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Apple Releases Basic iPod Touch, Possibly Foreshadowing iPhone Strategy
redletterdave writes "While the new 16 GB iPod Touch released Thursday features the same 4-inch Retina display and dual-core A5 processor as its other variants, the newest, cheapest iPod Touch lacks a rear camera and comes in just two colors black and silver. Apple is reportedly pursuing a similar strategy with the iPhone, as reports from the past several months have pointed to development of a 'low-cost iPhone' with basic features to be sold at a lower price point."
The gravy train is over. Competition is a wonderful thing. Most of the big suckers already have their iStuff.
Still the same old crap and nobody has ever used the shitty iPod camera for anything meaningful.
The 4th generation 8 GB iPod Touch was also $229, but did have both cameras. They weren't as high-quality as their iPhone counterparts, but still.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
This leaves only the iPhone 4 and 4S as devices Apple sell without the taller screen. If there's any hint at an upcoming product strategy, it would be that they might drop those models to streamline production.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
... lacks a rear camera and comes in just two colors black and silver.
Oh, and way to edit, samzenpus.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
I can't see many owners of iPod touches wanting to get the new one, although new buyers might be attracted to it. But for the most part I think the people who'd have an i device in the first place would already have one by now.
Apple's iPod lineup keeps getting stranger year after year.
First the strange design changes for the nano (went from being basically a better mini to a tiny squashed one, back to being tall, then adding a camera, then taking away the camera, and video playback adding a touchscreen and making it squashed, now making it look like a smaller iPod touch) and now the removal of one of the cameras on the touch for the same price-point as one -with- the cameras (smaller storage on the previous generation, but with flash becoming cheaper and cheaper every year that should be expected)
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The ability to play 24bit/96khz flac recordings.
Don't need video, don't need a fucking camera.
How about a e-ink display that doesn't drink the power from the batteries?
with about 200gb of space.
Try to keep it under $200 please.
Be seeing you...
The new iPod does not come in two colors, it comes in one color: silver back + black face. Also, in addition to not having the camera it also omits the wrist strap attachment.
And there go the margins...
With a title description of "Basic" iPod Touch, I was thinking it would be a smaller, lighter, more storage, non-touchscreen, longer battery version of life iPod touch. Basically, a cross between the nano and original iPod.
But no, you still have WiFi, Bluetooth, web-browsing, a forward-facing camera, etc. How is that basic? It has a touch screen!
Ok, I'll admit it. I hate iProducts... but Apply could convince me to give up my Creative Zen X-Fi 32GB that I bought 6 years ago for $150 bucks. It has:
+Drag-and-drop music loading
+No need for iTunes
+Buttons so I don't have to stare at the screen to skip a track
+SD card slot
+No need for OS updates and obsolescence
To be fair, the Zen is over-engineered to have the ability to play video, view pictures, etc. and had they omitted those dumb things, price could have been even cheaper.
We all know the fact/joke that Taco Bell simply shuffles a small collection of ingredients to sell you a thing. More components cost more, fewer components cost less, but it's all a stack of the same finite list of components.
So now this is what Apple is to become without Jobs. They are running out of ideas and are now taking parts away to make a dollar menu version and re-adding the extras and sour cream to offer up the "iThing supreme."
Nice.
Stop reading here because I'm going off on a huge tangent... but then later I'll come back to why I hate Apple.
Today, I learned about the real core difference between people. We say conservative vs. liberal and all that. (What does liberal even mean?! We hear liberty but where is it?) Then someone came out and said it -- individual vs collective. Now it's much easier to understand what people have been sayiing that liberals are communists. And it's not so much "divide and conquer" as that never made a whole lot of sense to me before... it's "categorize and conquer." Now it makes sense. Because a person can say "I hate black people" and look like a moron (and they would be for saying that) but when a person says "I hate Al Sharpton" you are now deciding what you feel about an individual, not a collective like race, religion, red or blue.
You know? Everyone here believes they are an individual. But score yourself and be honest. Do you define yourself by what group(s) you are a member of? By the style(s) you wear? Be honest with yourself.
I'm an individual and I know it because people at times have instinctively hated me for it. Well, not for being an individual, but for not being a member of their group. And if I sought shelter of being in one group, I would feel less hated and more protected. But thanks to my somewhat autistic nature, I never understood or maintained a collective mentality. So I grew up wondering "why do people act like this?!" I'm not a member of group A, so they don't care for me. And I'm not a member of group B and they don't care for me either. That makes me alone and while I didn't understand group membership, I understood the misery of being "outcast" "excluded" and "alone." It's kind of depressing when you don't fully understand what's going on and what's what about it all.
So I ask again. Do you feel stronger, more self-assured, more powerful when you are in a group? Or do you feel more like yourself when you aren't part of a collective? Be honest. And to be clear, be honest with yourself because this is a rhetorical question. I actually don't care how you answer because when I say "be honest with yourself" you will be at some level and it will change how you see yourself. ...now on to Apple...
I hate Apple because of the mentality it exploits. That mentality is one of group membership. Apple isn't the first or only. Any of us who remember "Members Only" jackets are probably looking back at how outwardly ridiculous it really was. (I wonder if I can get one of those on eBay... it would be my first one!) Apple exploited this consumer desire to be elite... in an elite group. People really bought into it heavily. I recall when Apple started introducing less expensive Apple computers and people in forums started bitching because "...great! now EVERYONE can be an Apple user!!" And it was clear -- they were angry at their status degredation; the dilution. Boil it down to basics? These people REALLY define themselves by the things they bought... the things they own actually own them! Ridiculous on its face and amazingly true. And Everyone reading this acknowledges that these people exist. And the vast majority of those will deny they are one of them.
Apple exploits this in people. And when Apple is finally dead, it will be one less entity exploiting this in people.
And if you are honest with yourself and you also begin to see how ridiculous collectivism is on its face, then you will begin to see that "racism" is a collectivism as well and ne
Hipsters won't like that ordinary folk use the "same" phone. What will they move to?
The iPhone Classic II
Did you really just say they should release a non-touchscreen version of the iPod touch?
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Crap content, crap summary, crap analysis. Jesus, is someone holding a gun to your head and FORCING you to post Apple stories? There's NO APPLE NEWS. Apple has gone quiet, as it does quite regularly, and the tech press is losing it's fucking mind.
Unfortunately, yes. It was an error. I meant to say that a "budget" iPod shouldn't have a touchscreen.
But if you take away all those things - especially the touch screen - it is no longer an iPod touch and simply becomes a bigger iPod Nano. And I would make the argument that if you do remove all those features, you don't need such a big display so you could even make it the same size as the iPod Nano.
Realistically, in 2013, would you not consider a touch screen as a basic feature? It might have been advanced 6-7 years ago but these days you can pick up cheap Android devices for under £50 which all have touch screens.
WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity these days seem to come as part of the SoC which powers these devices. Same with GPS. I think it would actually turn out more expensive to maintain a separate line producing separate chips - particularly as the incremental cost of WiFi & Bluetooth isn't much.
You probably don't need Apple to convince you to buy one of their iProducts. They aren't going to give you drag & drop nor remove the iTunes requirement. I love my iPhone but I really hate iTunes so much that I subscribe to Spotify instead and only use that for music these days.
If you're happy enough with your Zen, why not look for its natural successor instead? You'll probably appreciate it much more than switching to Apple.
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It doesn't.
If it's going back to one camera it would be better to keep the one that gets used the most.
With a title description of "Basic" iPod Touch, I was thinking it would be a [...] non-touchscreen [...] version of life [sic] iPod touch
The iPod Touch wouldn't make much sense without a touchscreen, now would it? The product is intended to basically be an iPhone without the phone component. If you don't want all of that, then clearly the device isn't aimed at you, and it sounds like you'd be better served by a different product.
And I don't understand this mentality where people think that $company_x needs to make $product_y in order to win them over. The truth is that no, they don't need to do that at all, since we're not their target demographic most of the time. We're nerds. We have strange needs and wants compared to most of the population and we're willing to put up with a lot more headaches in order to have a few more choices, but good product design involves knowing when to say "no", particularly when it will confuse or inconvenience a typical user.
You want an SD card in your music player, but most people don't even know what an SD card is or what it's used for, nor would they want to deal with the hassle and stress of having to shop for something they don't understand in order to make their music player hold all of their music. They'd rather just go get an iPod Classic that "just works" if they need that much storage. And that average person? They already have iTunes installed, since it's the biggest music store in the world and that iPod they got ages ago used it too, so they don't need to change, move, or relearn anything. To them, it's a feature that they can use the stuff they already have installed to sync, not a drawback.
The basic iPod Touch really is basic...if you understand that it stopped being a music player in anything but name and recognize that it's now just a stripped-down iPhone without the phone app. It's not meant to be just a music player any more, nor is that even the focus. It's meant to be a mobile smart device. But you? You want a music player that's just a music player. Is it really a surprise that it's not what you want, but that it might be exactly what millions of others want?
No one young enough to know how to work a smartphone has any idea who Al Jolson is.
Can we please stop pretending that "market share" means "winning?" http://techpinions.com/androids-market-share-is-literally-a-joke/16709
Samsung and the other lower end competitors are hurting Apple. The only reason Apple would be selling dumb down versions of their products is that the competition products are hurting their sales to a point where it is better off to have cheaper and less costly products and get that money than see it being spend elsewhere.
Wrong, on both counts.
I had one of those Zen X-FIs, too. They rocked. They *stored, transferred, and played back music files* quite nicely.
In other words, they acted the way a reasonable media player ought. My sole gripe was that they didn't play all media files and there was no way to add support for those that were lacking.
Smartphone takes care of that now, though. VLC works fine on all 3 of my Android devices, and I've yet to find a format it doesn't play, and thus I've no need for any other media player software on any of the platforms I use (Android, Linux, and occasionally Windows) or, any longer, for dedicated hardware, for that matter.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Crap content, crap summary, crap analysis. Jesus, is someone holding a gun to your head and FORCING you to post Apple stories? There's NO APPLE NEWS. Apple has gone quiet, as it does quite regularly, and the tech press is losing it's fucking mind.
There never was any Apple news; Apple only have 5 products, although some have been measurably very very successful. In reality this is speculation on Apples main (Only) product line, as its currently one phone profits over market share solution is running out of steam (and has been for some time). Right now we are simply gambling on whether we sill see a *larger* or *crippled* iPhone. I personally think the summary is on the money it will be a crippled iPhone.
Hipsters won't like that ordinary folk use the "same" phone. What will they move to?
Hipster might be a market demographic for the iPhone, but in reality its very popular in a few global markets, the UK and US, and those because the phone is bought through higher purchase. In fact one of the problem Apple have is that people are buying the cheaper iPhone 4 through these *contracts*. Apple are happy to rip you off whoever you are.
You are joking right? $49 for a MP3 player without display, and only 2GB storage?
Personally, I regard the click wheel as the killer feature of the nano. What a pity it doesn't have it any more, so if you want to interact with the device in any slightly complex way you have to look at the screen.
People don't buy an iPod touch to play music. They buy them to play games. It's what you get for your 10 yr old niece/nephew/son/daughter. My 2 yr old has a 2nd gen iPhone w/o a cell card, basically an iPod touch. My 4 and 6 year olds have 3rd gen iPhones the same.
It's been a great investment so far.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Look at the iTards modding quotes from Parliament as flamebait!
You can't handle the real world without an RDF-induced haze, can you?
As for the gravy train being over, by what metric? Their sales certainly aren't growing at the rate that Android's are, but by any measure, they are still massively successful. Their rate of sale has continued to grow incredibly fast, and their profits in PCs and mobile devices represent either a plurality or majority in each of those markets.
They bought back shares to stop the bleed in share price, and the negativity around it, and it has stabilised at around $450 from its high of $705. Its a poor move that slowed the drop in price of the shares, but not the cause of the drop; The end of the gravy train being over.
I am not sure why the post was modded informative. Here are the IDC numbers http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24085413. There rate of sales growth was single digit for Apple at 6.6% behind the market...at 41.6%...and samsung at 60.7%...and LG at 110.2%..and Huawei at 94%...and ZTE at 49.2%...even Others gets 37%...so you must be using some other measure of incredibly fast.
Nothing is mentioned about their PC's which are basically treated like cancer by Apple, but have incredible drops of 22%..and (the more manageable) 2% over the last 2 quarters, despite Windows 8 being hated universally. I cant help but notice Microsoft and Intel do not appear on the Pie chart...who are destroying the PC industry with their massive 70% margins.Its why Manufacturing companies are running to Android.
It is a false urban legend that Apple is paying no taxes.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/video/2013/may/29/apples-dirty-little-tax-secret-video Here is a great informative video from where they unusually, actually go to Cork Ireland.
They actually use a Tax loophole that allows them not to pay tax anywhere in the world. Its brilliant, what Apple do is not use a low tax island...they make the island disappear entirely. It woks because the US is concerned with where a company is Incorporated...where the Irish look where a Company is controlled...so Apple tell the US that they are Incorporated in Ireland...and tell the Irish they are controlled in the US, So Pay literally (proper use of word) NOTHING :)
So if by Urban Myth...you actually mean Fact you would have been right. The fact that you were modded informative shows a frightening trend.
This device is targeted for businesses, a representative doesn't need a camera. The device is cheap enough to integrate into a business process, and it has a development platform and hardware architecture to synergize whatever management wants.
Tablets have their place, but not so much in the business world. Basically anyone using a commuter in a business setting is a content producer (documents, spreadsheets, databases), and you still need a traditional computer to do this type of work, i.e. MS Office. A full size tablet in the workplace then is the odd man out due to cost / benefit. However a iOS tablet priced at $229, even with the small screen, is just the right price point to make it very useful in the business world.
Can we please stop pretending that "market share" means "winning?"
No I'm a consumer :) I think better specification/OS at better value/choice with Android is winning...and the fact that that it has greater market share (with a stronger Application Market) reinforces these things.
As for any idea why people here talk about market share over (short) term profits. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22274324 Apples profits are falling
I agree, except I would've used the word 'features' instead of 'quality'. . . . to me quality represents the grade of components used, the robustness of construction, etc. Hopefully they won't be sacrificing that (which really is part of the Apple brand) and just trimming down on features.
I disagree, I would use words like 'overpriced' and 'Stock components' going forward we see their (not your) PC's being increasingly turned into electronic devices using incompatible connectors. No wonder there PC sales dropped 22% and 2% over the past two quarters.
That whirring/grinding sound? That's Stevie J doing 2500 RPMs in his grave. Poor thing, if he weren't already did what Cook is doing to Apple would kill him all over again. The stock dividends alone would give him a stroke, forget about falling behind Samsung in phone sales for the very first time.
The clock is ticking Apple, and I for one can't wait until you fucking crash and burn once and for all.
People don't buy an iPod touch to play music. They buy them to play games.
The the iPod can enjoy its continuing decline into obscurity, Already Android devices are good value (especially for kids) and everywhere, and Google unlike Apple (and I would argue Microsoft) gets games, we are already seeing consoles with Android at half this cost...with bigger screens and real controls.
There already is a low-cost iPhone, and it's been out for years. It's called Last Year's iPhone, and it's $100 with contract. And the iPhone from two years ago is free with contract.
It would be like the press jabbering at Samsung for a cheaper Galaxy phone, when you could get a newly built model two versions old for that cheaper price. Why reinvent the wheel...
Bean counting people are fine for advice but you NEVER EVER put them in charge of anything. I knew things were going bad (or spoiling? puns intended) when the stock dividends were announced. Sounded like BS to me when they explained why they wanted to pay interest on their capital they had been getting for FREE.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
But why not just have an iPhone, and get the phone functionality? Your business user will want a smartphone anyway, I don't see where an iPod fits in.
The cameras are both useful in business - I've used mine to take snaps of the content of whiteboards, flip charts etc to save copying them down, and the other camera is potentially useful for videoconferencing.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
it's ok there fella, its a basic touchscreen.
GP's post is evasive at best, dishonest at worst. He talks about market growth where profits have dropped, ignores the fact that where market growth has occurred it's been at one of the lowest rates in the industry and an order of magnitude lower than it's key competitors then pretends Apple is handing money back out of it's cash pile when it fact it's financing the buyback with debt. To put it kindly, he's cherry picked positive stats whilst ignoring negative stats which only tells half the story. When the full set of stats are taken into account a very different story is told to that the GP is pushing.
Parent clears up all that with the facts.
Oh sorry, nevermind, I forgot. Apple fanboys exist, so the facts don't matter.
and only 2GB storage?
Yeah, AND no wireless. Lame.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Apple, I would love for the iPod Touch to get back to being a media player. Drop the cameras, apps, Internet access, etc and give me a solid, reliable media player for my music and photos. That's why I bought an iPod Touch (I have no idea what generation it is - does it tell somewhere on the case?) in the first place. All my iPods have outlasted other media players I bought which have fallen apart, bricked themselves, etc.
It's a good point about the phone. Obviously iPhones are more attractive for business users than iPods.
But whilst there can be uses for cameras in business, there are a plenty of business and governmental scenarios where you're not allowed a camera. An employee with a camera-phone might be fired, and a visitor with one will have it retained by security.
A camera-less iPhone would certainly have a market.
+Drag-and-drop music loading
+No need for iTunes
+Buttons so I don't have to stare at the screen to skip a track
+SD card slot
+No need for OS updates and obsolescence
And you have the disease of one-sided feature lists. First of all "drag-and-drop" music loading means manually managing music. Rather than having the computer do it for you. Most people would call that a negative.
Secondly, you miss out all the features that the iPod Touch has that your ageing MP3 player doesn't. Too many to mention, but apps, a touchscreen and real web-browsing to name the top 3.
If by cheapest you mean "cheapest now that they discontinued the model that was $30 cheaper" then, yeah.
Please stop linking to IBITimes until they remove video advertising.
www.clarke.ca
Anytime a new i-device is released, it will be sold millions ... oh wait, that was so 2009.
The old iPod Touch Gen4 probably wasn't beefy enough to run iOS7, which is slated to come out this year. So, Apple wanted a cheap Touch for the lower end of the range, and the old Gen4 wasn't good enough, so out came the cheapo Gen5.
Business? Please. iPod Touches are to get kids hooked on the iTunes ecosystem. I have kids, and they and almost all their friends have iPod Touches. A significant number of their friends are now moving to iPhones.
Selling more, cheap(er) iPods will pay off in more iPhone customers down the pike.
WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity these days seem to come as part of the SoC which powers these devices. Same with GPS. I think it would actually turn out more expensive to maintain a separate line producing separate chips - particularly as the incremental cost of WiFi & Bluetooth isn't much.
For the iPod Touch and the few others in the same class, they are portable computers. Their main chip is the CPU/GPU. As Apple designed the A4/A5/A6 chips this was done by design. See Apple uses these same chips to power their iPhones/iPads/Apple TVs/whatever. Not all of these devices require all the functionality. Also the chips need to be computers and there isn't room on the die to add these in with the dual core CPU , dual core GPU, memory controller, etc. It would not be cheaper for Apple to make highly different SoCs.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Stop trying to apply logic to perception management.
What Apple did: they discontinued their $199 unit, introduced a new unit with more features at $30 more and called it 'Basic'. This should have been your first clue.
What we'll probably see soon is sales efforts to sell a $299 version with a better feature set, and people will reason, "well, it's only $60 more than the Basic version," and that model will sell well. They might have an even better model for $329 that grabs some of those people up another notch.
And the dregs of the population who cannot afford $299 but also cannot figure out to buy an $89 Android device with similar specs, can be left buying the 'Basic'.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
How in the world is this Flamebait? Because I said the Apple product is silly if it's the "budget" version at $229?
. No wonder there PC sales dropped 22% and 2% over the past two quarters.
No wonder they are one of very few companies with climbing PC market share, because the fucking PC market is being destroyed by tablets. By which I mean iPads.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Steve Jobs was a rare entrepreneur. He would be working up on his next great innovation. The iShoes? Who knows?
Well, w/ an iPod Touch, you can give it to a small kid, and not worry about him/her calling somebody. That way, s/he can have all the software toys that iPhone owners have, except the ability to call people, while you don't have to pay more to Verizon or AT&T for another connection.
No one young enough to know how to work a smartphone has any idea who Al Jolson is.
But they can look it up on Wikipedia.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
You are joking right? $49 for a MP3 player without display, and only 2GB storage?
Yeah, and it also can't find those damn moving goalposts.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.