They could have made it look different, then it wouldn't be riding on the coattails of the iPhone buzz... but then no one would want to buy one, either.
If you don't believe in copyright, then you don't believe you have the right to any work (written, music, video, whatever) you create.
If you have a good idea (the next Star Wars or Harry Potter, the next Thriller, the next Halo) and someone else hears about it and then uses your work but makes money where you don't, you've got no reason to complain because you don't believe in copyright.
Copyright, like property rights or free speech, is explicitly granted by a government and the consensus of the people who make up that government.
Copyright just means you have the exclusive right for a limited time to an idea, and the right to make money off that idea.
Let my put your argument another way: If the value is indeed inherent, then how can it be transferred from the creator to another person or entity?
Let us say you have created the perfect mousetrap; the value is inherent because it will catch, dispose of, and clean up after mice. How can it be transferred to another person? You give it to them.
So like copyright. If I have copyright, I just give that copyright to another person.
Thus if you don't believe in copyright you can't believe that I can give copyright away.
My best guess: Why it is wrong: because you don't own the copyright, you don't have the right to make copies and distribute them. I mean, would it compare to giving away "copies" of $1 bills away for free?
There is an inherent value, also, to the music, and giving it away for free, especially if you don't have the copyright, is akin to intentionally defrauding the copyright owner of some amount of income.
Try also, "No education, no running water, no electricity, no central heating..."
Blocking trade with China will not improve those things. In fact working in one of the factories (cities, really) provides workers with all of the above.
I say this because I am Chinese in the United States, not because I support Walmart or someone else trying to make a buck.
On the flip side however, everyone who does shop at Walmart at least gets lower prices.
Multi touch! Like when Geordi draws his fingers down the surface of his console to control the various transporter parameters. Or when Crusher taps multiple places on her Padd while diagnosing a patient while the thing beeps and squeaks. Or when Data deftly "draws" on his Padd doing engineering tasks like pulling data from a stream of spaghetti.
That is how you interact with the iPhone, now. Flick through lists with your finger, resize images with your thumb and forefinger, selecting complex menus with a tap here and there, turning on and off features with a slide and a swish.
Just like the Wii is virtual reality, the iPhone is science fiction.
What do you think the iPhone is, if it isn't a computer?
Or, for that matter, what is an AppleTV (hint, it's an x86 Mac running OS X and FrontRow), or even an iPod (which is trivially 10x more powerful than Apple's first Mac), if not computers?
Apple has figured out that computers can be useful to more people than those who sit in front of a keyboard and mouse.
Re:iPhone Samsung S3C6400 vs Nokia N95 OMAP 2040 C
on
Apple iPhone Dissected
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· Score: 1
It probably stems from their choice of OS:
Mac OS X. They already have scads of ARM experience (every iPod is an ARM CPU), and they already have a multi-platform OS (68k, PowerPC, x86), so it probably made a lot of sense to do what they already do and just port OS X to an ARM.
If they want to game, they'll just take advantage of the CPU; the Nintendo DS, after all, only has two ARMs at 67MHz and 33MHz without dedicated 3d or floating point hardware, and you see how successful that is right?
Releasing a product in a timely also has a lot of advantages Releasing a performance commanding product also has a lot of advantages
Currently Intel is king of the hill on both counts. If AMD has a 2GHz quad core, Intel could match with a 4GHz quad core ON THE SAME DAY.
It is very hard to believe that AMD will be able to field a 2GHz part with 2x the performance of Intel's chip... that is what would be required to show a 40% performance advantage.
You're the one who sounds like you don't know anything.
RAM is easily thousands of times faster than a hard drive. An MP3 player pulling songs from a HD can, at best, read at about 15mb/s (or 3 songs per second, assuming no fragmentation and no seeking). An MP3 player pulling songs directly from RAM can load songs at, literally, 100mb/s. A Nomad with only 8 or 16mb could only store 2 to 4 songs (at 128kbps, thats about 1mb per minute, or 8 to 16 minutes) while an iPod with 32mb could store 20 minutes of music, with 11mb reserved for the index file generated by iTunes. Additional battery/speed was extracted by reading the index file instead of the hard drive.
Anyway, back to the iPhone: I think the whole reason the iPhone is going to be fantastic is the UI; the same lessons they learned about UI from the iPod, iTunes, and AppleTV UIs will be in effect with the iPhone.
If you discount the effect the UI has on top of the advantages the iPod had, you will also discount the effect the iPhone's UI will have on it's success.
But regardless, the proof will be a year from now. Maybe you're right... and maybe I am.
Funny, I think that's what I am doing. Defending my claims. It's not my fault you decide to reject them.
You still haven't accepted the fact that the iPod was at least 10x faster (in upload, access, and usability), it was smaller (4x by volume) than the comparable HDD players, had more storage than the comparable flash players. All that, combined, made it more attractive than the existing MP3 players; each feature was incremental, but putting it all together made for a much nicer, easier to use, and ultimately "accessible" player that appealed to non-geeks. Add the UI and now you have something other manufacturers couldn't copy for several years.
The iPhone doesn't have that advantage, because in size and form factor there are already similar phones. All the iPhone has is it's UI.
The original iPod was roughly 4.1x2.4x0.7 inches and 6.5oz
Here's a review of a 2002 Jukebox: http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/nomad3.htm l The original Jukebox had 4 hours battery; the iPod had 12, the new Jukebox lengthened it to 12. The RAM was boosted from 8mb to 16mb... still half that of the iPod. The Nomad Jukebox was 14oz, more than twice the weight The Nomad Jukebox measured 5x5.5x1.5, double the iPod in two dimensions (or 4x the volume). You could literally squeeze 5 iPods into the space of a Nomad Jukebox
The iPod is hugely more accessible than it's predecessors, Rio Karma, Nomad Jukebox, Samsung Yepp, or even CD-based MP3 players.
So I mentioned the Nomad Jukebox, Samsung Yepp, and CD based MP3 players four or five posts ago. All of the below is comparing the original iPod to a 2001 Nomad Jukebox, 6gb to 5gb. 10x faster claim: USB was 1mb/s, Firewire was easily 12mb/s, 10x faster transfer speed Access speed: Hard drive seek is in the milliseconds, when a song isn't in RAM, and load time is something like 10-12mb/s, so it would take about 1/3 of a second to spool up and load a song from HD to RAM. The iPod, with 32mb of RAM, could store easily 8 or so songs. So to access a song from RAM only takes, at 100MHz, 1/1,000,000 of a second, which is trivially 10,000 times faster UI speed: Because the entire library is loaded in RAM (not the songs, just metadata), you can browse through an iPod at the speed of RAM; with a Nomad, you had to at the time spool up the hard drive when you needed to scroll through a screen of data; A difference of 1/10 of a second vs 1/1,000,000 of a second, still about 10,000 times faster; practical experience shows that the user was slower than the library, or in other words you had to read a screen of text, even at 1/100 of a second, before scrolling to the next.
Today, which I never disputed, those differences are gone. All the Zunes and Zens and Clixes now store all the metadata in RAM, all use caches like the iPod, etc. All navigate with much easier UIs.
But when you were looking for an MP3 player in 2001, 2002, and even 2003, the iPod was best. The contenders didn't release comparable systems until 2004, when the iPod mini was released in January and the Zen MicroPhoto was released in October. The Zen (not Micro) wasn't released until November. The Zune wasn't out until 2006 and the Clix wasn't out until, I think, 2005.
Sigh, I'm still writing: 1) I was comparing the original iPod to the original Nomad Jukebox, both of which existed in 2001. The Nomad Jukebox had a 2.5" laptop HDD as compared to the iPod's 1.8" HDD. Then the Nomad only had 8mb of RAM, as opposed to the iPod's 32mb. In practice this means the Nomad had 2 songs in queue where the iPod had 8; this noticably speed up seek times while skipping through a playlist. The 32mb also allowed the iPod to keep the entire library database in ram, which helps when a user is scrolling through the playlists without actually hitting the iPod.
I was also comparing the original iPod to the then current 32mb and 64mb flash players. Same form factor, but 10x the storage. I was never comparing the flash iPod... the flash iPod was released AFTER the original iPod was a success.
I loved being able to synch my iPod at 16mb/s. My friend had a Samsung Yepp and it synchronized at a little less than 1mb/s. Of course he only had 32mb where I had 5gb, so synchronization speed wasn't so huge. My co-worker, who had a 6gb Nomad Jukebox however, would take a little less than 2 hours to synchronize at 1mb/s where it took me less than 10 minutes.
In comparing to existing hard drive players, the iPod was literally 1/4 the size and weight. The existing hard drive players were the Creative Nomad Jukebox and the Compaq PJB100. I like how you think I'm technically illiterate for comparing the speed of access on a MP3 CD at 2x with speed of access on the iPod at 4200rpm.
Anyway, I don't think we need to discuss any more; I still think I'm right, and you still think I'm wrong.
Poor you I guess. I bought a 1st Gen iPod that I still have... no failures, though battery life is only 6 hours now instead of the original 12. I'm sure there are failures, anything with moving parts (like the HDD on an iPod, or the headphone jack, or the hold switch) will fail.
So.. no, I never thought the iPod had excessive failures. Owned four iPods without a single failure. You and I, we have different definitions of perfect. My definition of perfect is "usable", because a feature or product that can't be used or is difficult to use is essentially useless.
You value drag and drop; I value convenience. I liked (loved, really), that with the original iPod all I had to do was plug it in; no management, no organization, or file manipulation.
If you want to think of the iPod as an incremental improvement, you can. I think a 10x, order of magnitude, increase in upload speed (USB1 vs Firewire) is huge and not incremental. I think a 80x increase in storage (64mb to 5gb) in the same form factor is huge, and not incremental. I think access speed increases (from CD->HD, HD->RAM, etc) the iPod implemented were huge... they certainly impressed the world when everyone was used to the seek times of CDs, the UI of the Nomad Jukebox, etc.
Not certainly all of Apple's competitors have been able to copy these features; now the SanDisk Sansa, the Zen Micro, the Microsoft Zune, etc, are all able peers. The reason Apple gets the bonus points (and marketshare) is they managed to tie it all together before everyone else could. There were at least two HDD based MP3 players before the iPod, but they were 4x as big and 5x as heavy and 10x slower. There were several flash based MP3 players before the iPod, but they had 1/10th the storage capacity and difficult to read screens.
You can really believe whatever you want, but history, I think, will remember Apple for doing the MP3 player right, first.
Unlike the Mac, Apple hasn't dropped the ball with the iPod, continually adding refinements, increasing it's user base, and dropping the price in a steady manner.
It's insightful to people who categorically dismiss the iPod as a marketing exercise, an overhyped product, or are unaware of some of the iPod's history.
I'm curious what facts I get wrong, can you tell me?
1) Failure rates for the iPod don't seem excessively high... compare to the red ring of death or scratched discs for the XBox 360, for example. 2) You are right! Sony was hip first, with the Walkman, Discman, and Playstation. They somehow dropped the ball when they released their Net Walkman MD, though... something about not playing MP3s. Sony did it right, and screwed up. 3) No need to comment. 4) What reasons do you ascribe to their success?
Re: Accessibility. What device do you use as a benchmark? The iPod is hugely more accessible than it's predecessors, Rio Karma, Nomad Jukebox, Samsung Yepp, or even CD-based MP3 players. Compared to the modern Zen Micro, Microsoft Zune, or the iRiver Clix, I would say that the iPod is no simpler than any of the others... Then the issue boils down to momentum coupled with continuing refinements. iTunes and the iTunes Store continue to be lauded in the face of the Zune Marketplace, Amazon Unbox, Creative Soundstage, Sony Connect, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it looks exactly like an iPhone?
They could have made it look different, then it wouldn't be riding on the coattails of the iPhone buzz... but then no one would want to buy one, either.
If you don't believe in copyright, then you don't believe you have the right to any work (written, music, video, whatever) you create.
If you have a good idea (the next Star Wars or Harry Potter, the next Thriller, the next Halo) and someone else hears about it and then uses your work but makes money where you don't, you've got no reason to complain because you don't believe in copyright.
Copyright, like property rights or free speech, is explicitly granted by a government and the consensus of the people who make up that government.
Copyright just means you have the exclusive right for a limited time to an idea, and the right to make money off that idea.
Let my put your argument another way:
If the value is indeed inherent, then how can it be transferred from the creator to another person or entity?
Let us say you have created the perfect mousetrap; the value is inherent because it will catch, dispose of, and clean up after mice. How can it be transferred to another person? You give it to them.
So like copyright. If I have copyright, I just give that copyright to another person.
Thus if you don't believe in copyright you can't believe that I can give copyright away.
My best guess:
Why it is wrong: because you don't own the copyright, you don't have the right to make copies and distribute them.
I mean, would it compare to giving away "copies" of $1 bills away for free?
There is an inherent value, also, to the music, and giving it away for free, especially if you don't have the copyright, is akin to intentionally defrauding the copyright owner of some amount of income.
Surprising that Apple only has 6% to 7%? It was only a couple years ago that Apple hat 3%!s html
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2004/01/15.15.
In three years they have doubled their share. If they can keep this pace they may be able to hit 10% in another three years.
Try also, "No education, no running water, no electricity, no central heating..."
Blocking trade with China will not improve those things. In fact working in one of the factories (cities, really) provides workers with all of the above.
I say this because I am Chinese in the United States, not because I support Walmart or someone else trying to make a buck.
On the flip side however, everyone who does shop at Walmart at least gets lower prices.
Funny, an iPod from 2002, 3 years before the iPod nano, would have cost you $499 for 5gb. In 2005 the Nano was, what, $249?
You spend a phone today costs $500 will cost you $49 to replace the battery in 3 years or $300 to get an iPhone nano. That's more realistic.
Multi touch!
Like when Geordi draws his fingers down the surface of his console to control the various transporter parameters.
Or when Crusher taps multiple places on her Padd while diagnosing a patient while the thing beeps and squeaks.
Or when Data deftly "draws" on his Padd doing engineering tasks like pulling data from a stream of spaghetti.
That is how you interact with the iPhone, now. Flick through lists with your finger, resize images with your thumb and forefinger, selecting complex menus with a tap here and there, turning on and off features with a slide and a swish.
Just like the Wii is virtual reality, the iPhone is science fiction.
How can you be a Slashdotter, not watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, and NOT want an iPhone?
What do you think the iPhone is, if it isn't a computer?
Or, for that matter, what is an AppleTV (hint, it's an x86 Mac running OS X and FrontRow), or even an iPod (which is trivially 10x more powerful than Apple's first Mac), if not computers?
Apple has figured out that computers can be useful to more people than those who sit in front of a keyboard and mouse.
It probably stems from their choice of OS:
Mac OS X. They already have scads of ARM experience (every iPod is an ARM CPU), and they already have a multi-platform OS (68k, PowerPC, x86), so it probably made a lot of sense to do what they already do and just port OS X to an ARM.
If they want to game, they'll just take advantage of the CPU; the Nintendo DS, after all, only has two ARMs at 67MHz and 33MHz without dedicated 3d or floating point hardware, and you see how successful that is right?
Too bad for AMD that is such a small, niche, market.
AMD needs something for laptops, the hottest market now, in order to regain profitability.
Unfortunately for AMD I think Intel currently has the crown in IPC, thermal efficiency, and power draw :)
Releasing a product in a timely also has a lot of advantages
Releasing a performance commanding product also has a lot of advantages
Currently Intel is king of the hill on both counts. If AMD has a 2GHz quad core, Intel could match with a 4GHz quad core ON THE SAME DAY.
It is very hard to believe that AMD will be able to field a 2GHz part with 2x the performance of Intel's chip... that is what would be required to show a 40% performance advantage.
You're the one who sounds like you don't know anything.
RAM is easily thousands of times faster than a hard drive. An MP3 player pulling songs from a HD can, at best, read at about 15mb/s (or 3 songs per second, assuming no fragmentation and no seeking). An MP3 player pulling songs directly from RAM can load songs at, literally, 100mb/s. A Nomad with only 8 or 16mb could only store 2 to 4 songs (at 128kbps, thats about 1mb per minute, or 8 to 16 minutes) while an iPod with 32mb could store 20 minutes of music, with 11mb reserved for the index file generated by iTunes. Additional battery/speed was extracted by reading the index file instead of the hard drive.
Anyway, back to the iPhone: I think the whole reason the iPhone is going to be fantastic is the UI; the same lessons they learned about UI from the iPod, iTunes, and AppleTV UIs will be in effect with the iPhone.
If you discount the effect the UI has on top of the advantages the iPod had, you will also discount the effect the iPhone's UI will have on it's success.
But regardless, the proof will be a year from now. Maybe you're right... and maybe I am.
Funny, I think that's what I am doing. Defending my claims. It's not my fault you decide to reject them.
You still haven't accepted the fact that the iPod was at least 10x faster (in upload, access, and usability), it was smaller (4x by volume) than the comparable HDD players, had more storage than the comparable flash players. All that, combined, made it more attractive than the existing MP3 players; each feature was incremental, but putting it all together made for a much nicer, easier to use, and ultimately "accessible" player that appealed to non-geeks. Add the UI and now you have something other manufacturers couldn't copy for several years.
The iPhone doesn't have that advantage, because in size and form factor there are already similar phones. All the iPhone has is it's UI.
The original iPod was roughly 4.1x2.4x0.7 inches and 6.5oz
m l
Here's a review of a 2002 Jukebox:
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/nomad3.ht
The original Jukebox had 4 hours battery; the iPod had 12, the new Jukebox lengthened it to 12.
The RAM was boosted from 8mb to 16mb... still half that of the iPod.
The Nomad Jukebox was 14oz, more than twice the weight
The Nomad Jukebox measured 5x5.5x1.5, double the iPod in two dimensions (or 4x the volume). You could literally squeeze 5 iPods into the space of a Nomad Jukebox
I'm not making this up. You can read about the "past" here:
http://www.mp3newswire.net/sect/archive.htm
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=239419&thresh
I first mentioned the Nomad Jukebox in that post, several parents ago:
So I mentioned the Nomad Jukebox, Samsung Yepp, and CD based MP3 players four or five posts ago.
All of the below is comparing the original iPod to a 2001 Nomad Jukebox, 6gb to 5gb.
10x faster claim: USB was 1mb/s, Firewire was easily 12mb/s, 10x faster transfer speed
Access speed: Hard drive seek is in the milliseconds, when a song isn't in RAM, and load time is something like 10-12mb/s, so it would take about 1/3 of a second to spool up and load a song from HD to RAM. The iPod, with 32mb of RAM, could store easily 8 or so songs. So to access a song from RAM only takes, at 100MHz, 1/1,000,000 of a second, which is trivially 10,000 times faster
UI speed: Because the entire library is loaded in RAM (not the songs, just metadata), you can browse through an iPod at the speed of RAM; with a Nomad, you had to at the time spool up the hard drive when you needed to scroll through a screen of data; A difference of 1/10 of a second vs 1/1,000,000 of a second, still about 10,000 times faster; practical experience shows that the user was slower than the library, or in other words you had to read a screen of text, even at 1/100 of a second, before scrolling to the next.
Today, which I never disputed, those differences are gone. All the Zunes and Zens and Clixes now store all the metadata in RAM, all use caches like the iPod, etc. All navigate with much easier UIs.
But when you were looking for an MP3 player in 2001, 2002, and even 2003, the iPod was best. The contenders didn't release comparable systems until 2004, when the iPod mini was released in January and the Zen MicroPhoto was released in October. The Zen (not Micro) wasn't released until November. The Zune wasn't out until 2006 and the Clix wasn't out until, I think, 2005.
Sigh, I'm still writing:
:)
1) I was comparing the original iPod to the original Nomad Jukebox, both of which existed in 2001. The Nomad Jukebox had a 2.5" laptop HDD as compared to the iPod's 1.8" HDD. Then the Nomad only had 8mb of RAM, as opposed to the iPod's 32mb. In practice this means the Nomad had 2 songs in queue where the iPod had 8; this noticably speed up seek times while skipping through a playlist. The 32mb also allowed the iPod to keep the entire library database in ram, which helps when a user is scrolling through the playlists without actually hitting the iPod.
All information gleaned from here:
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=1508
I was also comparing the original iPod to the then current 32mb and 64mb flash players. Same form factor, but 10x the storage. I was never comparing the flash iPod... the flash iPod was released AFTER the original iPod was a success.
Anyway, have fun
Man, you're such a downer.
I loved being able to synch my iPod at 16mb/s. My friend had a Samsung Yepp and it synchronized at a little less than 1mb/s. Of course he only had 32mb where I had 5gb, so synchronization speed wasn't so huge. My co-worker, who had a 6gb Nomad Jukebox however, would take a little less than 2 hours to synchronize at 1mb/s where it took me less than 10 minutes.
In comparing to existing hard drive players, the iPod was literally 1/4 the size and weight. The existing hard drive players were the Creative Nomad Jukebox and the Compaq PJB100. I like how you think I'm technically illiterate for comparing the speed of access on a MP3 CD at 2x with speed of access on the iPod at 4200rpm.
Anyway, I don't think we need to discuss any more; I still think I'm right, and you still think I'm wrong.
Poor you I guess. I bought a 1st Gen iPod that I still have... no failures, though battery life is only 6 hours now instead of the original 12. I'm sure there are failures, anything with moving parts (like the HDD on an iPod, or the headphone jack, or the hold switch) will fail.
So.. no, I never thought the iPod had excessive failures. Owned four iPods without a single failure. You and I, we have different definitions of perfect. My definition of perfect is "usable", because a feature or product that can't be used or is difficult to use is essentially useless.
You value drag and drop; I value convenience. I liked (loved, really), that with the original iPod all I had to do was plug it in; no management, no organization, or file manipulation.
If you want to think of the iPod as an incremental improvement, you can. I think a 10x, order of magnitude, increase in upload speed (USB1 vs Firewire) is huge and not incremental. I think a 80x increase in storage (64mb to 5gb) in the same form factor is huge, and not incremental. I think access speed increases (from CD->HD, HD->RAM, etc) the iPod implemented were huge... they certainly impressed the world when everyone was used to the seek times of CDs, the UI of the Nomad Jukebox, etc.
Not certainly all of Apple's competitors have been able to copy these features; now the SanDisk Sansa, the Zen Micro, the Microsoft Zune, etc, are all able peers. The reason Apple gets the bonus points (and marketshare) is they managed to tie it all together before everyone else could. There were at least two HDD based MP3 players before the iPod, but they were 4x as big and 5x as heavy and 10x slower. There were several flash based MP3 players before the iPod, but they had 1/10th the storage capacity and difficult to read screens.
You can really believe whatever you want, but history, I think, will remember Apple for doing the MP3 player right, first.
Unlike the Mac, Apple hasn't dropped the ball with the iPod, continually adding refinements, increasing it's user base, and dropping the price in a steady manner.
Then to an end user, essentially, the feature doesn't exist.
If you know how drag and drop, or cut and paste, work, you probably aren't the target market.
My in-laws, who don't know how to cut and paste, or my dad, who doesn't know how to drag and drop, are the target market.
It's insightful to people who categorically dismiss the iPod as a marketing exercise, an overhyped product, or are unaware of some of the iPod's history.
I'm curious what facts I get wrong, can you tell me?
1) Failure rates for the iPod don't seem excessively high... compare to the red ring of death or scratched discs for the XBox 360, for example.
2) You are right! Sony was hip first, with the Walkman, Discman, and Playstation. They somehow dropped the ball when they released their Net Walkman MD, though... something about not playing MP3s. Sony did it right, and screwed up.
3) No need to comment.
4) What reasons do you ascribe to their success?
Re: Accessibility. What device do you use as a benchmark? The iPod is hugely more accessible than it's predecessors, Rio Karma, Nomad Jukebox, Samsung Yepp, or even CD-based MP3 players. Compared to the modern Zen Micro, Microsoft Zune, or the iRiver Clix, I would say that the iPod is no simpler than any of the others... Then the issue boils down to momentum coupled with continuing refinements. iTunes and the iTunes Store continue to be lauded in the face of the Zune Marketplace, Amazon Unbox, Creative Soundstage, Sony Connect, etc.
Good thing Apple isn't targetting casual gamers :)
At this point they are targeting rich people.
What? If you solve the problem of Mars, you solve the problem of the Moon. Cut spending for one, and you jeopardize the other, too.