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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."
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.
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.
The summary is very misleading. If you actually go in and read the article it is talking about a subscription service. You won't get to keep what you download.
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.
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!
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.
Bad analogy. There is a very real limit on how much you can eat in one sitting (let's call it stomach capacity). Therefore, the buffet restaurant knows, on average, how many plates of food each customer will eat and how to price accordingly.
iTunes, on the other hand, does not have the same restriction. You are pretty much limited to your hard drive capacity, which gets cheaper by the month. You could theoretically just have your computer download their entire catalogue without some kind of restriction on a monthly flat rate.
I got nothin'
You obviously have not met that common animal called the Starving Student. It lives mostly around universities and is capable of eating many stomach capacities' worth of food in a single sitting. In fact, you could say that strange beast's stomach capacity goes up as the meal price goes down.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
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.
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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...
l33tn355. If iTunes had a verbose startup screen no one here would be complaining.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
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."
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.
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.
Thank you. Your check is on its way.
Regards, Apple PR department.
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.
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.
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?
But I respect your opinion anyway.
Work smarter, not harder.
As I own and use both of these programs, I feel obliged to comment. Reason, while it is more powerful for the beat and loop creation part of music production, is not a one-stop shop for recording professionals. Adding any kind of live instrument is completely beyond Reason's capabilities. It is a midi sequencer, drum machine, and pseudo-synthesizer. That is all. Garageband is a great program for quickie recordings that sound decent when they're mixed. However, the software instruments included with the program fall completely flat. The sounds and loops included with garageband are very boring and one-dimensional, and not at all suitable for any professional output. However, combining the two can make a very powerful studio that enables you to work very, very efficiently.
The future isn't here until I can type "car keys" into Google and have it say "You left them in your pants last night."
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
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)
--
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.
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
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.
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
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.