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A Million Zunes Sold
According to Robbie Bach, Microsoft's president of the Entertainment and Devices Division, Zune has already met the goal of 1.000.000 players sold, set at launch for the end of June. He also confirms that new Zune things will come in this fall, talks (not) about the Zune Phone, the new Watermelon Red Zune, the Zune Marketplace and of course Xbox 360.
You're off by almost as much as the original poster.
1/100 = 1% not 0.1%
The only way to get down to 0.1% is if the iPod only had a 10% share of the overall MP3 player market. I'm pretty sure the iPod's market share is something like 60 or 70 percent.
soo..
100/.6 = ~166 million total MP3 players
1/166 = zune market share of 0.6%
I've found that Ogg Vorbis offers noticeably better fidelity than mp3 at comparable comression. It's not something that you can easily hear with a portable player and cheap headphones, but on quality gear the difference is obvious.
Ogg is much, much better at preserving the character of high-frequency sounds and overtones (think cymbals and strings), and much more faithfully preserves dynamic range. Again, this won't make much difference on the train with your ipod ear buds, but run it through a decent sound system and the mp3s just sound muddy. And when it comes to Classical music, mp3 is nearly useless. Ogg does a decent enough job of it, but I still keep Classical and many Jazz recordings in FLAC.
From what I understand, the lack of Ogg support on many players stems less from commercial or legal concerns (patent issues vis a vis Fraunhofer notwithstanding) than from technical issues. Ogg needs more juice to decode, which means needing stronger processors, better means of heat dissipation, and a necessary hit on battery performance. Not that it can't be done, but it requires more expensive components and shorter battery lives.
But the lack of Ogg support on the ipod is not a huge deal. I wish it were there, but that doesn't stop me from transcoding from Ogg (or FLAC) to mp3 for the ipod and keeping the Oggs and FLACs on my Myth system.
I do favor open source whenever possible but am no fanatic. I am, however, a musician, and sound quality is as imortant as, or more important to me than portability. Especially when portability is so easy after the fact.
And I think it's pretty stupid of you to not realize that other people may do things diferently than you, and they're not wrong because of it.
As far as the Zune claims go, I don't buy it for a minute, any more than I buy the claim of 40m Vista licenses sold.
I take the el to work in Chicago, and every day I see dozens of people with ipods. I've yet to see a single Zune in the wild, and at retail outlets like Microcenter or Target there always seems to be a crowd of people looking at the ipods on display while the Zune is simply ignored. I don't think I've ever even seen a working Zune on display -- they're always off or broken.
Microsoft's numbers don't mean a thing. The numbers to look at are from retailers: How many Zunes have been sold at Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.? It's certainly not as high as Microsoft would have you believe. No matter what color they make it.
"this is Slashdot and you're bashing Microsoft."
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No, he's quite correct.
Plus, I'll heap some more numbers upon you, just out of spite.
Apple is going to sell 9.5 million iPods ending this quarter. 9.5 _million_ iPods in _one quarter_ , while it took _two_ quarters to sell 1 million Zunes.
9.5 million versus 500 thousand/quarter. Please also note that I'm splitting the Zune sales evenly between two quarters, ignoring the initial early-adopter bump. You're not going to see many Zunes, period.
http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=article&artic
"According to the firms latest report, global PMP/MP3 player unit shipments will rise to 268.6 million units in 2011, expanding at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13 percent from 128.7 million units in 2005. In 2007, player shipments are expected to rise to 216.9 million units, up 21.8 percent from 178.1 million in 2006, iSuppli said."
So the market is going to grow by nearly 39 million units _this year alone_ and the Zune will be 2 million of that, roughly. That's not enough to be visible.
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BMO