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6G iPod & Apple's Future
belsin_gordon writes "CNET rounds up what we're going to get from the next iPod and where Apple is heading as a company and as a business juggernaut. [They have the] 100GB widescreen video iPods, Wi-Fi-enabled iPods capable of on-the-fly movie downloads over the air, unlimited downloads from iTunes for a flat fee and the UK finally getting its content-hungry hands on movie downloads.
Apple has dropped the 'Computer' from its company name, and is making significant advances into the media-distribution business. It's bringing video to everyone everywhere with iTunes movies and now Apple TV, and the rumours and speculation we've discussed promote the theory that Apple is setting itself up as a major player in the media-distribution industry."
End Random Comment.
Work smarter, not harder.
As totally hot as a wide screen ipod (more hopefully a phoneless iphone) makes me. I'll believe it when i see it.
Rumors are only that, rumors, and we have been hearing these same rumors for months (if not years now).
ml
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
I presume by 'unlimited downloads' they mean music subscriptions a la napster, rhapsody etc.
I've always wondered why Apple have been slow to enter that market, but to do so now without opening up their DRM is surely asking for trouble. Real have been trying to get access to the iPod market for years. Apple have tried to stop them at every opportunity. If they now try and copy that distribution method, while refusing to allow anyone else the opportunity leaves them more open than ever to charges of anti competitive behaviour, especially in the EU.
Of course it could also be an indication that Apple are about to open up their DRM? That would be great news for Real and Napster, but could be terminal for the smaller manufacturers of 'mp3' players.
Global warming is a cube.
It seems to me that apple will resist having wi-fi in the ipod because it would break their grip on the interface to the ipod. They have a great revenue stream with all of the third party gadgets that connect to the dock connector and if they gave the ipod a meaningful wi-fi connection, it would be a lot easier to make such additions without paying a licensing fee to apple. It would be nice though...
For many of the same features being described in the future video iPods, check out the Archos 704. It's got the wifi, the browser, the big touch screen, the USB ports, etc. Personally, I think it's a bit big, but the features are amazing. Soem competition to keep Apple on their toes is nice to see too.
It seems to me that apple is just trying to tie everyone to their media distribution.
Well, duh.. Of course they are.
You don't just buy an iPod, you buy your very own iTunes franchise, set up in your pocket.
I think that's actually part of the appeal. Buying an iPod gets you "into the club", so to speak, where any other media player doesn't. People just dont realize the "club" is simply "apple consumers".
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
For Majority of people who run Windows or Mac OS X, iPods are braindead to use. Plug into computer, let iTunes replicate all the playlist and music over along with any TV Shows you have downloaded. Unplug, walk around with those white headphones and look chill. Why would you find dragging and dropping from explorer easier? Something tells me Apple Engineering and Marketing Departments know their main audience better.
That's fine for someone that's computer savvy and wants to spend the time doing that. There is a problem with that for the general population though. It requires you, the human, having to be trained to do something that the computer could do for you. If you want to do that fine, the majority of people just want to be able to stick XYZ bands songs onto the player and don't give a stuff how its organised.
I used to be anal about how things were organised. I've now adopted the don't give a stuff attitude. I just want to be able to get to things easily, I don't want to have to spend time organising a filing system.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
Just got an 8 gig Nano.
I'm in the club, but if I'd rather user old fashioned headphones instead of the white buds, am I out of the club?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Well, good for you. There are a variety of other players out there, as you point out yourself, and you are welcome to them. Apple seems to be targeting the market segment that does want their music player to organize their music and keep track of things (import date, play counts, skip counts, last played, rating, etc) for them. Based on Apple's market share, compared to the rest of the market combined, it looks like they have a better idea of what will sell than you do. But feel free to vote with your wallet.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Let's See:
1. iTunes Subscription Service
How many times does Steve have to say that people prefer to own their music. How many different subscription services have to loose bucket loads of money before the media stops pretending apple needs subscription services just because they don't have one? If this was such a great fucking idea, then why didn't Naptster or Yahoo or one of the others make a big profit doing it?? Very lame, Crave.
2) UK iTunes Movie Downloads
Wouldn't Apple wait for the EU regulators to force the music companies to allow one EU wide Music Store before they open a country specific Movie store? I mena, really Crave.
3) Widescreen video iPod
Hey, one I agree with, although pretty damn obvious since the introduction of the iPhone.
4) Wi-Fi enabled video iPod
Hmmm... Zune has proven what a big draw a Wi-Fi enabled music player is. Those things are just flying off the shelves! Well maybe it's more their shitty DRM mania at Microsoft than something wrong with Wi-Fi. Still, how hard is it to drop your iPod in a dock to charge and sync it. We know how to share mp3's without Wi-Fi. Ever heard of a DVD burner??
5) Flash-based video iPod
6) The 100GB video iPod
Now that would be big enough to hold some serious porn. If the battery held out you'd even have time to let your buddies borrow it and have some fun too. Heck, you could even choose to carry around some actual music and some normal photos of the family too.
That would be two out of six that predictions that make some sort of sense. But only the two really obvious ones. After the iPhone demo, how bright do you have to be to know that it was also the 'future' iPod demo? How bright do you have to be to see a larger hard drive and think that Apple may use it for a video iPod hard drive? Crave... As prognosticators... You suck!
Yay! More anti-ipod FUD!
Is starting iTunes and then dragging and dropping files unto your ipod of choice really all that complex? Most people would say: no.
Yes, every geek wants to control exactly where every file goes. But once you get over yourself and realize that you can make playlists (with drag and drop none-the-less) to simulate your "utlimate directory of ultimate tunes" and still be able to do other things like sort by album,artist,genre etc. without chewing up your battery life you start to appreciate a slightly more modern interface.
Ipods are quite capable, despite what you believe, of surviving without ever purchasing things from iTMS. CD rips, your favorite illegal, quasi-legal, or legal mp3 sources can all be used to feed your ipod.
That's something I never quite got, the iPod hate. A friend of mine recently introduced me to his Cowon D2, which is a very slick piece of hardware: 52h battery life on music, 10h on video, smaller than an iPod and has a touch screen to boot. Why wasn't I sold immediately?
Because it meant the endless tedium of synchronizing my music with the god-awful "drag into Explorer" (or in my case, "drag into Finder") interface. The whole explorer drag-drop thing was fine when our music players were
The D2 also promised great things like album covers and even lyrics (which actually is a sweet feature), but both of which required you to maintain your own music library with their proprietary software - a bit of an attempt at cloning iTunes, except the software wasn't nearly slick enough to take over as my primary media player app - which would mean I'd still have to maintain two parallel libraries.
I keep explaining this to people: the secret of iPod's success is not only its marketing, but that it rolls the entire experience together from end to end. You play your music, download your music, play your videos, download your videos all from the same spot. The software provides all the features you need - album covers for example, and it also syncs automatically with your portable player. Slick.
I enjoy the end-to-end experience so much that even a clearly superior piece of hardware like the Cowon D2 has not converted me.
TFA does indeed have six rumors about Apple, but they're all related to the iPod.
Call me a stickler for accuracy, but "sixfold Apple rumour round-up" implies six different rumours (tidbits, what-have-you) about various things related to Apple. If all six were connected to the iPod, as all six do indeed turn out to be, a more meaningful headline would have bee "Apple iPod rumour round-up" or something similar -- the Slashdot summary title improves on it at least.
There are several other reasons to be excited about Apple -- possible super-thin/light MacBooks, a new revision for the iMac, and of course the now-delayed Leopard. Updates on those much-anticipated items would also have been appreciated.
Whoever at the BBC approved it obviously hasn't got a clue about what Jobs and Apple are about (or, probably, Gates). Wildly extrapolating, if a media company like the BBC seems to have few people who know what Apple is about nowadays, how far does the blindness extend? Right up until Jobs and Branson jointly attend the funeral of the conventional media industry, I guess.
Pining for the fjords
My iPod already has 8 Gigabytes, and is one of the smaller ones. Ohhh, you mean 6th generation. Wonder who else read this wrong.
I'm not the biggest apple fan but thats because I like to piss people off on a regular basis and apple cult people seem to be a good target. I've always thought that the iPod hasn't made any huge improvements over the years since it released the original iPod. It was always good and if someone gave me one I would probably keep it. But I never really had something from apple peak my interest as much as the announced 100GB widescreen video iPod. 100GB in a video player, this sounds fantastic, but then I remember such thing as quality of screen and if it will play all the files that a creative zen vision and I've seen archos and they kill anything for apple video out right now. The screens that apple picks are not quite the best thing, and they don't come with tv-out like other players(I believe you can purchase one for the ipod video). On that note I never believed that that ipod video was a pmp it just seemed to be an add on to make people buy the next round of iPods and get into videos. I will say that if it does have a nice big quality screen like the archos or the iriver or the zen vision, I might have to consider it. 100GB is pretty kick ass, and I assume it won't be 1000 dollars to boot.
On that note it seems that apple does things in baby steps I mean they went through like 6 ipods to get to the current version and they could have added most of those features in the second version. They want to keep selling iPods so I don't know if it will be as good as I imagine.
The problem is that if you want to use anything but iTunes to load up your content, then it becomes very difficult. Especially when iTunes is such a terrible program. Here's a bug. Enable fast user switching on windows. Start up iTunes on one user, transfer some songs to one ipod, then exit it completely. Then start up iTunes on another user, using switch user, so the other user doesn't log out. Try transfering songs to the second users ipod. It doesn't work. You have to completely log out the other user to transfer songs to the other ipod. This is just stupid, because I'm only using MP3s, and it shouldn't be that hard, there's no DRM to enforce. Just put the songs on there.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
If BMW started releasing some cars in the $20,000 price range they could totally crush Toyota and GM.
Apple to "Knife the baby." Of course they were talking about QuickTime. MS knew Apple was going to do an end run around them, but they had that pesky DoJ case against them and couldn't crush Apple like they wanted to. In the end Ashcroft gave MS all they wanted and more (as punishment), but it was too late. Apple had out maneuvered them. Even Ashcroft couldn't protect MS from Apple. (MS was a contributor to Ashcroft's losing congressional campaign*)
They knew Apple wasn't going after the bean counter business. Apple was heading to the living rooms, and MS could not compete against the axis of evil: Jobs, Ives, TBWA Chait-Day.
It has been fun watching this unfold. That's is what made me a fan of this company. Sometimes it is how you play the game, and Apple played it well.
* He lost to a dead man.
photosMy Photostream
Napster never got my business because I can't load their DRM format onto my iPod. Apple got my iPod business because I like their straight-forward, no-nonsense methods of organizing and synching.
I absolutely refuse to buy a single track from the iTunes Store. Steve can talk all he wants about our desires to "own" our music, but I don't own the music if it's crippled with DRM. On the other hand, I would pay a significant amount of money per month to "rent" unlimited iTunes songs. In this case I am willing to submit to DRM because there's no confusion about the fact I do not own any of the songs. I will happily enjoy hours upon hours of DRMed protected content that I do not own. And I will happily purchase music from iTunes if they switched to this method -- or anyone else for that matter if their tunes played on my device.
Until music is rented as "All I can eat" I will continue to own my music in the form of CDs, ripping them to my format of choice for my player of choice.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
they would re-work the psp. shrink it down a little, add another analog on the right, and either dump the umd drive entirely for a hd or start selling psps with a big memory stick in the box(>=4gig). with a decent d/l service, it would be everything that apple is trying to turn the ipod into and more with the addition of running ps2 quality games on a screen that is far superior!
i'll probably get modded a troll for this as i was last week for questioning the crazy demand for the wii even though the games are seriously lacking, but i feel it has to be said...for the $, the ipod is currently pretty low on the list of good buys as far as mp3 players go. i believe apple has been lucky to be able ride the ipod wave as long as it has. and unless they open the iphone up, it is going to fail miserably.
my $200 sanyo phone has a gig hdd in it with 8+ hours of play time, a 2 mega pixel camera, unlimited ev-d0 net access, and o yea, i can call people on it too!
imho, apple has got to push a little more than this to maintain their dominance. or just keep charming the masses with their stale commercials...i guess that works too...
Why does making it work with iTunes preclude it showing up as a storage volume?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
l33tn355. If iTunes had a verbose startup screen no one here would be complaining.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Where Apple fails though, is that once something in that chain breaks, the whole system breaks down. You can use Cowon's software, but you don't have to, and when you don't, you may lose a couple features, like album covers, but it you can still put music/videos on it. Have you ever tried tranfering music to your iPod without using iTunes?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Theoretically true, but when's the last time iTunes failed on you? For me, never. I see it like a manual/automatic shift thing. Some people prefer to drive stick, because it gives them more control. For some of these people they truly need/prefer this level of control, others are just flaunting their ability to drive stick (Slashdot demographic anyone?). Some of us prefer to drive auto, because our point is to get to the destination, and the whole bit about driving there is rather irrelevant to us.
1. iTunes Subscription Service - unlikely. Has been discussed ad nauseum. Some people love subscription services, most don't. Look at the numbers. Plus, Apple likes things simple. They wouldn't want to sell music two ways. Plus subscriptions = more complexity and more DRM. Apple's already making a killing. Why double their efforts for 5-10% more sales?
2) UK iTunes Movie Downloads - duh. Eventually, all services will reach all major countries.
3) Widescreen video iPod - duh. But don't look for it until 6-12 months after the iPhone debuts--not "right around the corner." Anyone who thinks Apple would release a cheap widescreen iPod before the iPhone and let it cannibalize iPhone sales hasn't been watching Apple very long or very closely. Release the expensive, limited product first, let everyone fret and moan and bitch online, watch them sell like mad anyway, add one requested feature, lower the price a bit, lather, rinse, repeat.
4) Wi-Fi enabled video iPod - duh. Might be another year or two, though. It's not that Apple is resting on their laurals, they're just pacing themselves. Apple obviously has the capability to release a widescreen, touchscreen, flash-based, movie-playing iPod with wireless that connects to the iTunes store and syncs wirelessly tomorrow--but then what would they do for the next few years?
5) Flash-based video iPod - possible, but not likely (flash is still much more expensive) and there's not much point--which I think they know, because their whole comment is about how video iPods are better matched with traditional drives. WTF?!?
6) The 100GB video iPod - duh. iPods have gone from 5 GB to 10 to 15 to 20 to 30 to 40 to 60 to 80. And CNet.uk is predicting 100 GB will be next? Wow, they've got a bunch of fucking geniuses working there. Let me be the first to predict that at some point in the future, Apple will release a 120 GB iPod. Possibly followed by a 150 or 160. You heard it here first!!!!!11oneone
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Since on Windows, iTunes doesn't do the transfer as much as it communicates with low level service call "iPod Service" to facilitate the transfer. I imagine something in Fast User Switching is fouling up this service and iTunes communication with it. I agree that it should work properly but it won't. Still for 99% of people, iTunes is both easy to use, easy to maintain and syncs with iPod without issue.
Reading the comments here and elsewhere, as well as seeing what is happening in the content industry and what is about to happen, I feel great relief that it seems to be a fact that development, here exampled by Apple, inevitably leads to the opening of standards and devices, through for example wifi and DRM free EMI music.
This is an obvious trend, which I believe and hope will open the eyes of consumers, resulting in increased pressure to open up the movie industry as well. Not least since Apple is a mayor player in both fields.
Who knows, maybe even RIAA will seize and desist one day.
Don't be crazy anymore!
Jobs talked so much smack on the Zune's WiFi capability, that I doubt he'd throw wifi into an iPod that would have a stronger functionality and actually keep your battery from discharging on power-up. Granted, I wouldn't put it past Apple to innovate something clever as they've always done. But, if Apple went to WiFi, I'm quite certain Microsoft would enable a more complex access as well.
Why haven't they already(ms)? Nobody has WiFi yet, why up the ante 2 full steps when nobody else even uses it at all? I'm sure that WiFi enabled (network/internet connectivity) iPods and Zunes would not only waste batteries in wholesale fashion, but they would also be pretty iffy when talking about security. Granted, movies and music being hacked into aren't a huge ordeal... but having millions of iPods roaming around with WiFi would have to be a pretty decent target for some type of exploitation. There are tons of other wifi-enabled objects floating around, yes.. But, I'm sure the platform they're running on is a bit more complex than a handheld jukebox.
More power to them if they can pull it off... if they can, MS will follow as they always do.
As for iTunes... screw iTunes and everything around it. I own an iPod Video, 20G iPod, nano and a zune. Once I grabbed the zune, I realized how much of a pain the iPods were... resetting, getting it to recognize, having to erase all my music when I installed a new OS or go to a new PC... clearing out all my music in any error, and starting over... every month. And the only thing they had over the zune was the click wheel... and that wasn't even a plus when you didn't lock it and put it in your pocket. Again, Apple is innovative and I dig 'em for throwing out great products... but, there are too many other products that have more features and have better and more reliable interfaces to work with than the iPod and iTunes nowadays. Now, it's just people buying a name as a status symbol. The ipod is now cliche.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
It does not. Every ipod can be used in disk mode, should you so choose.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
But to the person using itunes, it doesn't matter how the music shows up on the iPod. It doesn't need to be laid out in a bunch of randomly named directories, with randomly named files, and only play songs that are put in some database file. It doesn't need to be that way, because it's transparent to the end user. So why not make it easier for those of use who don't want to use iTunes? Because it has failed them.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Not all that many people care about expandability. Only the hardcore gamers and geeks who buy the latest-and-greatest cpus and graphics chips really have a use for the kind of expandability that you seem to want.
Most people don't know how or don't feel secure swapping their own cpu or graphics card. Even for those who do, it is hard to justify taking out and throwing away a perfectly functional cpu just because it is too old. It doesn't make economic sense. Just like people who buy a new car every other year.
The current Macs all have room to expand the RAM, and they can be bought with hard drives that are large enough for any normal consumer. As for the optical drives, the burners in Macs can write to any format that will be mainstream for the next several years.
To put it simply: for the vast majority of the computer market, the benefits of having a small and quiet computer completely outweigh the downside of not being able to expand it with pcie cards or extra hard drives.
No it's iTunes. It says there's another using still using iTunes and to log them out before it will even mount the iPod under iTunes. Nothing to do with windows specifically, Althouh, Maybe I should just try restaring the iPod service, that might fix the problem, and would be a whole lot less useless than logging the other user out completely.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
In the ``drag and drop'' model, the device has to build that database itself, presumably by reading the ID3 tags. That's a nightmare. To build it incrementally is incredibly hard. To build it from scratch every time involves reading the tags out of potentially tens of thousands of files, grinding it into a database of some sort and writing it to disk. On a ~100MHz low-power CPU with a small amount of RAM, out of either flash or a slow microdisk. That'll take forever. And the moment you say ``ah, but there's this application you can run on the host computer'' then you're back essentially with the iTunes model. And that's before we consider the living hell that is parsing ID3 tags consistently, writing to FAT32 filesystems safely and all the rest of the tasks an iPod doesn't have to do.
ian
It's nice to want things, but to me, it didn't seem that the author understood why things are the way they are. A lot of the article seems to dispel how difficult changes could be technically or practically.
Yes the media companies would love this, but there are far greater technical barriers to this than the current system. To do this, Apple would have to develop a different way of securing and authenticating the files. Roughlydrafted went into detail how FairPlay works and why there is no subscription service. Besides technical reasons, Apple has always argued against it on principle as it was anti-consumer.
The main reasons are purely legal which translate into technical reasons. They don't have permission from the content providers. Groups like MPAA has always tried to maintain strict control of all aspects of release from time and location. DVD, HD-DVD, and BlueRay all have region encoding for a reason. FairPlay would have to match that. Now Apple has to devise a way to separate out all users based on location at the file level so that certain movies do not play for the users until the local release date. That makes things a lot more complicated for FairPlay. So the easiest solution is to limit purchases only to American users.
The iPhone is Apple's first attempt at a widescreen. I would expect newer generations of iPods to do the same as Apple works out the kinks.
I suspect the main reason why no company has done it before MS was that it wasn't practical. They could have released wifi iPod but there would be a drastic difference in transfer rates. You and I might understand that 802.11g takes 10x as long as FireWire or USB2.0, but the average consumer might not and would hate it. "It takes hours to transfer my small collection. This sucks!" 802.11n is on the horizon. When that is in place, you will probably see a wifi iPod.
Th
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I used to have all my music nicely organized in directories (okay, it was a mess), and ditto with thousands of digital photos.
For a while I told iTunes to just link to the music. Then one day I just let it organize it all. MUCH nicer.
Same with the photos when I bought Aperture. Both programs give you the option to organize things yourself, but trying it both ways you quickly realize what a pain it is doing it by hand.
It does show up as a storage volume. You can drop anything you want onto it. BUT, mp3s you drop on won't play, because they need their metadata added to the iPod's database. Why? So the iPod can do all its fast scrolling, instant on and organize by this or that or the other thing tricks. For me it's more than worth it.
Yeah, it's called Winamp. Not to mention there are ways to make it "explorer" or "finder" drag n drop like. The way its set up by default is just to make it easier. There are plenty of ways around it.
"Why does making it work with iTunes preclude it showing up as a storage volume?"
It does not. Every ipod can be used in disk mode, should you so choose.
If you go to that page, the first thing it says is that it doesn't work with the iPod functionality at all. It's just a way to embed a thumbdrive/external HDD, but you can't actually use it for anything but dead storage.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Well, I don't think apple don't include wi-fi in the iPod is because of the third party gadgets. In fact, if they found third party gadget is making money, they try to make them too! such as apple's own ipod cases, well, ipod hifi, if you count it as an ipod accessory. The main reason for no include wi-fi is because it trains the battery! Currently, the playback of a video iPod for movies is about 3.5 hours (if I remember correctly), if they include wifi, which use batteries for search wireless network, I doubt how long it can last. Even worse, if you want to download a movie from iTunes using iPod through wireless network, I doubt you'll have enough battery for downloading a full-length movie and play it without charging, well, I guess that's the limit of current iPod battery. Conclusion, unless they found new ways to save energy, no wireless.
Sort of. I would describe that as the empty part of the storage inside the ipod showing up, not the ipod. And I understand that iTunes writes file information to a database so that the ipod doesn't have to work as hard, but I'm not real convinced it was for purely technical reasons(go ahead and call me a cynic).
a ge=WiwiHome
I guess there is this thing:
http://www.floola.com/modules/wiwimod/index.php?p
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Archos already has Wi-Fi enabled players, Widescreen players, 160GB HDD players, Touchscreen players, Camcorder players, and all the accessories you can think of, including a DVR station, a helmet camcorder, and an FM radio. .PS, .VOB, H.264, and AAC.
They can play back MPEG-2,
Archos is the real mp3 player pioneer, they paved the way for large hard drive mp3 players with their Jukebox Multimedia. If you want any of the features mentioned in this article, you don't have to wait for the next iPod, because Archos has had them for a while now.
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
It doesn't. You can have your iPod show up as a storage volume. That's an option. You still can't copy songs to it and have them play on the iPod, but you can get other files on and off the iPod, and you can copy your whole library back off of your iPod.
Some applications, like Floola let you copy songs and videos to and from your iPod without using iTunes (under Win/Mac/Linux), so you're really only tied into iTunes if you want to buy and transfer songs and videos from the iTunes store.
Yes, I have, in fact. I regularly transfer music to my iPod from Amarok, and it works flawlessly. Next question!
This statement is solely an opinion. Kindly take it as such in all cases.
I'm pretty sure they could have made it work both ways, with the itunes 'experience' being better but the other way actually working, without even creating all that much confusion.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
There are other apps that can transfer music and video to the iPod. I like Floola which can run on Windows, Mac and Linux, and you can keep the binaries on the iPod itself in disk mode, so I can easily copy whatever I want to and from my iPod, from any computer. It will also update the podcasts on the iPod directly (as opposed to iTunes, which updates the podcasts in your library on the computer, then syncs with the iPod to update it).
They wouldn't crush Microsoft...lowering the prices on their hardware would put pressure on other PC makers like Dell and Sony.... Microsoft just takes advantage of the monopoly they have over the PC market. MS is the only company that will licence to them and has the OS most people think they have to have to run a computer. A good part of MS's profit is almost guaranteed from the income from licencing XP, Vista or whatever version of Windows that is out. In the long run, selling sub-$1000 machines has hurt PC companies like Dell and Gateway...so why would Apple want to kill its own business?
I've refrained from profanity, racial/ethnic epitaphs and am 5'11" - how can I be ranked as troll?
iPods didn't start out with the opaque file system. Originally, Apple made no attempt to prevent users from transferring songs back and forth between the iPod and your computer. Then the content owners (record labels) complained that the iPod encouraged piracy and threatened to sue. This was before the iTMS. In order to appease the record labels, Apple put the music files in hidden directories with random names, and changed iTunes so that you couldn't copy music from your iPod to your library.
So that's what's "with" that.
If you go down the model of allowing drag/drop then the player has to do more work. That require additional software on the player to handle this. That takes up more space and makes the firmware more complex. It also means that some content (iTunes loaded) will be available straight away whereas other won't be until it has been indexed. This dilutes the experience and adds complexity. When dealing with consumer devices complexity is the enemy. The KISS principle is heavily at work here.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
If walking around Williamsburg is any way to judge, wearing big-ass headphones is the new micro-club. But I'd prefer anything to those shitty-ass white buds.
Limina.Log
By executives and also by lawyers looking for libel or defamation. (IANAL but if I were Jobs and had it brought to my attention I'd certainly pay Carter-Ruck to send a nasty letter.) None of them seem to have noticed. If they had, they might just have had the wit to substitute Michael Dell for Jobs (Dell is a recognised brand in the UK), which would have been more accurate. Conclusion: BBC execs and lawyers don't actually know who Jobs is or what he is doing. Nor does Enfield or his scriptwriters. I bet you they know who Rupert Murdoch is. Or Richard Branson.
Pining for the fjords
I tried floola. It takes at least half an hour to fill up my 512 MB Shuffle. Do other users experience similar problems, or is it just me?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Mod parent up. This is incredibly true and immediately visible on my Xbox 360. Sometimes I connect my iPod to it, and it takes *forever* for the device to reconstruct the library on the Xbox interface. The speediness and responsiveness of the iPod is at least partially due to the fact that the system has a highly device-optimized database that's guaranteed to be there.
That said, this article annoys me. I'm getting an 80 GB iPod next week (father making business trip to the US, and I'll use the chance to get him to pick up one for 2/3 of what it would cost me here...). Here's hoping the widescreen rumors are false. :P Don't care much about the wireless though - what's the use for that anyway?
Lalala
It's not totally automatic, as users have to create the playlists and they will have to decide which playlist(s) to assign their stuff to, but once done, they never have to worry how the songs are logically organized within the file structure.
That's because they built it that way though. They weren't running into physical laws or anything(I can see where it was simpler/cheaper to take the route they took, I just don't like it).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
"Apple seems to be targeting the market segment that does want their music player to organize their music and keep track of things (import date, play counts, skip counts, last played, rating, etc) for them."
That doesn't preclude his suggestion. Rhapsody/Sansa users have this functionality.
"Based on Apple's market share, compared to the rest of the market combined, it looks like they have a better idea of what will sell than you do."
Would I be invoking a variant of Godwin's Law if I pointed in Windows' general direction and asked you to repeat that?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
You've apparently never owned a BMW.
Sounds like you aren't using a USB 2.0 port. 8 mbit in contention with mouse and keyboard sounds about right for a half hour for 512MB. How do non-iPod USB drives perform on that port.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Just one thing and that is plugin support for extensions and add ons. It means that people could easily write things like cross faders, support for additional codecs, etc. There could be official unoffical community website for getting hold of these plugins, providing users with source code, etc. to minimise the chances of malicious code.
Of course, there are probably some major security risks around stuff like that... But it would still be cool.
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
Nope, iTunes has no problem using that same port which is USB 2.0. Neither does Amarok. It's real USB 2.0. I'm pretty sure it's a floola specific problem.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
No way, but you have just reduced your risk of getting mugged. Certainly in London nothing says I have a lot of expensive electronics which is easy to fence than those white buds. Admittedly though as the iPod becomes more prevalent I expect it is becoming less of an issue
If you read a speed reading book, does it take you less time to read the second half?
But Archos don't have 'status' appeal. Sad isn't it that conforming looks sell more. It's sort of the same feeling of despair for the population that I had when a friend, who's a clothing buyer for a main street store, pointed out that the store had the next two years of fashion trends already planned out, in general. Sheep
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Actually, in order to optimise hard drive seek times on the iPod (seek time == battery wasted) it uses a highly efficient tree structure. The database in the iPod OS makes sure that when you choose a playlist, the iPod knows exactly which sectors to load into RAM, and therefore you increase battery life and decrease possible damage (iPod user jogging while listening == possible HD crash during heavy seek)
--
yeah I remember hearing that story a few years ago.
here in Boston the buds are pretty ubiquitous.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
archos does not have the slick UI and the easy sync. It also does not have a legal content source. Where are you going to get movies from? Not everyone has the time to rip and reencode a DVD.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I got a pair of the SR 80's after doing some research.
MAN...these things sound good and are reasonable in price.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
On the main Floola page I linked to above, if you scroll down to the "Latest Changes" section, the first item is "huge copy speedup", so it sounds like they've fixed whatever was giving you grief in the latest version... hopefully.
Why would they use the relatively high powered Wifi instead of the low power Bluetooth for this kind of short-range wireless?
If they're such a pioneer, why does their product weight over 4.5 times what an iPod does? As has been said in previous comments ... size _does matter_ in portable devices.
'' But Archos don't have 'status' appeal. Sad isn't it that conforming looks sell more. ''
I don't know if it has so much to do with "conforming". The new iPod Shuffle does just look quite nice, and so does the Nano, and the iPhone. The other music stuff from Apple looks acceptable, but there is a lot of stuff out there that I wouldn't want to be seen with. Just my opinion.
And yes, looks count. Buying an iPod because it says "iPod" on the package is stupid. Buying it because you like the way it works or because you trust the brandname isn't stupid. And buying it because it looks good isn't stupid either.
Because it does more. Besides, if you're so worried about weight, then buy one of Archos' smaller, lighter, more compact players.
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
But I'd prefer anything to those shitty-ass white buds.
Ah, that's where you're supposed to wear them.
I drank what? -- Socrates
It does have the slick UI, and any sync program will work on it because it mounts as an external hard drive. It accepts any legal content source besides itunes, including the many subscription services out there. As for video, you can record it from any video output on any video device, via component or composite or what have you. What's more, you can also hook it up to a TV and play media back on it at a higher resolution than the screen on the player itself.
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
I've been using Sharepod for 2 years now. I have NEVER used iTunes to put music on my iPod. Sharepod allows you to copy music to and from your iPod, create playlists and it runs off of your iPod so that you have it with you wherever you are.
Speedy thing goes in; speedy thing comes out.
Since what seems like the dawn of computer time, Apples have been the choice of "creative professionals" and others involved in media creation. It makes perfect sense for them to continue to build on and extend from that market position. I just hope that now all of the fanbois can realize where Apple fits in the overall computer landscape and stay there, sipping their lattes, staring at their 20+ inch displays and being "creative." =)
As off topic as that is.. I dunno if I'd be so quick to say that. If BMW were to start releasing cars in that range there would be a significant quality drop compared to what regular "BMW" is. The purity of the brand is important to them. As an aside I think the target at that price range wouldn't involve GM much, it would probably be Honda/Toyota/Nissan/Volkswagon. In an attempt to grab the loyalty before consumers move on to the respective groups upper brand (Acura / Lexus / Infiniti / Audi). And couldn't the exact same statement be made about Mercedes?
For that matter why doesn't Bentley, Ferrari, Porsche, etc release cheap versions of their cars? Because thats not what they are. BMW's aim is to be a (high performance) luxury vehicle. I tend to doubt if they want to enter that segment of the market which is heavily saturated and would be a much tighter competition for smaller profits.
Why doesn't Breitling and Rolex release less expensive watches? Why is there a Lexus and Toyota? etc. It's a debacle across many industries. Gibson has Epiphone, Fender has fender and squire, PRS makes some 'se' models that suck. Maybe you should tell Patron to start making a 10 dollar handle of tequila to compete with .
All aside even if they did enter that segment I don't think there is any evidence to suggest that they would crush toyota, gm or honda. And considerations of adverse impact on the traditional BMW sales would be intriguing.
what it mainly comes down to I think is maintaining brand image and identity.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
It's called Rockbox, and it's an open source OS for media players. It's been ported to most of the popular ones, and some obscure ones. I run it on my Toshiba Gigabeat F40, and I can play any media type except WMA, including MPEG movies now, which was not a feature that Toshiba put on the Gigabeat. There's all sorts of plugins too.
Ever wanted to play Doom on your iPod? Rockbox comes with that too.
http://www.rockbox.org/
--Drive carefully. 90% of people are caused by accidents.
I know this is a troll, but CR does not say that... They probably ranked the 7-series that way, but not the brand as a whole. The 3-series is usually held in very high regard by CR.
Just because it has a huge market share doesn't mean that the product is any good or even the best thing for any given person. I really do like my iPod but I know if Rio stayed in the game and evolved their product line my money would be theirs.
one of those 'it's funny because it's true' sketches I suppose...
When I bought my Archos gmini, it was the cheapest and smallest 20gb player on the market.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
You are thinking of burlesque, which is much broader and coarser, in which something is exaggerated or misrepresented for comic effect. For instance, the alternative version of God Save the Queen that starts "God help our boring Queen" is burlesque.
However, your general point is just utterly and obviously wrong. Being inaccurate does not make anything funny, it just makes it irrelevant. There is indeed a form of comedy which consists of reversing everything (and which is presumably connected to the Saturnalia), of which an excellent example is the Onion's accounts clerk who writes about himself as if he was a black gang leader. It is a lot more than inaccuracy, it involves turning things completely upside down. In the case mentioned that would have to involve Gates and Jobs going off to find a few loose woman while their wives discussed operating systems. But otherwise, the principle of comedy is to present things as they are but with a twist. Mr. Bean is funny because he is an adult who not only behaves like a child but has all the worst stereotypical characteristics of the English. The French laugh at him because they recognise the English on holiday, not because he behaves in an un-English way.
Furthermore, I assume you are an American, because I expect, rightly or wrongly, that English people are more knowledgeable about humour, but also because you obviously think American law applies in the UK. It doesn't. The satirical programme "Have I got news for you" goes out a day late because it has to be carefully checked by lawyers. If (as was the case here) you name and identify a person on a programme and then publish defamatory content, you do not have any First Amendment rights because (a) we do not have a Constitution in written form and (b) therefore it has no amendments. If the defamation is inaccurate, be assured that doesn't help your case. And if it is accurate but has no bearing on your fitness to do your job, you may still be stuffed. There are many things wrong with the UK, but at least we have ways of dealing with the likes of Don Imus and Ann Coulter.
Pining for the fjords
Geez. More Archos whining. Archos players -- particularly the early (supposed "pioneering") models, represented everything that was wrong about MP3 players, which Apple fixed with the iPod.
What's funnier is that a RockBox iPod does the same thing as far as synchronization. It's a whole lot easier to create playlists when one can just write a Perl script on the device, instead of fumbling through some bloated GUI (iTunes).
Plus, I can play music other than AAC/FairPlay, MP3, and Apple Lossless, which is why I installed RockBox. I get the same slick looks yet the greater additional expandability and features for free.
iTunes is a bloated gui? Most command line apps have a more bloated UI!
Okay, not that far, but it's pretty minimalistic. As in, I've never had to click a button to make my iPod sync.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
What people seem to forget is that it is a royal PAIN to upload music to MP3 players! Sure, it only takes literally a few seconds to transfer a song to a device, but it requires booting up a computer, finding the cables, ripping/buying/*cough*other , and then actually transferring the music over with all the right tags. To me, I find it a pain. And I think because it is the only really viable method of getting the music you want, people stick with it. - There was a revolution in music when people got the tape cassette. People everywhere could record music! Suddenly much more music was available to them. - There was a revolution in music when people got the Walkman. People could listen to music everywhere! - There was a revolution in music with the invention of the MP3 player. Suddenly everyone could listen to their music from anywhere without the hassle of exchanging tapes or external media! There was a demand for space. And it was exponential. Why? Because people can NEVER get enough media! The way I see it, the future is not with the massive disk space, or the super long battery, or the short range wi-fi. I would love to be able to subscribe to something like Rhapsody and listen to ALL the music I wanted, no downloading to devices required, no stupid tagging, no CDs. A set up similar to satellite radio, but where I don't just chose stations, but I can MAKE stations, similar to Pandora or last.fm, and chose the songs I love. How can this be possible? Simple! EDGE networks! EV-DO! Cellular technology has plenty of bandwidth available! Having a device like an Ipod with some limited storage space for buffer/saved tracks and a cellular data connection would be fucking unbelievable. IMHO this seems like not only the next logical step, but the final step in the digital music industry.
Geeks should learn more responsibility.
Apple's stores are almost like walking into a fancy TV store. If they could get news shows like "The Daily Show" on iTunes as soon as it's broadcast, they'd take over TV.
No, I will not work for your startup
Because it meant the endless tedium of synchronizing my music with the god-awful "drag into Explorer" (or in my case, "drag into Finder") interface.
"Drag into Explorer" (a Windows term) is not necessary since the Cowon D2 is a PlaysForSure device. Therefore, in addition to Cowon's proprietary Windows application, the D2 can be syched with Windows Media Player 11. OS X and Linux users, unfortunately, only have "drag files" support for now (the D2 was introduced last month). The D2 also promised great things like album covers and even lyrics (which actually is a sweet feature), but both of which required you to maintain your own music library with their proprietary software - a bit of an attempt at cloning iTunes Windows Media Player, which can be used with the D2, has had album cover views for years. That annoying Windows "journalist" Paul Thurrott claims that Apple ripped off Windows Media Player 11 for their album cover views. I keep explaining this to people: the secret of iPod's success is not only its marketing, but that it rolls the entire experience together from end to end. You play your music, download your music, play your videos, download your videos all from the same spot. The software provides all the features you need - album covers for example, and it also syncs automatically with your portable player. Slick. This can supposedly be done with any PlaysForSure device, like the Cowon D2, and Windows Media Player 11. Sure, it took a while for Windows Media Player to catch up with all this integration. It also beat iTunes for some features (e.g. album covers, video support). The only real advantage I can see for iTunes is its dual platform support (Windows and Mac).TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
does it play legal content though? also do you really think people want to write perl scripts on their ipod? Seriously, i know this is slashdot and all, but you've just taken what is right now the best UI and replaced it with a perl script because you think GUIs are bloated.. good god.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I have a 20 Gig Ipod thats about half full. Theres a mix of oggs and mps on it and i use the rockbox firmware. Rockbox has an option to build its own tag database on the the Ipod itself, on mine it takes about 10 minutes and because it happens in the background i don't even notice it.
So i don't think that building the metadata database on the source computer is any kind of advantage for the ipod, its down more to its simple interface and almost a monopoly in the online music business. I'd guess that Jobs' recent cooling towards DRM was at least partly motivated by the fact that it is seen as an unfair trade practice in a few countries, (France and Norway recently adopted this position i think).
Abort, Retry, Ignore?
If only MS had instead done the hard work necessary to create an actual QuickTime competitor, then they would be in a position to actually compete.
All of Microsoft and Real's audio and video tools rely on QuickTime just like everybody else's. There is no content creator side to MS or Real tools. It is just a way to convert your standardized content (e.g. MPEG-4 H.264 AAC) into stuff that only plays on Windows or only streams from Real servers. There is no point to this other than Microsoft and Real exploiting the technical ignorance of their customers for fun and profit.
Ha ha ha that was funny because you are using Windows yet you are complaining about bugs.
If you want to drop media files on an icon and they go directly on your iPod you can do that very easily with iPod + iTunes if you are using a Mac.
iTunes on the Mac is scriptable, its functionality is exposed as programmatic objects. If your iPod is called "iPod" and you make a playlist in iTunes called "iPod Playlist" and set your iPod to sync whatever is on that playlist, then you can use this AppleScript to add files to your iPod:
on open theFiles
tell application "iTunes"
repeat with theFile in theFiles
add theFile to playlist "iPod Playlist"
end repeat
update "iPod"
end tell
end open
(Paste the above script into Script Editor and Save as an application. Drop files on your new application to add them to your iPod. Repeat.)
You can also add files directly to the iPod using "device playlist" but it is probably not necessary.
The above is a top-of-the-head simple example. You could easily add to it to deal with a full iPod, to remove the oldest items from the playlist in that case or whatever. The point is that you don't have to work with iTunes in the way that everyone else does, its functionality can be used as a library for your AppleScript applications.
This is a good place to start for iTunes scripting:
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/
One burden of being a Mac user is watching Windows users always doing things the hard way.
> they paved the way for large hard drive mp3 players
LARGE is the operative word. Heavy is another word. Hard-to-use is three words.
> It's a whole lot easier to create playlists when one can just write a Perl script on the device, instead of fumbling through some bloated GUI (iTunes).
.. you can also script your iPod with Unix scripting. If you want to use Perl or Python that is there also along with Ruby. If you want to use DOM Scripting you can go:
... there is no shortage of iPod scripting options.
First, that is only true for Perl coders, and even then it is a pretty sketchy statement.
Second, you can script your iPod with AppleScript on the Mac. iTunes exposes its functionality as objects. There is no need to touch iTunes. You can create and modify playlists both in iTunes and directly on an iPod that is attached also. You can encode and transcode, rip, mix, burn all from outside of iTunes.
Further, because in AppleScript can always say:
tell application "Terminal" to do shell script foo
tell application "Safari" to do javascript foo
The Mac is one object. It is an integrated system. Mac users don't know about various kinds of optical drive standards and other extraneous uninteresting bullshit. Since 2001 I can put a CD or DVD in my Mac optical drive whether it is blank or not it will just work. If I make a DVD-Video disc it will just work in consumer players. Apple takes care of that shit so that Mac users can focus on being artists and lawyers and Web developers, not IT staff.
Also on the Mac, we do not miss PCI because in the first place, Macs always have a whole range of stuff built-in, and even FireWire goes back to the 20th century, so plugging stuff on when you need it has been the rule. I have a MOTU 896HD FireWire sampler here for many years when I want multichannel audio it is hot plug and go. I have used it on about five Macs including a PowerBook recording a live concert, it beats PCI so many times over it is not funny. Also, standalone devices like this do not steal CPU from your machine like a lot of integrated peripherals.
A lot of the ways that the PC market works are built on these assumptions:
- you have only one personal computer
- you are a full-blown IT nerd
- you have all the fucking time in the world
- you love to do Microsoft's QA for them for free
- you have all the fucking time in the world
These days we have lots of computers, we even have iPods and AppleTV and more is coming. I got no time to fuck with them. I don't want to choose a pencil and pen and then later realize I need white-out, I want to choose a pencil case that has everything in it, in every case, so that I am always ready to work no matter what comes up.
I saw a guy on here the other day arguing that it is wasteful for Apple to put Wi-Fi in all their boxes when some users don't need it. He is missing the point that it is wasteful to take Wi-Fi OUT of some boxes and then put it back in later, all based on the changing needs of users. If you buy a system without Wi-Fi and then a year later pay an IT guy to put Wi-Fi in you have just shot yourself in the fucking foot. You just paid the IT guy more money to install and configure and test that Wi-Fi than it would have cost to just buy a system with Wi-Fi from the start and let the user either use it or not as required over the life of the machine.
I think you're missing the whole point here. Expandability isn't about tossing aside old parts and replacing them with new ones as an act of hardware elitism. It's so that unlike most modern Apple products, you can upgrade your stuff without throwing the whole silly unit away. I think it's a travesty that you can't even replace iPod batteries. I worked as a configuration guy for the IT department of a major advertising agency for a few years. We worked with mac laptops from Lombards up to the last generation before the new intel MacBooks. Every generation of mac laptop got more and more difficult to tweak and upgrade by yourself. Even just Ram. It went from simply popping the keyboard off to having to pull out the jeweler's screwdriver kit to remove first just an external cover, then an external cover and some plates, and then having to take the entire battery housing apart. Lombards? You could swap the whole damn CPU out of a daughterboard slot after pulling the keyboard and a small metal cover. My girlfriend's Macbook? Screw it. If her RAM goes bad, I'd rather pay Apple than go through the hassle myself after looking through the docs on it. As far as quality is concerned, I'd say we were lucky if we didn't end up eating half of our mac laptops on a lease return compared to sending back 95% of our Dell laptops in reasonable condition. Granted, there is something to be said for the way a creative is going to treat his laptop and the way your average fearful office person will treat theirs but it was a pretty staggering difference nonetheless. And these were only 2-year leases. Why the hate for iPods? They're overpriced. You can buy stuff with dozens more useful features and of much higher quality for half the price of an iPod. Maybe I'm just iChallenged but I never thought iTunes was particularly user friendly and suspect the reason Apple addicts think everything else is so awkward is that they've trained themselves around a broken system in the first place. I used to like Apple a lot and I'm pretty indifferent to the OS battles but I think modern Apple fans are suffering from excess brand loyalty and the fashion statement that the Apple/iPod logos have become. --------- Not all that many people care about expandability. Only the hardcore gamers and geeks who buy the latest-and-greatest cpus and graphics chips really have a use for the kind of expandability that you seem to want. Most people don't know how or don't feel secure swapping their own cpu or graphics card. Even for those who do, it is hard to justify taking out and throwing away a perfectly functional cpu just because it is too old. It doesn't make economic sense. Just like people who buy a new car every other year. The current Macs all have room to expand the RAM, and they can be bought with hard drives that are large enough for any normal consumer. As for the optical drives, the burners in Macs can write to any format that will be mainstream for the next several years. To put it simply: for the vast majority of the computer market, the benefits of having a small and quiet computer completely outweigh the downside of not being able to expand it with pcie cards or extra hard drives.
Yikes... Should have the used the preview button on that one before declaring myself a total slashdot noob. The readable version:
I think you're missing the whole point here. Expandability isn't about tossing aside old parts and replacing them with new ones as an act of hardware elitism. It's so that unlike most modern Apple products, you can upgrade your stuff without throwing the whole silly unit away. I think it's a travesty that you can't even replace iPod batteries.
I worked as a configuration guy for the IT department of a major advertising agency for a few years. We worked with mac laptops from Lombards up to the last generation before the new intel MacBooks. In my experience every generation of mac laptop got more and more difficult to tweak and upgrade by yourself. Even just Ram.
It went from simply popping the keyboard off to having to pull out the jeweler's screwdriver kit to remove first just an external cover, then an external cover and some plates, and then having to take the entire battery housing apart. Lombards? You could swap the whole damn CPU out of a daughterboard slot after pulling the keyboard and a small metal cover.
My girlfriend's Macbook? Screw it. If her RAM goes bad, I'd rather pay Apple than go through the hassle myself after looking through the docs on how to do it.
As far as quality is concerned, I'd say we were lucky if we didn't end up eating half of our mac laptops on a lease return compared to sending back 95% of our Dell laptops in reasonable condition.
Granted, there is something to be said for the way a creative is going to treat his laptop and the way your average fearful office person will treat theirs but it was a pretty staggering difference nonetheless. And these were only 2-year leases.
Why the hate for iPods? They're overpriced. You can buy stuff with dozens more useful features and of much higher quality for half the price of an iPod. Maybe I'm just iChallenged but I never thought iTunes was particularly user friendly and suspect the reason Apple addicts think everything else is so awkward is that they've trained themselves around a broken system in the first place.
I used to like Apple a lot and I'm pretty indifferent to the OS battles but I think modern Apple fans are suffering from excess brand loyalty and the fashion statement that the Apple/iPod logos have become.
---------
Not all that many people care about expandability. Only the hardcore gamers and geeks who buy the latest-and-greatest cpus and graphics chips really have a use for the kind of expandability that you seem to want. Most people don't know how or don't feel secure swapping their own cpu or graphics card. Even for those who do, it is hard to justify taking out and throwing away a perfectly functional cpu just because it is too old. It doesn't make economic sense. Just like people who buy a new car every other year. The current Macs all have room to expand the RAM, and they can be bought with hard drives that are large enough for any normal consumer. As for the optical drives, the burners in Macs can write to any format that will be mainstream for the next several years. To put it simply: for the vast majority of the computer market, the benefits of having a small and quiet computer completely outweigh the downside of not being able to expand it with pcie cards or extra hard drives.