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Will The iPhone Kill The iPod?
Edward Sinovian writes "According to Cnet.co.uk, the days of MP3 players, digital cameras and satellite navigation systems are numbered with cell phones about to take center stage. "PDAs have already been crushed by smart phones and the same thing looks to be happening with standalone MP3 players, particularly the smaller flash ones — a theory supported by Apple's recent entry into the world of music phones. If you then take into consideration the convergence of camera, GPS, TV and laptop-like functionality into mobile phones, it raises the question of how long it's going to take before all you need is a mobile phone." With that in mind, do you think that the iPhone will kill the iPod?"
Especially since the iPhone *is* essentially the new iPod.
Not as long as smart phones are as expensive as they are now. I can't justify spending 500 bucks on a phone, even thou it can be the only device I carry.
Plus, a button less phone seems counter-intuitive to me.
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Hmm, let me think, I want an MP3 player Option 1: Buy the iPhone for 600 dollars or whatever it costs Option 2: Buy an ipod for a lot cheaper You're right, I would go with Option 1 - so long iPods!
It costs significantly more money, has significantly less storage space, and inherits the messiness and unpleasantness of cellphone contracts. This doesn't appeal to people who just want to play their mp3s.
No, of course not. Did the MacBook Pro kill the MacBook? Did the PowerMac kill off the iMac? WIll a $500 iPhone kill the $99 iPod shuffle? No, but it may eat into the sales of the lower-end model.
Sheesh, this is a no-brainer.
... There isn't a cat in hells chance of the iPhone touching the iPods market.
Why?
Price for one. For $499 (with contract), you can get yourself a 4GB iPhone. For $349 you can get an 80GB iPod. That is a least expensive vs most expensive comparison.
The iPod (well, portable digital music player) market is huge; the numbers speak for themselves. People will happily pay a few hundred dollars for a portable player that'll last a few years. But $499 for a phone, plus contract? That is out of most peoples leagues for something that is completely unproven, if you ask me.
And for one very good reason: The iPhone is supposed to be around $600. You can buy iPod Nanos for less than a third of that. iPods were a success, but not an unbelievable hit, until they managed to get the costs down to something your average person can afford as a Christmas or Birthday gift. Not to mention something someone could buy without having to work it in their budget for the next 3 months. The iPhone is just plain too expensive to kill the iPod yet. Maybe if iPhone v.3 or v.4 brings the price down to the point where it's not much more than a regular phone I'll entertain thoughts about it being an iPod killer, but right now I have to say no way.
I read the internet for the articles.
Current 'rich' mobile devices won't replace mobile phones until fuel cell or battery revolution occurs.
Because I don't need a phone that can't live through the day on a single charge. No matter how rich it is.
Eventually a single device combining cell phone, camera, pda, mp3 player, GPS, ... will replace stand-alone devices. The transition has already started with devices such as the iPhone. Due to high prices, which is common with new types of devices, global adaptation will not happen instantly. People who have one or more seperate devices will not trade them in right away for a single device. If the seperate devices still work properly people will keep using them. But gradually as prices drop people will start buying the single device.
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Let's discuss Apple and their product line, behind the thin veil of a "tech discussion".
I know I'm going to throw away all my iPods when the iPhone comes out. I've already thrown away my Tivo, VCR, DVD Player, Xbox, PS2, cable box, and 40" LCD screen, because Apple has their own TV now!
Now that Apple has a phone that can play an mp3 - AN IMPRESSIVE TECHNOLOGICAL ACCOMPLISHMENT! I mean, my god - a phone playing mp3s? What will they think of next!
You are all asshats. If vcast/treo/etc (every fucking phone plays mp3s) didn't kill the market for a standalone player, why would iPhone? There's an enormous market of people who like music, and dont want a new cell phone. Most people just take the phone thats free with the service.
Who the fuck would rent an iPod?
Apple would love it, though, as you can force phones into obsolescense, while the iPod can do its thing until the shitty build quality rears its head.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Great, so you've got all the functions on your phone but they all suck.
Apple has actually done a pretty excellent job at positioning different choices for people:
1) Pure music player with a very large storage space for people hwho have to have everything with them (iPod 80GB video)
2) Phone with music playing and PDA abilities with a medium amount of storage (iPhone)
3) Devices that are small enough you can use them anywhere discreetly or while in action (iPod mini and nano).
There are really valid reasons to own all of them. For some people there are valid reasons to own more than one, because they each meet a different need. I could see keeping the 80GB model in a car, while still having the iPhone for roaming use, with a nano for the gym or jogging.
In general though phones are where the market for many music playing devices is headed, Apple realized that too and is getting ahead of the game with the iPhone. In time we'll probably see other versions to replace at least the mini.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
......Having a single unit that does everything I want it to would be a lot more convenient.......
But when the battery on your iPod dies, your entertainment ceases for a while. However, when your phone battery goes dead, it can be a matter of life and death. My iPod either sits by my bed to provide music to fall asleep by or in a dock in the car. Battery life is therefore not all that critical. The phone is always in my pocket and when its battery fails, it is a much bigger problem. A swiss army knife is useful, but a dedicated tool for its various functions is usually much better. If the entertainment use impacts the working of the phone, then having two distinct devices is much better.
All theory is gray
The reason for Apple's "clunky" interface becomes clear when you have a lot of music. I have close to 6000 songs and I'd be hard pressed to remember where I put 'em if I had to keep track of them by organizing them into folders.
The main problem with the all-in-one device is the risk associated with having "all your eggs in one basket" if you will.
I don't know about the rest of you, but the thought of having a $600 device with me all the time makes me cringe.
While I have a $400 digital camera, $200 phone and $250 iPod, I don't take them all with me wherever I go. There is some satisfaction with being able to protect some of the devices by not bringing them along. Also, I leave my cell phone at home sometimes when I don't want to be bothered.
"If vcast/treo/etc (every fucking phone plays mp3s) didn't kill the market for a standalone player, why would iPhone?"
Because the VCast and Treo aren't made by Apple. The iPhone is. You see, Apple "gets" simplicity. Its something a geek couldn't understand if it pulled down a geek's pants and blew em.
This is why the iPod dominated the already present MP3 player market, and why the iPhone will do the same to the Smartphone market.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
The PDA and smartphones were targeted to the same segments. The people who need PDA are same people who need smartphone and smartphones provides virtually all the functionality of PDA. The price of smartphones with subsidies from phone company was competitive with that of standalone PDA. Hence they killed PDA.
With iPod and iPhone, the target market is not same. People who want iPod does not necessarily want a cell phone. Yes, there is some overlap, but not enough (at least not yet), to kill the iPod. At high end, iPods provide more storage and at low end, iPods are cheaper.
However, if the price of iPhone reduces too much, it is likely, people would start buying iPhone as a replacement of iPod. In fact, I already do something similar. When my contract with Cingular expired and I got a new phone, I converted my old phone into an MP3 player (with 2GB miniSD, AM/FM radio, voice recorder and tiny photo/video camera, it is a great gadget to keep in the car all the time).
"For me it depends on when they have one out with a decent amount of space. Right now, I consider my 30Gb player much too small."
I was in the same boat a few years back. I thought I couldn't live without my 30GB iPod. I was obsessed with keeping as much of my music with me as possible. Then I took a good look at my listening habits, and realized I never actually _need_ that kind of capacity. I moved to a 4GB Nano, and it's much better with cheaper price and much smaller size. And it holds enough music for an across-the-country road trip. I'm much happier with the Nano than the clunky and heavy "normal" iPod.
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
I'd rather be able to access it from a mobile device along with other documents.
The biggest factor in folding all of these devices into a single device, is battery life. With an ipod you have a seperate battery that isnt always on, where as your phone is going to be running all the time. Lets say you've been listening to tunes all day on your phone, how long will the battery last on that important call you have to take on the run? The more functions you put into a single device, the more usage that device gets, which places more demands on the single powersource inside of it. With seperate units, you have seperate batteries which of course means longer run time.
The iphone also does not have an 80gig hard drive and it wont for some time.
I suspect the vast majority of people using PDAs also use cell phones and typically pay a fair amount for them (business users, primarily), so combining the two is a natural fit (except for form-factor issues). I don't think the same can be said for MP3 players, digital cameras, etc. My phone is reasonably small, but it's still 3 times the size of my MP3 player. That makes a big difference when I'm working out. And cell phones (at least reasonably priced ones) are a long long way from being even decent compared to a dedicated camera.
Just because those features are there doesn't necessarily make them good enough to replace a dedicated device. Having GPS in a phone might be a cool feature to some people, but to others it's just a useless extra-cost item. MS Word has every feature imaginable, but how many of them do you use? Wouldn't you like a version that had just what you use at half the cost (in dollars, memory, cpu cycles, UI complexity,
1) When you mount an iPod, it too is a drive.
2) How do you generate the folders with MP3s? iTunes does it for you
3) iTunes copies these folders with MP3s for you so you don't have to.
4) Quicker and easier than your proposed method because you don't have to do any of the following:
A) Import music
B) Organize music
C) synchronize music
iTunes does all of the above without any user interaction.
I understand you may find comfort in organizing and sorting your music, but really, computers are good at that. Why don't you just relax and hit play instead?
GPL Deconstructed
you can't win with flight attendants - if they aren't with "the phone is off"; "it's inflight mode" etc.
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Exactly... I arrived at the same size preference by a different road. The old war-torn CD case that I used to carry around in my car had a rotating repertoire of music that fe.l within the 4-6gb range. When I thought about the possibility of carrying more music than that around, I didn't like the idea...
...not to mention it's tough to pick something to listen to out of an 80gb pool while you're driving. Smart playlists are pretty much the only way to utilize a collection like that...and that's too much work until someone makes a simple UI to generate them (though I have seen some pretty slick stuff).
With a lower capacity player, I get to force myself to listen to parts of my vast music collection that don't get very much attention while I'm at home. It's easy to ignore the daimond-in-the-rough artists when my favorite artists are always within reach. This way I get to listen to new stuff more often...and old favorites when I normally wouldn't feel like I was 'in the mood.'
And it holds enough music for an across-the-country road trip.
Maybe for you. Unfortunately, not for all of us. My listening habits defy analysis, and my tastes are pathologically eclectic. Since I have no idea what I'm going to want to listen to a half hour from now, and the options are ridiculously broad, a 4GB iPod would be way too small to hold enough music to keep me happy for an across-the-state drive, much less across-the-country. I know in that time I'll only listen to a tiny fraction of my music, but there's no way to determine ahead of time which fraction that will be.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Then I took a good look at my listening habits, and realized I never actually _need_ that kind of capacity.
You don't need an MP3 player, period.
The only question is whether the benefits outweigh the costs. In your case, a 4GB nano and ~1,000 songs is plenty and the benefits your listening patterns gain from adding the extra ~6,500 songs of a 30GB or ~19,000 songs of an 80GB player are much smaller than the cost/bulk benefits you get from a smaller player.
I, on the other hand, gain a lot of my self definition from my love and knowledge of music. For me, the 80GB player is as small as I want my fat fingers to deal with in the first place so size isn't an issue. Cost would certainly be nice to drop. Getting to have discussions about what Punk-Country sounds like in the form of the Meat Puppets, have cheesy Roxette/Erasure 80's flashbacks with my wife on a Monday morning drive AND be able to listen to the core 1,000 songs in my main playlists is worth a fortune to me - way in excess of the $200 extra price.
Now add in the ~20 movies that can run picture in picture on my monitor while I code, the ability to figure out what certain lyrics are because I ran an app to grab them from the net, the ability to keep samples of my photography handy... For me it's a no brainer.
The capacity is a HUGE issue for the retarded (meant in the true sense of the word) iPhone. For my 320x240 iPod, I tend to rip movies at around the 400MB point (granted I go slightly over 320 wide so I can either zoom in on the center at 1:1 or zoom out and letterbox on a square screen). 4GB for the great new "widescreen movie capable" iPhone lets me put maybe 7-8 movies on there so long as I put no music on and minimal extra apps. That's barely enough for an intercontinental flight and back and now my iPhone's useless for music. Sure there's an 8GB version... giving maybe that small set of movies and a very limited music library.
For users like yourself, the iPhone will be the latest and greatest new gadget, able to do all kinds of quirky things that you can't do on other phones and save space in your pocket for your willingly limited music library - albeit for a very high price. For a user like myself, the biggest feature is the great new touch sensitive screen. Finally getting a movie big enough to be worth watching is huge and the same goes for easy navigation of bigger playlists - both of which are massively hampered by too little capacity to store much.
So, it's all about personal definitions. At its simplest, no one needs a cool movie and MP3 playing phone. At the other extreme, people who're excited by those features and have the libraries to really use them are massively hampered by the tiny storage in the first generation. In the middle, there are people like yourself - though the cheaper price argument falls flat on its face there.
Fortunately for Apple, they only ever aimed for 1% market saturation and, whilst tying it to signup with a provider could have dropped the price and a bigger drive could have upped the appeal to maybe 20-30% market saturation, Apple are evidently more than happy with 1% on their own terms rather than 20-30% on other people's terms with smaller margins. Going for that 1%, they can dictate whatever they like and accept that most of us won't take it but enough will.