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Steve Wozniak Predicts Death of the IPod
Slatterz writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, better known in the industry as 'Woz,' believes that the iPod is on its way out and has revealed his discomfort with some aspects of the iPhone. Wozniak said that the iPod has had a long time as the world's most popular media player, and that it will fall from grace due to oversupply. Wozniak also commented on the iPhone's proprietary nature and locked service provider, and compared it to Google's open Android platform. 'Consumers are not getting all they want when companies are very proprietary and lock their products down,' he said. 'I would like to write some more powerful apps than what you're allowed.'"
First post. damn I feel all strange./joke
Well who knows ... the hype with apple products is the reason why so many people like it. Usually it's not the "best" technology who gets approval but the one who is used by most people see Windows, we all know that it's relatively crappy but so many people use it that finally it doesn't count that much.
But clearly android phones are going to be a refreshing new option for the horrible windows mobile platform or the jail'ed Iphone.
I did read tfa. His prediction on the iPod does not seem to take apple's innovation history.
I do agree with his discomfort with the iPhone. Apple had the chance to revolutionize the cell phone market in the US and flubbed it.
I never liked iTunes and thus also not iPod, and that all because ONE TIME, years ago, iTunes was installed on my PC during the installation of other software without me asking for it (or making the stupid checkbox to turn it off not visible enough) and me since then associating the name iTunes with malware. That association has never left my head, and continues on for iPod and iPhone. If everyone would have been like me, Apple would have had to change the name of their brand because their brand would be dirty in everyone's memory.
I would like to write some more powerful apps than what you're allowed.
Clearly Woz is not in Apple's demographic. It's been said time and again: Apple succeeds at delivering coherent, easy-to-use products that admirably perform tasks that typical non-techy users require. As long as Apple continues to design the products with that mentality, they will do well. If the iPod/iPhone stops selling briskly, it will be because everybody who wants one already has one, not because an Android phone lets you ssh into your home slackware server.
What I've noticed though is that the people who buy them don't seem to care...
Perhaps not directly, but over time the Android platform will likely build up a more impressive library of apps written by tinkers and hobbyists who did care. Even non-geek users will eventually notice the difference.
I can't understand the appear of iXXXX's either. Locked proprietary technology with limited scope for a geek to truly enjoy.
What I've noticed though is that the people who buy them don't seem to care...
You answered yourself with the second sentence; iPods and iPhones aren't targetted at geeks.
I'm no (current) Apple fan and don't own any Apple products. However, from a consumer POV, Apple got an awful lot of things 'right first time' with the iPod and iPhone. They're intuitive and stylish and give you the right functionality as simply as possible. It's like Nokia did when cellphones became popular a few years ago - deliver a 'must have' consumer product that feels right.
Woz is a remarkable guy, a bit of a hero to me. But he's no consumer product guru.
Squirrel!
Woz is looking at the iPhone with engineering eyes, not consumers eyes. It's a strange culture shock to geeks when they find out the universe of non-geeks doesn't work like them. Yes, the API is locked down, yes, it is locked to a single service provider but the average user really REALLY doesn't care. Even if they do know better, they really don't care. It's why McDonald's sales are high. They know a better burger, but they don't care. I'm not sure if this is a problem or not, to be quite frank. But when a geek tells me is a better solution, they're not realizing that "better" is incredibly subjective. Yes, OpenMoko is open, but is that better to me? I don't want to edit config files unless i'm being paid for it.
Is the iPod going to die out? Sure. Not before moving much much more product in the mean time.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I doubt the iPod will go out of market because of it's limitations.
All they have to do is see they loose market share and address the issues. I know it sounds easier than it is, but the marketing team that kept the ipod where it is for so long cannot be so incompetent as to not get over it.
Perhaps a better framing would have been "iPod as it is now is on it's way out".
That said, I got myself a Sansa e280 instead of iPod, especially due to the iPod's lock-in, so take my comments with a grain of salt.
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
Not to be a prick, but my Sandisk Sansa does almost all of that, lets me change "collections" and use Micro SD cards, runs rockbox, plays games, and even lets me watch video in just about whatever format I find best (using rockbox). It also cost me a whopping $30. Still cant see what all the iFuss is about, with the exception of much nicer aftermarket accessories due to market domination.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order- Ed Howdershelt Via Tass
IMO, all stand-alone music players are on their way out. Convergence is the future.
Apple is in the business, especially for consumer devices, of promoting solutions. This is a big differentiator from the competitors who usually focus on feature checklists and component integration.
However, someone like Woz is a hacker in the purest sense of the word - he wants to get tools and pieces that he can use to make his own solutions. An iPod he cannot change things on is not something he's interested in.
But for most people, the fascination with Apple comes simply from Apple 'getting it' - most consumers want to pay for problems to be solved for them, not to be given tools to learn to solve the problems themselves.
What I've noticed though is that the people who buy them don't seem to care...
The only reason they don't care is because they haven't seen that the grass is greener on the open side of the fence.
It is hard to miss what you don't know. But should Android or even a WinCE system get a few cool toys that apple explicitly forbids, that green light of envy will start to burn bright.
I've had a Symbian phone for years. Lots of free apps and developer tools, built in GPS and great touch screen, been around for years... That didn't stop the iPhone coming out either.
Because the iphone had a cool new interface that no other phone had. But its going to be a tough battle for Apple to keep ahead of the other platforms when they are deliberately excluding software that people want.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Yeah. But it's not an apple i-pod. And that is essentially what sells an i-pod.
How can something become not popular because there are too many of them? Can someone please explain it to me? Did cars fall from grace because there were too many? Buttons perhaps? Children, are they not popular any longer?
Steve Wozniak is a smart guy but he is, to put it mildly, an extreme "power user". He left Apple to develop a programmable IR remote control (http://www.ktronicslc.com/core.html) with 256 functions split over 16 code pages.
It had programmable macros, scheduled timers, and absolutely no way to label what a button *does*. If the batteries ever ran down it had to be re-flashed via a serial link. It's technically sweet, it filled a niche that Woz perceived in his daily life, and it remains completely unusable for 99.9% of the world's population. (I'm sure it generated some fantastic patents, though!)
I would trust Steve Wozniak to design firmware for a battery powered car, or to build a lifesaving medical device, or to write a graphical Tetris clone that fit entirely in the unused bytes of a LILO boot sector. But I don't think his opinions on the marketability of consumer electronics are worth a damn.
This was a bad move, not only hurt in terms of sales but damaged the Apple brand image, pushing them towards the sort of resentment that MS manage to generate.
End users don't care about specs, but they do care about functionality.
Features like downloading and syncing over the air, updating podcasts, shopping at multiple music stores, place shifting, better E-mail clients, and laptop Internet access matter even to non-geeks, and Apple is preventing a lot of that from happening.
I think the reason that hasn't mattered for initial iPhone sales is because most US consumers are so inexperienced with smart phones that even the iPhone seems like a big step forward and because the only other smart phones US carriers are pushing are the Blackberry and Windows Mobile shit, often with carrier restrictions. But Android and Symbian are going to change that. We'll have to see whether Apple can reverse course quickly enough, because it won't be long before regular users do care about all this.
Perhaps not directly, but over time the Android platform will likely build up a more impressive library of apps written by tinkers and hobbyists who did care. Even non-geek users will eventually notice the difference.
Android isn't the only mobile platform to allow 3rd party software. Some of the other ones have been around for many years. And yet, within 3 months, the iPhone and its App store beat them all and left them bloody by the roadside. Some developers are on the record stating that they made more profit in one month of App store sales than they make in a year for other mobile platforms.
I wish Google best of luck, after all competition is good. But to compete with the iPhone on that level, they'd need an end-to-end solution, where everything from the dev tools to the online shop comes out of the same hands and is readily available not only for the developers, but most importantly to the customers as well. By my modest estimate, the App store tie-in will win out in the end, because it brings developers and customers together. And that's where the rubber meets the road. If Android can't offer something similar, it'll end up like FreeBSD - an interesting curiosity with lots of technical advantages that nobody really cares about.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You're right, and loathe though I am to admit it, Apple are capable of taking someone else's cool idea and frobbing the usability right up to eleven.
How is the parent labelled insightful? Oh I understand, its the usual FOSS love in. Android will be open and succeed in the same way that Linux has replaced every other OS on the planet. Oh, it hasn't? That would be my point then.
This sort of post is typical of slashdot in that it shows that there is a basic lack of understanding of the wider world. Non-geeks don't care what XXX is running. They just want it to be able to do what they want. They want it to be as easy as possible to use and anything else is a bonus. Apple get this. In general Slashdot users and FOSS advocates don't.
Put it another way. There are many digital music players on the market with more features than the iPod. Why does the iPod continue to dominate? Its easy to use. On the Gadget Show on UK TV this last Monday they did a comparative test between three portable video players. One was a the iRiver Clix 2, one the Archos 5, the final the iPod Touch. They had a BBC Radio 1 DJ help choose between them. He went for the iPod Touch despite it not having the best sound because it was the easiest to use and looked good.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
This exemplifies your fundamental mistake. If a normal person finds themself having to use terms like "operating system", "firmware" and "crash" in relation to a telephone or a digital music player, then that is a fail. People want to make telephone calls or listen to music. They do not care about the operating system or the firmware or the ideology of the developers until the phone stops working and then they'll just start cursing it.
People might be getting more sophisticated and knowing what operating system is running on all of their personal devices, but it's not because they want to, it's because the products are crap and don't shield the consumers from their underlying workings properly.
Actually, this example demonstrates preciseley the opposite of the point you were trying to make. The phone operator is still there, it's a computer instead of a person, but the interface between the users and the operator has been simplified to the point where most of us have only the vaguest idea that it's there, how it works or what it does. We just type in the number of the person we want and we are connected. The operator is completely invisible.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
But should Android or even a WinCE system get a few cool toys that apple explicitly forbids, that green light of envy will start to burn bright.
I'm not saying they don't exist, or that they are trivial; but please specify the types of "cool toys" that Apple explicitly forbid that aren't replacements for existing apps?
Tethering is explicitly forbidden by Apple. It's technically possible if you jailbreak it, but Apple bans apps that do it, and it's also explicitly forbidden in the contract, EULA or whatever.
The Apple zealots will mod me offtopic, but analogy is not specious. "Security" in this context is always a pretext for "control".
What has a the increased security of the iPhone gotten you? A crippled device with limited options under an external authority's control, though the security is nonetheless easily defeated by the well informed, thus demonstrating it to be a sham. The security of the system does not exist to protect you, it exists to protect a monopoly of power.
Listen fanboys: deep down, in your heart, you know Woz is right. You are not your machines. You owe Apple no loyalty. There is good left in all of you, you just need to listen to your conscience.
Back in the 80s you had many different kinds of PC (IBM and compatible, Apple's Mcintosh, Amiga and several others depending on the country).
Apple's one was the best, no question about it. Neat graphical interface (against MSDOS or Windows 1.x, ugh!) responsive, fast (Motorola RISC processor against Intel 8086) networked from the start (Appletalk was really user friendly compared to the abominations that existed for IBM compatibles).
But the IBM platform was open (in the sense that everybody copied it), unlike Apple's, and this created a boom which we are still enjoying (or suffering, if you consider the poor sods that continue to use Windows).
Fast Forward to today. Apple has the best platform (at least from the point of view of the market share, technically I am not so sure) but they are doing their damn best to lock it (again).
Google is creating an open architecture for mobile devices that all carriers are ready to support. This will increase the synergies (horrible but necessary word) between carriers, phone manufacturers and application developers, creating many new, exciting business possibilities.
Open (Internet, IBM PC, TCP/IP) beats closed (AOL, Mcintosh, Netware). Apple is not paying attention and clearly did not learn the lesson.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"Users do care about openness, not necessarily because it's openness, but rather for the things that it allows."
Correct, but it would be a false impression to think that "open" doesn't have as much a price as "proprietary". For example all the advantages you listed wouldn't be worth as much if one had to stand on their head, whistling Dixie, while hand-editing files in hexadecimal. As some open source projects are finding out it costs money to gain some of "proprietary"'s advantages. e.g ease of use.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
You know, I find that hilarious.
Darwin is STILL open source, and has always been, except for a short period when the Intel version was unreleased. But the FOSS people keep complaining about OS X being closed. Why? Because they want to run the shiny value-add parts like Aqua too! You've just illustrated the grandparent's point perfectly, and extended it to the techies as well.
They want it to be as easy as possible to use and anything else is a bonus.
Conversely, you would say that /.-ers and FOSS hippies "want it to be as easy as possible to HACK..." They find it supremely important to be able to break into a given gadget as readily as possible, else it's "closed."
Funny thing: ever since the first electrical cord was plugged into the first electrical outlet we've been dealing with NOTHING but "closed systems." Someone else above mentioned the term "appliance" as opposed to "platform."
When I buy a phone/PDA/whatever-you-call-it, I personally WANT an appliance, because I'm an END USER.
There are people, like my stepson, who love to buy junk cars and tinker with them for months and even years, and get them running again, new paint job, new engine, everything.
My wife and I, and just about everyone else, just want to get in, turn the key in the ignition and drive to our destinations.
For years, her son wouldn't even THINK of getting a car built after the mid-70s or so, because of electronic ignition. See, to him, that's a "closed system," because there was no carburetor with which to fiddle. And we're talking a kid who just turned 29 last month.
Hobbies are great, but if you're going to tell me I can't have electronic ignition becuase you love carburetion, please get out of my face.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.