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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.
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.
My big bugaboo with portable devices is keeping them recharged; it's annoying to have to plug in one device every night, much less multiple ones. Having a single unit that does everything I want it to would be a lot more convenient. This would be true even if "plugging it in" involved laying it on a mat.
Don't worry. They will eventually ship the iPhone Shuffle for cheapos like you.
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... 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.
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.
Just one button.
It dials a random number from your phonebook.
Back in the day, no phones had buttons. They had this perforated wheel thing called a dial. In fact, when we push the buttons on a phone today, we still say we are "dialing" the number. There was even a time before there were dials.
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.
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As for phones, I use a Treo, and appreciate the third party development efforts. Opening up the iPhone for 3rd part dev would go a long way in my books
Besides I want an ipod with me all the time, I don't like being attached to the blackberry all the time.
Just be careful next time you walk through airport security with four ipods strapped to your belt, ok?
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Uh, the high end Video iPods have an 80GB capacity (as of today), whereas the iPhone goes up to 8GB. The iPhone will eventually replace the high-end Video iPod, but not until flash memory gets cheaper and increases to that sort of capacity. That won't happen any time soon (where "soon" is defined to be in technology terms).
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I'll third that no. And add that the X kills Y discussion is inane. Phone with mp3 player kills mp3 player? Might as well say mp3 player with phone kills phones. (And really, I'm far more impressed with the capabilities of my mp3 player, which is actually good at what it's supposed to do, than I am with my craptacular phone which is barely useful for talking to people with and appears to be mostly intended as a billing instrument for shady ringtone deals, crappy toys and overcharged low quality multimedia services).
The _real_ killer 'device' would be an advancement in body area networking so I could have a central storage unit in my pocket, a display on my wrist and a variation of camera, phone and various other useful attachments (again, that are actually good at what they do) with me when I need them. Heck, with the right programming I might want to have multiple 'phone' devices that could switch data and voice traffic over whatever carrier was best/cheapest for the moment. Single-purpose devices that are good at what they do, rather than several devices that all replicate functionality like input, output and storage, costing more to manufacture and drawing more power and still end up more or less sucking at most of what they do.
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.