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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.
Well my iPod already died, so he was spot on with that one. The proprietary battery lasted about a year, and it would cost about as much as a new iPod to replace it.
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...
Sure they'll die, but I doubt they'll die just because there's something better on the market.
And as for open alternatives? 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.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
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 recently played around with an iPod (classic) and to be honest I really dont get why people tout its great UI ('clickwheel') - at least for me it was completely counter-intuitive and just plain stupid. I mean why no dedicated buttons for volume? The iPod UI in the iPhone works much better for me.
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.
Maybe not quite in the discomfort-with-lack-of-openness sense that he meant it, but the iPhone is supposed to be a temperamental item to own, much like a Chihuaha.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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)
This is what it would be like, if the majority of people were athiests.
ATHIEST KID: Mom, I'm going to go fuck a hooker.
ATHIEST MOM: Okay, son.
ATHIEST KID: Afterwards, I'm going to go smoke pot with my friends, since it's "not addictive."
ATHIEST MOM: Okay, come home soon!
The athiest kid leaves the room. The father comes home from work several minutes later.
ATHIEST DAD: Hey!
ATHIEST MOM: Hi, honey! I'm pregnant again. I guess I'll just get another abortion, since "fetuses don't count as human life."
ATHIEST DAD: Okay, get as many abortions as you want!
ATHIEST MOM: Oh, and don't go in the bedroom.
ATHIEST DAD: Why not?
ATHIEST MOM: There are two gay men fucking eachother in there.
ATHIEST DAD: Why are they here?
ATHIEST MOM: I wanted to watch them do it for awhile. They just aren't finished yet.
ATHIEST DAD: Okay, that's fine with me!
Suddenly, their neighbor runs into the house.
ATHIEST NEIGHBOR: Come quick, there's a Christian outside!
ATHIEST MOM: We'll be right there!
The athiest couple quickly put on a pair of black robes and hoods. They then exit the house, and run into the street, where a Christian is nailed to a large, wooden X. He is being burned alive. A crowd of athiests stand around him, all wearing black robes and hoods.
RANDOM ATHIEST: Damn you, Christian! We hate you! We claim to be tolerant of all religions. But we really hate your's! That's because we athiests are hypocritical like that! Die, Christian!
THE END
Scary, isn't it?
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.
Steve Wozniak saying "the iPod is going to die some day" was in the same vein as someone saying "we're all going to die some day". It's trivially true and that was what he was getting at.
once the patent on that wheel navigator runs out. im surprised you can patent the thing, shows what i know about patents i guess.
I'm a die-hard linux geek but deliberated and bought a 10GB ipod about 6 years ago, never once using itunes software. I just replaced it this week with a 16GB nano and am thrilled with the tiny size, much better battery life, and otherwise identical musical experience. The old one still works, but just barely, on its second battery which I installed myself.
I can see myself buying another nano in 5 years at whatever the newly expanded storage space is for $200. As long as I can still get gtkpod or equivalent to work on it.
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?
The person who posted this last time must not have got the response he was looking for.
I think this is the third time it's been posted in the last two weeks.
I'm suffering from troll-overload.
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.
Perhaps US and few other countries are indeed starting to be "oversupplied" with iPods (though I wonder how is that a sign of death...), I don't know.
But IMHO iPod sales still have bright future in many places where, until recently, iPods were waaaay too expensive for all but small minority (rest choose cheap chinese noname mp3 players). I see it happening around me right now (ex-soviet bloc, central european, new EU member country) - for most of their presence on the market, iPods were almost shunned as extravagant, unnecessary and few times overpriced.
But during the last year and a half, perhaps two, this started to change. Partially thanks to new, cheaper with each revision, models and growing life standard, they are now...fashionable. Now, also here, it's "I can choose iPod or one of that other mp3 players...I'll try to have an iPod"
One that hath name thou can not otter
First evolution gets cancelled and now there's no more iPods? If it wasn't for the fact that I've got a ton of money in the bank I think I'd jump off a bridge.
At the bottom of the
Troll or Flamebait...
Place your bets now!
http://xkcd.com/190/
I know, shameless offtopic - but in these uncertain times, who is to say what on and off topic? (Oh right, moderators. I forgot about them.)
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
So finally iPod users will have a chance to experience blue? touch-screen of death ...
>Scary, isn't it?
Only in as much as some Christians apparantly believe this sort of rubbish.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I remember when Apple included iTunes with Quicktime by default. But then, that's not too different to the whole Safari fiasco earlier this year ...
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
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.
Wozniak must be one of those Apple haters who has never used a Mac in his life. Quick, mod him down! Oh, wait...
for boosting AAPL's share price at the perfect time.
It's iPod, not IPod you insensitive clod!
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.
This statement is not interesting at all. Sooner or later, every piece of technology will die. I will die. You will die, Woz will die.
It's a trivial truth not worth the all the attention.
So, where is the news on this statement? the fact that was Woz who said it?
http://www.ghastlycomic.com/d/20040418.html
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
I ride on trains and a subway to work every day. About a quarter to a half of the passengers have headphones stuffed into their ears. Most of the times the headphones are connected to a cell phone, and not an MP3 player.
Granted, where I live even kids in their early teens have cell phones.
If you have a cell phone that offers good quality audio, why bother with an extra gadget?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Ms Palin (or may I call you Sarah?), have you ever considered signing up for an account here?
At the bottom of the
I just decided against an iPhone ( in australia ) and went with a walkman phone from sony-ericsson instead.
remember walkman?
same deal for iPod methinks.
iPhone will probably have to open up once android gets momentum
i talked the provider into 12 months contract on the w980 phone - with the express intent that my next handset will be android based - hey i write java for a living, the api for android is reasonable, and given how cheap flash storage is these days, i'd expect 32gig + in 12 months time. this new handset has 8 gigs built in, which is fine for my needs for now.
and while i have dabbled in j2me for phone software in the past, what the android sdk looks more like is a full blown stack with an implicit 'always connected' promise. gimme gimme gimme!
thing that woz seemed to be getting more toward was there will be a diminished need for the straight up ipod media player, and as a result ipods themselves will probably drop off and things like iPhone will take their place.
The Android!
Informative...
How long have I been an atheist and didn't realize all these options were available? No more good clean living for me - I don't know where I got that nonsense from. Hookers and pot from here on in - yeeha!
I would of course take up genocide, institutionalized rape and mass murder etc. - but unfortunately those damn christians have pretty much cornered the market on that.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
wow, scary!
see for yourself:
http://skitch.com/slowburn/2fyx/wozniak-death-prediction
>Scary, isn't it? Only in as much as some Christians apparantly believe this sort of rubbish.
I just love how no matter what the subject is, it somehow leads back to Christianity. Amazing isn't it.
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.
It all sounded fine up until the intolerance part.
Put identity in the browser.
Well, I predict that the iPod will outlast Steve Jobs if that boy doesn't eat a freaking steak once in a while. He looks like an ugly Fiona Apple.
Android phones will take iPhone sales down faster than a fat guy at a buffet. The reason why: customization. I know as a cell phone user I have always hated the way certain companies made there OS, like the RAZR hides everything under Tools (calc/alarm , etc) or the way Samsung phones are just weird, you can tell it's not thought out by someone from the US. but with Android you can change everything, even the dialer can be replaced by YOU the user. that's what I'm talking about, let me change the layout: It's my phone why did it take this long to let me have it my way?
If Jobs is Jesus, then clearly Wozniak is God. (He is to me and I don't even like Apple)
Your God just dissed you. Summon your power and try to bash your God.
Long Live Wozniak!!!
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
Woz came to my house.
"I see dead iPods."
"How often do you see them?"
"All the time. They're everywhere."
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain with all your metadata.
This is another example, certainly one of the iPod skus will be removed (probably those large HD based ones.) but small music players will always be a hot item. The iPhone & Touch are designed to cannibalize the high end iPod sales, and it has done so effectively.
So now apple are selling a more expensive device to the same audience who bought all those big ipods years ago.
"Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, better known in the industry as 'Woz'"
The entry part of the article should be:
"Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, better known in the industry as 'The Irrelevant Steve'"
Now the whole story makes much more sense, trust me on that.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
iPods won't die as long as Apple keeps pumping out incremental improvements, and as long as the competition doesn't catch on to the accessory effect.
Like, say... iPod Touch with a hard disk, or with >40G of flash.
Or iPod Bluetooth, to get rid of the tether.
Or an iPod Shuffle headset.
Or ...
They've got plenty of room on the upgrade treadmill.
There a reason that Woz is not at Apple anymore. He doesn't get the products and he is so wrong and has been for a long time.
It doesn't have wireless. It has less space than a nomad. It HAS to die.
Now that it DOES have Wireless and has as much space as a Nomad?
Consumers have no understanding or care about "proprietary" or customization. They just want cool stuff that works.
As long as iPods work and are perceived as cool, they will reign supreme.
There will always be a market for niche consumers, which make up a large portion of Slashdot.
And don't forget the power of geeks. They usually have some money to spare for gadgets,...
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Isn't it more pretenders with enough money, doing it partly to show of?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Normal people don't care about things like vendor-lock in and DRM. Geeks do. Based on the huge market share held by iPods, it appears that there are far more normal people in the world than geeks (not a good or bad thing, just is). And why do we keep posting opinion pieces from a guy who hasn't had any impact in the industry in the past 20 years? Maybe silly conclusions like this is the reason Woz hasn't been involved with Apple since the 1980s?
He'd better be careful - that's a pretty intense bunch, and he just slammed iPhonies pretty hard.
If I were him, I'd call Salman Rushdie and find out where to hire a good car starting assistant.
Woz is an economist now? Read his autobiography. Language of a 10 year old. A smart one, no doubt, but the guy knows how to put circuits together. It certainly doesn't qualify him to comment on economics any more than the Bush Administration can comment on separation of powers.
Eric
If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't. - Pugh
""Consumers are not getting all they want when companies are very proprietary and lock their products down," "
Well Woz is half right. No consumers aren't. However in exchange consumers usually are getting a cheaper price or better service, or something that the consumer desires in exchange for not getting full and complete freedom to do whatever they want. So the situation isn't as lopsided as some would make it appear.
The ipods are nothing like any other mp3 players, but off course why be logical when there is Apple hate.
The iPod is nothing like other MP3 players? Really? I mean, doesn't it play music and video?
I understand what you're trying to say (the design and interface of the iPod is superior to that of other MP3 players), but the way you say it makes it seem like the iPod is an entirely different device. It would be like me saying, "Acuras are nothing like other cars, but of course, why be logical when there is Acura hate."
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
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.
I have never owned an ipod, and I have no desire to own one.
I listen to music in three places - my garage, my car, and my office.
In my garage, I have a stereo.
In my car, I have a radio.
In my office, I have a computer.
The last portable music player I owned was a cassette Sony Walkman way back in the 80s when I was a kid. The novelty of having portable music didn't last long for me. Probably because the batteries ran out so fast and my folks weren't going to buy me batteries every 3 days!
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
The history of Personal Computing is a stern reminder of this.
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"
What a surprise.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
nokia s60 phones are better as they are unlocked.
They don't have 1 app store that you must you with out hacking your phone.
They have mem card slots.
You can take the battery out of them.
That Apple's core (OSX) is based on taking advantage of an open license, but here you are, embarrassing yourself in public claiming that we all are unthinking FOSS apologists. Apple recognized open is better with that move, but as soon as they reached some success they went back to their old ways. It may be their downfall.
As for Linux not having replaced all other OSes, well, you are not paying attention. Linux is the most deployed OS in the world, of course it is not deployed in most desktop PCs yet, that to the uninformed gives the impression that the little penguin is not achieving all the success it should, but this will change.
Just yesterday I went to one of the most important computer shops in the UK and there were several Linux laptops in show, side by side with their Windows counterparts, the Linux machines £50 cheaper in average.
There are 2 points to make: companies are no longer afraid to err out of Microsoft's influence and the people are seeing the price differential and will start to ask questions about why this is so.
And all the above is in the consumer market only, add embedded and mobile devices and servers, and frankly there is no world domination yet, but the bandwagon is rolling quite nicely.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
TFA is just a crude summary of the actual interview in the Daily Telegraph.
your not exactly spot on with predictions or with your business sense. Clearly Jobs was much more the design concept and marketing genius then you would ever be. I love Woz as a person but he is a limited hack when it comes to engineering. He could not keep up with the times and changes. And from a business point of view he knows nothing compared to Jobs. While Jobs has many faults taking care of business is not one of them. Why people listen to this washed up one time great hardware designer (we are talking the days of 8 bit procs and simple circuits) is beyond me. Simply put...Woz...nice try to troll but you dont have a GOD DAMN CLUE. Which is good for Apple...Cause if Apple was in your control we would all be still clicking away on BS computers using a BS OS. Get a farking job WOZ and quit crying sour grapes. Jobs kicked your ass no questions asked.
. I love the sound of burning women and screaming rubber....
the hype with apple products is the reason why so many people like it.
Not ONE of you thought this was flamebait? I didn't think it was even subtle. Ridiculous.
I recently loaded it on my teenage kid's Sansa, and yes it does have to reboot into the Sansa firmware to transfer songs. However it does this automatically -- plug it in, and it auto-reboots into the Sansa firmware, directly into the transfer app. Unplug it, and it goes back to Rockbox (takes only a few seconds).
The kid doesn't mind, he likes Rockbox much better than the default firmware (for the games, and tweaking the audio settings).
I suspect you would call that a plaster.
I'm a septic, so I might be wrong.
[UID-HeinzIntel]
...they buy it because it's a dream. A lifestyle choice. They're not buying iPod, the MP3 player, that's more of a secondary thing. They're buying cool, a dream of being "unique".
Has Woz been paying attention? The REASON iPod is a success is precicely BECAUSE "more open" platforms havent been giving people what they want. I'm no Apple fan, not by a long shot, but the very REASON their products are so popular is BECAUSE they are proprietary and locked down.
Take desktop operating systems, for example. Apple has been gaining a TON of Lunix market share in the past few years. That's where the REAL "Switch" has been- Lunix users tired of waiting for The Lunix to be ready for Teh Desktop have finally grown tired of waiting. They want something that "just works"... and Lunix can't offer that. It also can't offer being able to go into a store and purchase software for it which will "just work"- only Windows and OSX have a presence in the marketplace, due mostly to Lunix's commercial-hostile nature.
Likewise with MP3 players. I've had three of them, none are Apple because I don't care to get locked in to their platform. However, I clearly understand the appeal of what Apple is doing. If ALL you care about is your music and movies, Apples a great way to go. Their computers work great with their iPods and iPhones. Heck, you can even play World of Warcraft under OSX (which seems to be the only game I make time for now, anyway).
But does Lunix, or ANYTHING "open", even offer close to that same level of experience? No, not at all. Heck, not even their commercial competitors can do that either.
Being "open" is not, for most people, an acceptable replacement for reliability, functionality, and ease of use. It's shocking people think otherwise. Woz I can see, because his jealousy of Steve Jobs is clouding his reasoning. I have no idea what everybody else's excuse is, however.
For most of us that have kids in the teenage years the IPOD is the thing all the kids think is better the sliced bread. That is until you show them that other MP3 players do the same or more for less money. Some won't care because it is a status item but some will appreciate the value and being not having to be the same by having something different. I have a Sansa Fuze with 4 gigs of ram that cost me a whole 66 bucks. IPOD nano with 4 gigs of ram 150 dollars. No brainer. Plus no itunes lock in. I got the free converter and have put TV shows on the player and watch at lunch hour at work plus the microSD slot that some record companies are going to start bring music out for. I bet the minute they do IPOD will come out with a model with microSD but it should be too late.
Its the space, silly.
How on earth is apple able to cram 16 gigs in an iphone, while the newest tmobile thingie can store, what, up to a gb?
Thats the driving force behind jobs: some strange space cramming genius (or exclusive patent license).
NO SIG
iPods will stick around until they are replaced by new and improved technology. Likely we'd all still be using Walkmans if the iPod hadn't come along. While the market may be saturated as far as new sales, replacements for old / broken iPods will continue for a long time. I know I'll replace my nano iPod when the battery goes dead. Like most people I'm used to mine and don't want to give it up. That suggests continued iPod sales for the foreseeable future.
But I think Woz is correct on the iPhone. The lack of innovation (open development platform) and single carrier could be a serious impediment to adoption by the larger public. While several million iPhones have been sold that's a tiny fraction compared to the 50 million Razrs in existence. I think Apple could be making the same mistake it made with their computers in the 1980's. An industry leader with great design that eventually suffers because of the locked-down, proprietary control. I hope for Apple's sake the iPhone doesn't turn into a blip in cell phone history.
Apple has done a good job evolving the iPod it went from a trendy music player to the most useful PDA I have ever had. The Touch generation of iPods has little similarity to the other line and that will probably be the way they go. The strength of the iPod is no longer its trendiness and while it has nowhere to go but down (in terms of market share) Its not going to 'die' anytime soon.
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
Or is it that as current and previous news reports on /. shows, the music industry wanting a larger cut of iTunes profits, and Europe wanting removable batteries on the iPhone, Steve Jobs is murmuring about taking his ball and going home?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
The dynamic may be a bit different here though. The Google Android == IBM PC isn't a real good match, as we are talking consumer AND enterprise here, and "nobody ever got fired for buying Android" is not an oft-muttered phrase (yet).
Jobs is not Wozniak. They don't even look alike.
Steve Wozniak is just an (empty) talking head these days. Need a calculator built? He's your man. Anything else? His opinion is worth no more than any other random person on the street.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
The largest hitch in convergence is ubiquitous wireless TCP/IP. Once that happens, VOIP will be added to music players and most other phone services will either need to find something spectacular to add to the mix, change business models, or wither away and die.
I jailbroke mine and have never looked back. an unjailbroken iphone is a hindered iphone. If you use PwnageTool/Winpwn/Quickpwn, it's also 100% reversible if you don't like it. Joey
This is more like the iPod is the trendy Smart car which isn't much of a car and the other MP3 players are SAABs, good cars but never trendy.
Virtually all of my portable music listening is done on a bike or running. Every previous generation of MP3 player eventually bounced off my belt or tugged annoyingly as it bounced up & down on my shirt, or required an annoying band or harness. The shuffle, at 30g, can't be noticed, and with that clip that exerts about a pound of force, it just can't fly off. Hell, if it does (because I was hasty & incompetent clipping it on), the friction of the 1/8" jack in the socket will keep it from going off the sound cable, and the friction of the buds in my ears will hold it from pulling them out. It winds up swinging back & forth from my earbuds, unharmed.
Any multi-function device must necessarily be larger, to have any user interface bigger than one button. It must weigh more, enough to go back to the annoyances I have gratefully left. That's why my cell phone is in my pack en route to the train: I hate little weights bouncing up & down on my waist as I run.
Long live single-function and UI that is utterly minimal - preferably a single button. You don't have to push it for me at the factory, I can take it from there.
I think the iPod has a few more iterations to go before it goes belly-up in favor of technology that removes the need for large-capacity satellite devices to be kept on our person.
Instead, I think we should be more worried about the death of the personal computer as we know it.
If cloud computing takes off in a way that allows currently popular software to run faster and more powerfully than possible on any single computer, it's possible this excuse may support could-only distribution models as a form of DRM. Instead of running actual software on our computers, we'll merely run software-nodes that won't be capable of processing our data locally. Instead, our computers will become glorified dumb terminals with mass storage and the ability to run a few minor programs, while everything else is handled by a cloud.
So, instead of actually buying software, you'll rent a seat on the cloud hosting that software, with the option to pay extra for better performance or multiple sessions. Your computer will simply be an observer to all of this.
The only benefit, is that this should bring the cost of hardware way down as demands on individual machine performance decline.
Personally, I see this occuring before the end of the iPod.
8==8 Bones 8==8
I avoided the iPod shuffle series because of how limited it is. I have an old Samsung player that is comparable in size as the current generation iPod shuffle, only it has a colour LCD screen, can play MP3/OGG/WMA/Audible, has WOW/SRS/TruBass effects, a manually configurable 10 band EQ, realtime VU meters for playback, voice record, line in record, FM radio, can display images, can display text files, has no DRM whatsoever and can be used as an external storage device. Oh, and the casing is mostly made of metal.
Back when I bought it, circa 2005, it was $50. The first generation iPod Shuffles were $99 back then and the new ones are $79.
Samsung YP-T7Z
62x37x14mm
1.25 oz
iPod Shuffle (2nd gen)
41x27x11mm
0.55 oz
So it's a little bit larger, a lot less expensive and does infinitely more.
You're asking why an iPod is better when likely the child does not yet (or likely ever will) know the words and phrases needed to describe things well enough. But this could be a great chance to teach some critical thinking. In fact, give the child some material so she can answer you back. Since she is 9 years old, help her find some reviews on youtube. Try to make it an interesting activity.
I'm going to stray from the core conversation topic just a bit, so bear with me. There are cases where people may read or hear things about a something and figure out something generally better for them, but never really absorb the details. Keep in mind too that the kinds of recommendations different groups will hear will be fundamentally different. Nerds are much more likely to recommend hard to use products with features that will likely never be utilized by an average non-technical user. They are also much more likely to recommend products to other nerds. Average non-technical users will recommend what they like, but the description will usually be much more vague as to why. It just feels right. They are also much more likely to recommend products to other average non-technical users.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Apple's one was the best, no question about it.
Wow! Looks like you've never had a run in, real or virtual, with an Amiga freak before. I'd prepare for "incoming," were I you.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
... stop claiming you have a wife who watches Kathy Griffin's show, or that you have ever seen a naked woman!
Admit it, you think Kathy Griffin is hot!
Laugh, so do I... carry on brother!
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.
Tethering is explicitly forbidden by Apple.
That bothered me at first - until I started playing around with the iPhone 3G and realized "my gosh, with this thing I really don't NEED to use the laptop outside of a wi-fi hotspot! It already does pretty much everything I need the laptop for in a fully-mobile environment, with the exception of being able to touch-type. And I can live with hunting and pecking.
So, when I'm at the hotel or in a restaurant, or waiting for a LONG TIME in the airport, I'll break out the laptop. Everwhere else, the iPhone 3G is just fine. Suddenly, I don't need "tethering" any longer.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Children, are they not popular any longer?
Well, apparently not in THESE places anyway:
COUNTRIES WITH BIRTHRATES BELOW REPLACEMENT (with births per 1,000 population):
New Zealand ---13.7
Montenegro ----13.6
U.S. Virgin Islands ( United States) 13.4
Puerto Rico ( United States) 13.3
North Korea 13.2
People's Republic of China (mainland only) 13.1
Serbia --------12.8
Armenia -------12.5
Netherlands Antilles 12.5
Australia -----12.4
Martinique ( France) 12.4
Cyprus --------12.2
France (metropolitan) 12.2
United Kingdom 12.0
Norway --------12.0
Luxembourg ----11.5
Moldova -------11.4
Sweden --------11.3
Denmark -------11.2
Finland -------11.2
Netherlands ---11.1
Barbados ------11.0
Republic of Macedonia 10.9
Estonia -------10.8
Georgia -------10.8
Spain ---------10.8
Russia --------10.7
Portugal ------10.5
Belgium -------10.4
Canada --------10.3
Cuba ----------10.3
Slovakia ------10.0
Malta ----------9.8
Romania --------9.8
Poland ---------9.5
Belarus --------9.4
Greece ---------9.3
Hungary --------9.3
South Korea ----9.3
Latvia ---------9.3
Austria --------9.2
Czech Republic --9.2
Italy ----------9.2
Switzerland ----9.2
Ukraine --------9.2
Lithuania ------9.1
Croatia --------9.0
Slovenia -------9.0
Bulgaria -------8.9
Bosnia and Herzegovina 8.8
Japan ----------8.3
Germany --------8.2
Singapore ------8.2
Hong Kong ( People's Republic of China) 7.6
Macau ( People's Republic of China) 7.6
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/3145691/Steve-Wozniak-interview-iconic-co-founder-on-the-iPod-iPhone-and-future-for-Apple.html
Next time don't be so lazy and find the original article, that way I can be lazy.
Nothing against him as a person, but what's he been doing that's so brilliant in the past 2 decades that makes him an authority? He's like the Pete Best of Apple.
He's basically channeling Yogi Berra, who once said of a popular restaurant, "No one goes there any more. It's too crowded."
He points two popular products, the transistor radio and the Walkman, and said they both died. But he neglects to mention why they died--they were replaced by new technology. The transistor radio was replaced by the Walkman. The Walkman was replaced by the portable CD player. The portable CD player was replaced by the MP3 player. The iPod is currently the #1 MP3 player. Until a new technology comes out, there's no real reason for it to become less popular.
It's not dead till I buy one dammit!
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Appears to have vanished. The smallest MP3 at samsung.com now is about 50mmx50mm - but has no screen, and only a uni-button like the shuffle, audio output.
Not sure I'd be interested in video and all that. (And, I mean, video on a 62x37mm screen? Why?)
I just want my music.
Yeah, it's an older model and a shame they don't still produce them.
I couldn't agree more about the video thing. My current player is a Creative Zen V Plus and although it has a really nice OLED screen, I can't handle watching any video that is longer than a few minutes on that small of a screen (music videos only perhaps; great for rickrolling people in RL). The old Samsung doesn't do video, but it does have pristine sound quality, possibly even a little better than the Zen.
I have been an iMac/Mac OS X (Leopard) user for quite some time. And as some pointed out, Apple has been good at including nice-to-have features in any device. A couple of years back only a couple of laptops had included webcam, now most do. One of those was a Sony and the other was the MacBook. Linux is free, but OS X is not and it has a superb GUI. Even non-geeks love that, that is the difference, now no one has to be a geek just to love a piece of technology. And that is where Apple succeeds. my $0.02.
"Hoover" also is a play on words for "hover".
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I was sitting waiting for take out food and fooled with my iPhone. The "about" function told me how much memory was in use. It turns out buying the 16GB iPhone was important because I was down to 9.3GB available and I didn't have anything significant stored on the phone besides the latest firmware and 50 entries in my address book. It seems the operating system takes quite a bit of space, like almost half of the storage in an 8GB unit. I bought the 16GB unit because I am a software developer, but I am not developing because they have made me afraid with their NDA and non-approval policies. The Apple marketplace is well thought out in term of giving them the lion's share of the control and profit. Although those of use who bought stock hoping to share the profit have not. In fact that was a major disappointment. I was ready to buy a hundred shares just before the 3G rollout, but sanity arrived in time.
My father is a resident at an extended care facility. He cannot get dsl or broad band for any amount of money, and edge/3G based USB dongles don't seem to work reliably in his room. He has a MacBook and an iPhone. The iPhone seems to have better connectivity than the dongles. He can't stand browsing on the iPhone, and he shouldn't have to. He already bought $1500 of Apple hardware and has an AT&T contract (pays $30/mo for inet). I just can't understand why, having spent all that money, he can't take one small step and get satisfaction. I just kick myself for not getting the tethering app when it was available. This is a problem that just doesn't seem to have a solution, and it bothers me a lot. I want to love apple, but they are falling short in so many areas these days.
This woman was alive and cogent when Roosevelt was president. Browsing is something one does at a store and surfing is what some young kids do at the beach.
The offspring of her child's daughter bought her an Ipod. Now cats and parakeets are more tech savvy than this woman yet when she hooked up her Apple I-pod to a computer, downloaded a podcast from NPR and showed me it on the screen I was ---FLABERGASTED.
Now I know why all those other Mp3 player with VCR clock like user interfaces are still in Apple's shadow.
I predict Wozniak will be correct in the year 2099 (maybe).
My father is a resident at an extended care facility. He cannot get dsl or broad band for any amount of money, and edge/3G based USB dongles don't seem to work reliably in his room. He has a MacBook and an iPhone. The iPhone seems to have better connectivity than the dongles.
That's odd. Dongles (or PCMCIA cards) should have exactly the same connectivity as the iPhone. Are they from the same provider or a different one? Not every provider has the same 3G coverage.
My biggest problem at the moment is actually GPS doesn't work half the time. UMTS not working might be explained by lack of coverage, but that excuse doesn't work for GPS: it covers every inch of this planet. So why does GPS fail me when I'm out of the city? That makes no sense.
He already bought $1500 of Apple hardware and has an AT&T contract (pays $30/mo for inet). I just can't understand why, having spent all that money, he can't take one small step and get satisfaction. I just kick myself for not getting the tethering app when it was available. This is a problem that just doesn't seem to have a solution, and it bothers me a lot.
There is a solution, although it might not be legal: jailbreak the iPhone and install a tethering application. And it's also supposed to be possible to install the tethering app by hand without jailbreaking, but I don't know how yet. (And I think that's still breach of contract.)
I agree in principle but when I tried the cingular/at&t 32-bit USB dongle (sierra) it didn't work at all, trivial email took forever, browsing like 300 baud... really sad. The iPhone is not blazing, but does get some 3G throughput. The firmware/software/driver behind the hardware is different I guess. Maybe the dongle gives up too easily, and the iPhone is like the eveready bunny. This is what I have observed though. Maybe the antenna of theiPhone is better...