Slashdot Mirror
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?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And as long as the prices for the real thing stay and absurdly high levels that trend will actually spread. I can't afford the prices so I buy less expensive brands. My 8gig player was much cheaper that Apple's 4gig and the interface is fine. I'm not even confined to one vendor for application and use.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
I find this utterly astonishing, if you're referring to compressed music. Even uncompressed, that's an enormous collection at your fingertips. Do you really listen to all that music? If so, I have concerns about: a) your hearing, as damage is related to length of exposure; b) your mental health, as locked away in a private auditory world is ultimately alienating; c) your substitution of listening for creation (i.e. you don't make any music); d) your identity being somehow reliant on your consumption of music; e) your inability to make a decision and just pick a playlist for the road. If you aren't listening to it all, yet must carry it around with you, you're engaged in a strange variant of conspicuous consumption.
Okay, that's partly facetious, except for the hearing bit, and don't take it personally, I direct my concerns to all those I see lost in earphone land (disclaimer: I have one too). There are lots of reasons to have all that space used: you're an ethnographer studying music; you're a musician using it for reference; you're backing up hard drives; you're storing video. All of which is perfectly reasonable for requiring 60GB.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Since it is soldered in place in most motherboards, I wouldn't call it user replaceable.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You went into an Apple store with the intent of purchasing a Mac and iPod, and started asking questions about Ubuntu?
Sounds like you had your mind made up from the start.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
While it's true that Apple does a lot less pure research than it did in the 90's
Apple didn't do much "pure research" even in the 90's, and there has been essentially nothing since. That's particularly galling because Apple has been using so much of the results of academic and other people's corporate research.
Microsoft is evil when it comes to their business practices, but they at least employ a lot of computer scientists and have some programs to support academic research. Apple just leeches off other people's results. Any academic computer scientist who supports Apple is a fool: if all computer companies were as stingy as Apple, computer science would cease to exist.