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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.
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.
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!
I'm guessing that someone who might have thought of getting you a gift, you already gave this rant to and they decided just to get you some nice socks.
Shit. It's a gift. Say thank you and smile.
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.
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
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.