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iPod Casualties Offer New-In-Box Bargains
An anonymous reader writes "For the last few years makers from Creative to Virgin have proclaimed their latest digital audio player to be an iPod Killer, only to watch those portables flame-out in the marketplace. This doesn't mean there was anything wrong with them, in fact some were pretty decent. They just couldn't compete under all the iPod hype. It turns out that this pattern has created a huge sub-market of new-in-the-box stock, sold for pennies on the dollar to overstock vendors who then pawn them off cheap to the public. For the price of a basic iPod Shuffle you can now acquire some well-equipped units from a few years back. Examples include the 40GB Toshiba Gigabeat F40 and AlienWare's CE-IV with external speaker system."
Difference between an "iPod" and "40GB Toshiba Gigabeat F40"? One is cool and the other is geek speak. Go figure.
that Apple selling billions of dollars worth of ipods and accessories is all hype? I'm sure there have been many decent players that have come to market, but no ipod killer. Why? Because the ipod does what it does very well, it's affordable, and there's a flood of accessories that go with it. I can go into damn near any record, computer, electronics, or fashion store in any mall or town and find at least an ipod skin or cover of some kind, odds that they'll have a gigabeat f40 or zune accessory? I'd say the hype is all in articles talking about decent players being given away at pennies on the dollar, when you've got a similar player that can't be given away, hype is your best friend.
There is nothing preventing anyone from listening to the exact same music for similar prices on equally priced or cheaper players. It's not "hype" that keeps the iPod on top, it's the fact that no company has made a product that competitive.
The non-iPod market reminds me of when I look at Linux desktops. I, or almost anyone with a Mac, could stand in front of a two machines and make a giant list of glaring and astonishingly obvious problem with fonts, alignment, the way UI elements operate, how colour is used to convey importance and information, the names of applications, the sets of options presented to the user, how errors are handled, and so on.
I get the same feeling when I see the non-iPod players. The problems with the entire package, player, software, and store(s), is so obvious to anyone with an iPod that one has to think that the companies are absolutely delusional in their development.
You would think they would just need to spend the cash to have a room with:
A Mac running iTunes
An iPod
One iPod user
Their player they are developing
A machine running their software
and let that person point out all the glaring problems these companies have coming up with a complete package like Apple has with the iPod/iTunes/iTMS.
The iPod does not require you to use DRM'd music. It plays regular old MP3s (or AACs) ripped from your CDs or downloaded from P2P or flown in on floppies by carrier pigeon, whatever source you may choose. It has the ability to purchase songs from the iTunes store, but you don't have to and if you prefer another jukebox app you don't even necessarily have to use iTunes with it.
I'm gonna sound like an Apple fanboy, although in reality I'm more like the opposite. But it's only fair to acknowledge what Apple did right.
Thing is, before Apple being the #1 player with all the accessories and brand name and all, it was just another player. Everyone could make a HDD based player... and fucked up.
E.g., I remember going to a few shops in '99 to get an MP3 player. (Yeah, one of those "back in my day" tales;) There was the iPod or there were some things that qualified as one or more of:
A) As big as a fucking brick. (E.g., I remember the Archos brand name just because it was the biggest one on display. It looked like two 3" HDDs stacked.)
B) Overpriced to hell and back. (Oh, they had some extra feature ahead of their time, but not worth paying that kinda premium for it. E.g., there were those offering video playback... except they cost more than a decent laptop, which could play those videos in higher res.)
C) Encumbered by retarded world-domination attempts. (E.g., no Sony could actually play MP3, even after they had started grudgingly calling them MP3 players. If you read the fine print, they offered to convert your MP3s to their own 64kb/s codecs that sounded like playing the song through a cheap old digital watch. I'm sorry, but MP3 is lossy as it is, converting it to another lossy codec just gives you basically a multiplication of that.)
D) Were an interface nightmare. (Creative, I'm looking at you.)
Etc.
I'm sorry, I may not be the most hip and fashion-aware guy around, but if I end up with something the size and weight of a brick on my belt, then at least it better not cost _more_. I ended up buying a CD-based player at that time, since it was a lot cheaper and actually lighter than some of those.
Years later I got a Creative Zen, because it was one of those clearance bargains the summary mentions. It's still bigger than a same generation iPod, and still encumbered by retarded ideas. E.g., I can't actually just plug the USB cable in and drag-and-drop the music files on it, you actually need Creative's software for that. Why? E.g., even if I wanted to start a company producing accessories for it, it doesn't have a little connector like the iPod has. The only accessory you can make for it, will have to be connected through 3.5mm audio jack. I.e., either it's headphones or it's speakers, and not too smart ones either.
What I'm trying to say is: even just saying "but iPod has accessories" makes it sound like some random twist of fate, and absolves Creative and Sony and everyone of all responsibility. It makes it sound like some other people just happened to make accessories for the iPod and not for the Zen or Walkman, dunno why, it must be hype again. In reality there was a time where that market was up for grabs for everyone, and the likes of Creative and Sony just blew it fair and square. That iPod ended up king of the hill and worth making accessories for, simply because (at the time when it counted) it was indeed the better player.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Shit I don't even have a cell phone."
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See, now this I don't understand.
I don't have a land line. Why? The cell phone is _cheaper_. If you're going to be pragmatic, ditch the land line.
It's not about new and hip. It's about being fed up with how the old-fashioned phone company rips you off and charges you out the a$$ for features that simply come included with cell plans.
Plus you can take the thing with you. Nobody could ever get in touch with me when I had a land line. Now, they can, plus I get to screen my calls with caller ID and voicemail for free. Woot.
You can take my barebones nokia from my cold dead fingers.
As for the iPod, it simply works with Linux and has a non-annoying interface. Run Amarok or GTKpod and you're good to go. At least I _know_ it
works. It's not about trendy, though a decent design that doesn't look like ass helps.
Cranky Old Man Rant about electronics design and "WTF are they thinking?":
Minimalist design never gets the chance to look like ass. Steve Jobs knows this. Take a brick. Paint it white. You have a White iBrick. Throw a bunch of buttons, weird shapes on it, and you have an Ugly White iBrick. Same goes for laptops. Apple laptops are all striaght clean lines, single color. Tasteful. Doesn't even get the chance to look like ass. Look at a Dell or (horrors) DellAlienware notebook. Looks like ass.
A KitchenAid mixer looks like...a Mixer. It doesn't look like anything else or try to. Yet it's a classic design with clean streamlined lines. If I erased the logo from it, you'd identify it as a KitchenAid anyway.
Sit there and look like a computer, not a ricer box.
Computer fashion victims:
http://img.alibaba.com/img/product/11/32/11/11321
It looks like the grille of a Pontiac Aztec.
http://images.planetamd64.com/phatsob/dainescc/da
I know it's a mod, but that will give a 3 yr old nightmares... DAAADDEEEE!!! IT'S COMING TO TAKE MY BRAIIIN!!
http://www.freecomputer.ca/cases2.gif
Is that a jet intake? Yes, not only do I want it to sound loud, but I want it to _look_ loud and what's louder than a jet engine?
Another mod, but damn....
http://otakuscience.sharper.nl/images/game_pc%20c
OMFG, it looks like a Partidge Family lunch box (which is trendy now!) Aaaand it's slightly creepy at the same time! Yes! You too can raise eyebrows at your next LAN party!
Get off my lawn, you kids.
--
BMO
> They just couldn't compete under all the iPod hype.
Bullshit. They failed for technical reasons or for DRM reasons or for a combination of technical and DRM reasons and may get an assist from bad or no design. You are defending the 8-track tape. It is pitiful from a technical perspective. The "PC" technology market did not take over the consumer entertainment technology market as planned. Let it go.
iPod hype hit in like 2004-2005 when the iPod was already years old and had already bested all rivals on technical, DRM, and design merits. Something like 90% of iPods ever sold have color screens, that excludes the first 3 generations entirely, they are just a blip on the radar, but those were sales to a much, much geekier crowd.
It may be a treasure trove for Slashdot readers but maybe that's only because we will have the right combination of diminished expectations and technical know-how to not be disappointed in one of these devices.
Only in terms of its interface? You say this like it is something trivial. Surely, the interface is a critical aspect of a personal music player that one interacts with? And how does the interface not affect functionality? A good interface makes a device more functional than a device with the same features but a poor interface to access them. As for "styling," I don't think that had much to do with the success of the iPod. Unless by "styling" you mean "form factor." The iPod was smaller and thinner than other devices with equivalent storage. That's very important. It's not just "style." It's part of the function. The whole idea of these players is that they're portable. I don't think many (especially early adopters) bought it because it was stylish - but rather than it wasn't like a brick to carry around. Look at how people laugh at old-fashioned mobile phones that are too big to carry comfortably in your pocket.
There is also the slight problem that the original ipod sounded terrible, it took several models to catch up with the nomad sound quality.Got any evidence for that one, or are you just making stuff up?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Completely, 100%, wrong. No DRM is added to non-DRM'd files you put on an iPod using iTunes, gtkpod, or your own favourite iPod syncing tool. The music is stored in a hidden folder, and re-named to a hash value, which was done on the early iPods to make searching the collection fast on their slow processors, and is retained because legacy stuff like that has a habit of staying around.
When you plug the iPod in to any computer, it shows up like a USB or FireWire mass storage device. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from copying the music from the hidden folder to your computer. The tags are preserved, and so you can generate human-readable file names easily using a number of tools, if you wish.
Please stop spreading FUD.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The folder is hidden in the UNIX sense that it starts with a . (or has the 'hidden attribute set on FAT filesystems) and so is only advisory. Finder won't show it, and neither will Explorer if it's set to hide hidden files, but most file browsers have an option of showing it (and you can always get to it in the terminal). You don't have to guess the hash unless you were using the filename to store metadata (in which case, it won't be displayed on the iPod anyway). If you have tags containing the correct information, then it's trivial to re-import it. In iTunes, you can just say 'Add to Library' (File menu) and point it at the folder and then 'Consolidate Library' and it will copy all of the files from the iPod into your iTunes music directory and construct file names from the tags.
Yes, Apple could have made it easier, i sharing music had been a primary aim of the iPod. It wasn't. The iPod is a device for letting you to listen to your music collection while mobile. It can also act as a mass storage device for transferring files between people.
There was no reason to make sharing music trivial, because 99% of the target audience do not have music collections that are either in the public domain or for which they own the distribution rights. When it came to a choice between adding a feature that would be of no (legal) use to 99% of their users, or extending the battery life by making the searching easier in the first iPods, they chose the second one. Unlike Microsoft, however, they did not add any technical hurdles preventing people who did own the distribution rights to their music collections from copying them off. They do not apply DRM to music that does not come with DRM. There are no technical copy protection mechanisms that prevent you from extracting the music without violating the DMCA. The only thing stopping you copying the music to your friends is the law.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The fact that a sizeable number of Slashdot posters still think the iPod is successful because of "hype" explains why a sizeable number of Slashdot posters will never be as successful as Steve Jobs.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.