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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 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.
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."
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.
My iPod already has 8 Gigabytes, and is one of the smaller ones. Ohhh, you mean 6th generation. Wonder who else read this wrong.
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
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
l33tn355. If iTunes had a verbose startup screen no one here would be complaining.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Player - Weight - Size
Arch704 - 22oz - 7"x5"x0.8"
iPhone - 4.8oz - 4.5"x2.5"x0.5".
The primary drawback of archos players has always been size and weight - which also happens to be the primary requirement for these devices. if it does not satisfy this preliminary constraint, it does not matter what amazing features the archos provides.
My sig has been answered.
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.
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.