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Apple Prepares For the Coming iPod Slump
Hugh Pickens writes "Companies like AOL have stagnated along with the products that made them successful as a mature market and downward pressure on prices led to a nasty death spiral, but Saul Hansell writes in the NY Times that Apple has used its amazing six-year run with the iPod to nurture other business lines. Even though the number of iPods sold this quarter grew only 1 percent from the same quarter a year ago, Apple should be able to sustain itself with three business lines that will help it withstand a collapse in the MP3-player market: a continuing revenue stream from the iPods that have already been sold because of the iTunes Store, product upgrades to the iPhone and iPod Touch that are so different that they may well appeal to a significant number of iPod users, and perhaps most significantly, sales of the Macintosh which showed an increase of 51 percent by units and 54 percent by dollars."
> Do you bitch about the battery on your motherboard to?
No, because that one is user-replaceable...
You could check out the Cowon Q5W. It competes with the high-end Archos PMPs. I have a Cowon A2 and for the kind of player it is, it's easily the best one I've used. Though the next player I plan on getting will be Cowon's successor to the D2, whatever that will be, as the idea of just swapping out high-capacity SD cards works for me.
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The 3rd-party iPod battery market has been over-saturated for years. You can get a new battery for any iPod model, including the tools needed to perform the replacement, for under $30 dollars.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
Lucky you. The mommyboard battery on the older Compaq Deskpro I have at home is spot-welded in place. :-(
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
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I've replaced the battery in my 1st gen mini twice by myself. the company i ordered the battery from ($9 btw) even included the tools to open the mini's case without damaging it.
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Apple now has two highly successful, separate platforms that feed one another: it's iPod/iPhone platform (handheld) and its Mac platform (PC). As others have noted, the iPod isn't going anywhere; the iPhone/iTouch sub-platform is very compelling and has a lot of room to grow; the Mac is enjoying growth unprecedented in the platform's history (to my chagrin, largely thanks to Apple's defection to Intel, which allows people to replace their PCs with Mactels). The substantial growth seen in Mac market share will cause developers to take the platform a lot more seriously than they have in the past and may spur traditionally unfriendly developers to enter the Mac market. Apple's corporate image is great in most quarters. Now I'd love to see a consumer Mac tower for those who are never going to buy iMacs, but that's probably not coming any time soon.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Apple should be looking at Dell as a cautionary tale of what can happen if your company doesn't expand their business. I don't think I made that clear. Dell is trying to expand but haven't had much success in other products other than computers.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
And there you have the answer. The smaller iPods will remain, but the real money is in the new convergence wireless touch devices. Once those hit $250-300 in decent sizes (and that will probably happen in the next iteration - the 8 gig is already $300), and the SDK means that there will be games and apps and allsorts, who wouldn't want one? There have been promises of such devices from companies like Nokia, and the PSP is probably the closest, but the iPod Touch and iPhone look like the first real winners.
(FD: I bought a 16 gig, but gave it to my wife so I had an excuse to buy a 32gig - it's enough for the essentials. I'll have to find someone else that needs a gift when the 64gig comes out)
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Most? No. I've been working or playing with IBM PC-compatibles since I was 12 when Dad brought a second-hand 286 home from work. I've never seen a single battery that was welded in. Anecdotal evidence, of course, but I've laid eyes on easily hundreds of different mainboards. I certainly wouldn't purchase a board where you couldn't replace the only piece guaranteed to die in ~5 years.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
Lucky you. The mommyboard battery on the older Compaq Deskpro I have at home is spot-welded in place. :-(
Most of those are not spot welded in place. After working in a repair shop for many years, I noticed it was common for many of the coin cells to have spot welded terminals which are then simply soldered onto the PCB. A soldering iron replaces these with ease if you have any soldering skill. Often a standard coin cell socket will go in it's place. Leaving out the socket is a cost cutting move an is seen only on the lowest quality boards made. The battery is replaceable, but not by breaking off it's terminals. Congratulations on getting one of these cheap motherboards. Many of these expect a battery life of about 5 years which is past warranty.
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I have a ~6 year old 15" PowerBook G4 Titanium that still looks stylish, runs OS X Tiger and Adobe CS3, and performs pretty well.
I find this amusing.
With the Macbook/Pro, Apple effectively closed the gap between its 'Pro' and 'Consumer' grade laptop products, and immediately faced a barrage of criticism for not offering a "Pro" 12/13" laptop.
The iBook was a fairly significant step down from the PowerBook. The MacBook is a fairly small step down from the MacBook Pro. Even back during the PowerBook days, the 12" model was often speced lower than the larger models.
That all said, I still use a 12" PowerBook as my main machine, and do wish that Apple would offer a slightly "nicer" machine at the Black MacBook's $1500 price-point (which, as it currently stands, is a very poor value for the money)
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You can't, but that doesn't imply that iTunes is the only way to load music onto an iPod. There are 3rd-party apps (for Windows and Linux, at least...probably for Mac OS X as well, but iTunes works well enough for me there) that'll manage what's on your iPod.
(Now that I've thought about it a little more, if you use something like the iPod kioslave, you can get drag-and-drop management (somewhat) of your iPod through Konqueror. Last time I checked, though, it didn't support album covers on the newer iPods that support them.)
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I recall the great "aha!" when I tried to figure out how Woz did the graphics on the Apple and discovered he took advantage of the 6502's symmetric clock cycle to put the screen access to memory on the backside of the cpu access to memory.
this had the side effect of hitting every (lower byte) address every 60th of a second. That in turn solved the great problem of how to refresh dynamic memory without wait states for the cpu. This allowed the apple to avoid using static ram.
this in turn let them have a smaller power supply, one of the first to use a switching power supply that were the new thing in electrical engineering.
As for the cards, woz was clever again. By pre-decoding the address space for the cards on the motherboard he saved having to have circuitry on every card to recognize it's own address. Thus the cards were half the size of the s-100 cards and used less power.
all that was pretty freakin innovative. Not that they invented it but they made it all work.
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