section. Everything on there is backed by the same warranty as the new stuff. They used to have (and may still have) first gen (black/white) 2Gb nanos for $99, for example.
For Christmas I got a refurb'd 60GB iPod video. I'd told my parents that I had no need for 80GB, but 30 was too small (they really should stick a 60GB in that $300 hole) and pointed them to Apple's refurb site. Since the 5G 60GB is for all intents and purposes the same as the current generation aside from the capacity, it seemed like a good call.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
While I'm not an iPod owner, I heard this Zune thing was poised to take over the portable media market.
It did record numbers for November. It'll probably beat last years sales for December too.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
The internet was overall extremely slow after XMas, mainly due to Taiwan going
offline for an earthquake. All the traffic to Asia had to go through the Atlantic cables instead of the Pacific cables.
Classic.
You are all a bunch of idots.
Stuff by COWON America is pretty good. They support a whole lot of audio formats, such as mp3, wav, flac, ogg vorbis, and wma (including DRMed, though it requires a firmware update on all but their newest player). I just got an iAudio x5l, and I am quite impressed by it, especially the 35hr. battery life. The only downside as far as I'm concerned is the video, which is only 160x128 xvid at a bitrate of about 256kb/s, but they have a model specifically for video playing called the A2.
The biggest problem with the competition are two fold. First creative and Sandisk do not have a great reputation. I would never buy a creative again because I lost a $300 investment because of a cheap piece of plastic. I don't know about Sandisk, but they also seem more concerned about price than quality.
Second, there is a question about online purchased music. When purchasing music, people do seem want a format they can depend on. We have LPs, tapes, and CDs. There are arguable better formats, but the other formats never achieved critical mass. Likewise, the old formats die quickly. We still have cassette tapes, but how many 8-tracks do you see? The LP market is absolutely speciality. The advantange that Apple has is that is recognized the the DRM defined a format, and the format would drive the market. No one is going to buy an LP when all they have is a cassette player. Likewise, the mistake that MS made was to not take the format seriously. They have shot themselves int he foot by changing formats midstream. Who is going to trust them only to end up with useless content in a year?
So while other music players may be better in certain areas, like playing movies, they are not neccesarily better on the core needs, and importantly do not play the predominate only DRM format.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Hilarious.
The only digital video format that could reasonably be described as a format "people" (i.e., a non-trivially-small fraction of them) use would probably be MPEG2 (as in ATSC & DVD). After that probably comes all of the flash being watched by YouTubers.
Ahh, so that explains why murder rates have risen recently.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I used to own a serial adaptor for my Psion Series 3 palmtop. It came with a blob of flash in the middle of the cable that contained all of the drivers etc. required to use it. I don't see why iPods shouldn't adopt this model. Sure, download a newer version of iTunes if you want, but at least provide the software required to use it...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I love the spirit of Christmas. Soon *everyone* will know that Christ was born with a pair of Nike trainers on his feet and an ipod in his pocket!
And by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots.
That comment, sir, got you added to my friends list.
Your other observations about the importance of market research in determining a product's feature set are stating the obvious, but valuable nonetheless. Extremely granular market research that determines who will pay how much for this product over that product because of which features is what should have sent the Zune designers back to their drafting tables.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I do not know of a single family member or co worker that got an iPod for Christmas.
Your post was modded as interesting. In theory, my comment should be moderated just as "interesting" as your post as we are sharing the same exact subject and material but with opposite results.
Let's see if there is a bias in the moderation around here.
I have a feeling how this will work out because I would not classify one person posting about knowing a bunch of people that got an iPod for Christmas as "interesting".
Here's one for you. I know of at least 10 people in my family (ages 18-80) that got snow globes for xmas!
I know tons of people that got iPods this year, +5 interesting
I do not know anyone that got an iPod [silence...still silence...no moderation)
This is a repost of something I posted previously:
The 30GB iPod takes up 31% less volume than the Zune and 42% less volume than the 30GB Creative Zen Vision:M.
The 30GB iPod has 15% less mass than both the Zune and the 30GB Creative Zen Vision:M.
The 80GB iPod has 167% more storage space than the Zune and takes up 12% less volume than the Zune.
The 80GB iPod has 33% more storage space, takes up 38% less volume, and has 12% less mass than the 60GB Creative Zen Vision:M.
The 80GB iPod has 167% more storage space, takes up 26% less volume, and has 4% less mass than even the 30GB Creative Zen Vision:M.
No one makes an MP3 player comparable to the iPod in the capacity/form factor department. Same goes for the Nano. iPod owns the market because Apple has no real competition.
Obviously it's a bummer to not be able to buy new music for a day, but with DRM, there's more at stake. On Chrismas, I wanted to transfer some songs and videos I already owned to my new iPod, but I was using my powerbook which I hadn't authorized to play the songs. Even though I had the files, iTunes wouldn't put unauthorized content on my new iPod. When I tried to authorize my computer, I couldn't because the iTunes music store was down.
Even if the iTunes store is too flooded to handle new purchases, Apple has an obligation to keep rights management up and running. It's very disheartening to lose access to content you made the deliberate choice to buy legally.