"Right there, you show that you believe that a company does not have a monopoly in one market because of the existance of competitors."
No, competitors are not enough. But there's practically nothing that forces the consumer to choose iTunes or iPod. iTunes doesn't really offer anything that some other store does not (apart from iPod-compatibility). And there's multitude of mp3-players out there, so people are not forced to choose iPod over the alternatives. And there are other stores out there that are compatible with iPod, besides iTunes.
Yes, Apple is the biggest player in this market. But did they reach that position through shenanigans or merely by offering a better product? Are they using questionable methods in holding on to their current position? No. There are stores that sell iPod-compatible music, and most music people have in their iPods is not from ITMS. And there are lots of competing music-players in the market.
Well, at least Intel didn't "UNLEASH flash-killer!". God, I hate it when all the time someone "unleashes" something. Next marketdroid who uses that word will see me unleashing a load of urine in his eye.
Well, astronauts do actually routinely use diapers. First they tell me that MacGuyver is unrealistic, then they tell me that astronauts wear diapers... Is there anything left of my childhood-heroes? A bunch of shit and urine in a diaper, that's all that remains.
Maybe you have just been reading wrong comics? As a kid I read Disney (Donald Duck mostly) and The Phantom, and I didn't see any major continuity-issues or in-comic historical revisionism in 'em. As I got older my interests moved to Calvin & Hobbes and classic Disney.
I think the idea of having a huge "universe" or interlinked characters, history and storylines is a good one. But as reality has shown us, they tend to grow too large and complex to manage, and at some point the publisher is going to make some major changes to them, disrupting the whole experience.
Don't discourage your kids from reading comics just because DC and Marvel suck. There's tons of great comics out there. And, of course, there's always the classics. I don't care one bit about the modern Disney-comics, but the classic Disney is as good as it gets.
"You're basically right about the French being beaten on the battlefield (although wrong about their (military) deaths being higher than the US; the US lost about twice as many soldiers IIRC)."
What if you compare the casualties to the total population? Take Finland For example. USA sustained about half a million men in casualties in the entire WW2. Finland suffered around 65.000 casualties in Winter War alone. Now, if we compare the casualties to the population of the country, had USA suffered similar losses as Finland did, it would have meant losses of over 1 million men in a war that lasted 105 days. Then, if you want, you could calculate the rate of losses for the entire war if you take the casualties of Continuation War in to account: 59.000 dead and 108.000 wounded.
Point is that raw numbers don't tell the whole story.
"Maybe it's because people like you keep forgetting to check history. The French didn't just lose.... they lost again and again. Sure they won a few, but the majority is in losses."
Well, they were victorious in WW1. In WW2 they did lose (well, Free France did continue to fight even after the armistice, and they were victorious in the end) and they lost in Vietnam. How does that compare to USA? USA won in WW1 (after others had done most of the fighting) and they won in WW2 (again, after others had been fighting for a long time). USA managed a stalemate in Korea and lost in Vietnam. Is that REALLY that much better than what France has done? Yes, you were successfull in Afganistan (against poorly equipped thugs) and Iraq (against a nation that was under embargo for a decade). And both Afganistan and Iraq are not over yet.
It seems to me that US victories are either
a) Against enemy that has already exhausted their forces fighting others (WW1 and WW2)
"Those tangible differences are not inherently better"
Since the subject is portable mp3-players, I would say that the size and weight of the device IS important. Very important. The smaller and lighter, the better. And Nano is considerably smaller and lighter than the competitors. Making device like that as small and light as Nano does cost money. If it didn't, the competitors would be as small and light as the Nano, yet they are not. Why is that?
"But again, the costs of shrinking an object are negligible, to a point."
True, but making things really small does cost money. And it's quite obvious that Apple went the extra mile on that front, wheras RCA, SanDisk and Creative did not. I mean, those three are 2-3 times thicker than the Nano. If it doesn't cost extra, why didn't they make their products thinner? And what about the weight?
Um, I'm sorry, but those are not "comparable". They look cheap, crappy and un-intuitive. The Lyra looks like utter shit (is that a _monochrome-screen_?!?!) and it's significantly bigger and heavier than the Nano is (three times thicker, over twice as heavy), Creative is.... well, Creative. And it too is bigger than the Nano (like it or not, extreme minituarization costs money. Those three obsiously never bothered with it, unlike Apple). Sansa is reasonable, but even it doesn't look or feel as refined as the iPod does, and it's twice as thick. Yes, I have tested it. No, it simply does not feel as good in the hand.
You might as well say that VW is overpriced, since you can get a "comparable" Lada for half the price. I mean, they are both cars, right? Nevermind the fact that Lada is noisy, it has interior straight from the eighties, it looks like crap, it has no accessories, it's quality is utter crap and it's just _awkward_ to use.
Sorry, you were saying? I was saying that "show me a comparable mp3-player that is half as expensive". And what did you do? You showed me a bunch of shitty players with zero elegance, design and minituarization. Show me a COMPARABLE player with half the price! No, the fact that it has as much storage-space as the Nano does not mean that it's "comparable"!
Anyone with a working brain-cell can obviously see where Sandisk, RCA and Creative cut corners on their products when compared to the Nano. And they did that so they could make their products cheaper. But that also means that they are not "comparable". Yes, they are all mp3-players. But not all mp3-players are equal. Just because you managed to find some bargain-basement mp3-players with similar storage-space does nothing to prove your point. It just proves that the mp3-players that are cheaer than the Nano are... well, crappier. Where are the comparable mp3-players? I'm still waiting.
Maybe I should save a whopping 90 bucks and get the kick-ass RCA Lyra instead of the Nano, since the two are just as good, right?
All subjective. No they are not, they are hard facts.
Again, why are any of those factors justification for 75% differences in pricing? Um, yes? Color-screens cost more than mochrome-screens. Making things small costs extra. And since we ARE talking about "_portable_ mp3-players", the size and weight of the device DOES matter! You took bunch of players that had nowhere near the specs of the Nano (well, apart from the storage-space), and then proclaimed how much cheaper they are. Well, they are cheaper because they are bigger and crappier. If they made those players as small as the Nano is and with color-screen, they would cost quite a bit more.
iPod requires iTunes to run. No it doesn't
Sucks for Linux users, huh? (Yeah, I know you can kludge your way around it on Linux. Key word - kludge). Weird. Both Amarok and Banshee "just worked" with iPod last time I tried them. Maybe I did something wrong?
So what's the downside? I mean, if Latitude is so much more expensive than E1505, then surely the E1505 is missing something that the Latitude has? What is it? There is no such thing as a free lunch.
If you are talking about movies: All of them? Without them, the movies do not get made. If they prefer certain themes (that are more compatible with conservative viewpoints), then they will prefer those over some liberal stuff. Hell, Yes, the artist would complain, but at that point they have two choices: Either the movie gets made the way the producers want it, or it doesn't get made at all.
just look at Jerry Bruckheimer! You have more flag-waving in his movies than you do in the annual flag-waving contest!
But how can you determine that some certain product from one certain company is crap, if you have only one point of reference? You simply can't make sweeping statements if you have only tested one product. Yes, some people have problems with their iPods. And there are millions of people who have no problems with them. There are lemons among iPods, just like there are lemons in just about all products out there.
And that means they are the same? Does that mean that the voice-recordings I made with my cell-phone (for taking notes) are the same thing as music by Sibelius and Mozart? I mean, they are both "audio recordings"? By your logic, there is no difference between the two
"Audiobooks and music are NOT, however, entirely different things. But Apple gives you different usage rights to the two."
Um, they are. Music is music, audiobooks are... well, audiobooks. They are most definitely not the same. For starters, audiobooks are long, whereas music is not. And that most likely the reason why you can bookmark audiobooks, but not music (duh!). Do you also think that comics and books are same thing? No you do not. While there might be similarities between the two (both books and comics are read), they are still two entirely different things.
"If Diamond and Creative were such dominant players in the market, as you put it, then how did Apple succeed in beating both of them when at the time the iPod wasn't even as good as other players?"
Because they provided a better product? Mp3-players sucked back then. Either you had a cheap player with tiny amounts of RAM. And those were next to useless. Or maybe one of those CD-players, that could play back data-cd:s with mp3-files im 'em? Or you could buy one of those HD-based players that looked like oversized CD-players with tiny LCD-screens. And let's not even talk about the software you used with those devices... Apple brought to market a device that was simply better. It felt better, it had better UI, it had big screen, it had lots of HD-space and you used it with intuitive software that "just worked". Yes, it does matter how the device feels in your hand. It does matter how easy it is to use it. It does matter how easy it is to move music to the device. It does matter how good the device looks. And Apple excelled at all of those things, whereas they competitors... Well, didn't. Their competitors focused on geeky features and geeky appearance, and the people buying those devices saw no value in them. They did see value in the features Apple gave them.
You say that "Their player wasn't even as good as the other players". But it was. Sure, there might have been players that had more space, more bells and whistles and so forth.... But in the end, that does not matter. Fact is that those players simply felt bad. I actually contemplated buying one of the first Nomad Jukeboxes. It felt cheap and flimsy. Sure, it might have had better specs than the iPod, but it felt like crap. And the UI consisted of crappy screen and multitude of cheap and plastique buttons. Same things is happening even today. We have people who say that iPod sucks because there are devices with more features etc. But those people are missing the point by a mile. iPod might not be better than some other player at all things, but it's better at things that matter.
"Again, if that were truly the case then why did consumers flock to the iPod by the 10's of millions."
Would those devices stop working the moment Apple went bankrupt? They flocked to those devices because they were simply better than what was available.
You are now comparing apples to oranges. explicit and clean music are both still music. Music and TV-shows are two entirely different things. They are different medium with different prices and with different usage-rights. If you are doing comparisons, make sure you actually compare the same thing.
So, from your statistical sample of ONE you have used your amazing powers of deduction and logic, and came to the conclusion that Apple sucks? Well, FWIW, I bought an iPod Mini close to two years ago, and it's still going strong.
"iTunes already has flags next to songs to indicate explicit content, podcast availability, and so on."
But the usage-rights are the same. You could say that explicit and clean versions of a song are two distinct songs, but they still have identical usage-rights associated to them. The user knows what he's getting when he buys that song. But DRM or lack of it changes the way the user can use that music. "Clean" and "explicit" does not. "Explicit" merely makes some small changes to the content, but everything else stays the same.
Slashdot Mirror
"Right there, you show that you believe that a company does not have a monopoly in one market because of the existance of competitors."
No, competitors are not enough. But there's practically nothing that forces the consumer to choose iTunes or iPod. iTunes doesn't really offer anything that some other store does not (apart from iPod-compatibility). And there's multitude of mp3-players out there, so people are not forced to choose iPod over the alternatives. And there are other stores out there that are compatible with iPod, besides iTunes.
Yes, Apple is the biggest player in this market. But did they reach that position through shenanigans or merely by offering a better product? Are they using questionable methods in holding on to their current position? No. There are stores that sell iPod-compatible music, and most music people have in their iPods is not from ITMS. And there are lots of competing music-players in the market.
So what's the problem here?
No, I keep my urine on a leash. A huge difference.
Well, at least Intel didn't "UNLEASH flash-killer!". God, I hate it when all the time someone "unleashes" something. Next marketdroid who uses that word will see me unleashing a load of urine in his eye.
you did spend quite a bit of time talking about snow and winter.
Maybe you have just been reading wrong comics? As a kid I read Disney (Donald Duck mostly) and The Phantom, and I didn't see any major continuity-issues or in-comic historical revisionism in 'em. As I got older my interests moved to Calvin & Hobbes and classic Disney.
I think the idea of having a huge "universe" or interlinked characters, history and storylines is a good one. But as reality has shown us, they tend to grow too large and complex to manage, and at some point the publisher is going to make some major changes to them, disrupting the whole experience.
Don't discourage your kids from reading comics just because DC and Marvel suck. There's tons of great comics out there. And, of course, there's always the classics. I don't care one bit about the modern Disney-comics, but the classic Disney is as good as it gets.
fyi: in military-terminology, "casulties" usually include both soldiers that are killed and soldiers who are injured.
and to say that the outcome of the winter war was mostly due to the weather is gross oversimplification.
"You're basically right about the French being beaten on the battlefield (although wrong about their (military) deaths being higher than the US; the US lost about twice as many soldiers IIRC)."
What if you compare the casualties to the total population? Take Finland For example. USA sustained about half a million men in casualties in the entire WW2. Finland suffered around 65.000 casualties in Winter War alone. Now, if we compare the casualties to the population of the country, had USA suffered similar losses as Finland did, it would have meant losses of over 1 million men in a war that lasted 105 days. Then, if you want, you could calculate the rate of losses for the entire war if you take the casualties of Continuation War in to account: 59.000 dead and 108.000 wounded.
Point is that raw numbers don't tell the whole story.
"Maybe it's because people like you keep forgetting to check history. The French didn't just lose.... they lost again and again. Sure they won a few, but the majority is in losses."
Well, they were victorious in WW1. In WW2 they did lose (well, Free France did continue to fight even after the armistice, and they were victorious in the end) and they lost in Vietnam. How does that compare to USA? USA won in WW1 (after others had done most of the fighting) and they won in WW2 (again, after others had been fighting for a long time). USA managed a stalemate in Korea and lost in Vietnam. Is that REALLY that much better than what France has done? Yes, you were successfull in Afganistan (against poorly equipped thugs) and Iraq (against a nation that was under embargo for a decade). And both Afganistan and Iraq are not over yet.
It seems to me that US victories are either
a) Against enemy that has already exhausted their forces fighting others (WW1 and WW2)
or
b) Against overwhelmingly inferior enemy
"Those tangible differences are not inherently better"
Since the subject is portable mp3-players, I would say that the size and weight of the device IS important. Very important. The smaller and lighter, the better. And Nano is considerably smaller and lighter than the competitors. Making device like that as small and light as Nano does cost money. If it didn't, the competitors would be as small and light as the Nano, yet they are not. Why is that?
"But again, the costs of shrinking an object are negligible, to a point."
True, but making things really small does cost money. And it's quite obvious that Apple went the extra mile on that front, wheras RCA, SanDisk and Creative did not. I mean, those three are 2-3 times thicker than the Nano. If it doesn't cost extra, why didn't they make their products thinner? And what about the weight?
You might as well say that VW is overpriced, since you can get a "comparable" Lada for half the price. I mean, they are both cars, right? Nevermind the fact that Lada is noisy, it has interior straight from the eighties, it looks like crap, it has no accessories, it's quality is utter crap and it's just _awkward_ to use. Sorry, you were saying? I was saying that "show me a comparable mp3-player that is half as expensive". And what did you do? You showed me a bunch of shitty players with zero elegance, design and minituarization. Show me a COMPARABLE player with half the price! No, the fact that it has as much storage-space as the Nano does not mean that it's "comparable"!
Anyone with a working brain-cell can obviously see where Sandisk, RCA and Creative cut corners on their products when compared to the Nano. And they did that so they could make their products cheaper. But that also means that they are not "comparable". Yes, they are all mp3-players. But not all mp3-players are equal. Just because you managed to find some bargain-basement mp3-players with similar storage-space does nothing to prove your point. It just proves that the mp3-players that are cheaer than the Nano are... well, crappier. Where are the comparable mp3-players? I'm still waiting.
Maybe I should save a whopping 90 bucks and get the kick-ass RCA Lyra instead of the Nano, since the two are just as good, right?
30GB Zune: $249.99
30GB iPod: $249
"Nearly double"? On what planet are you living on? And the Zune is bigger and it weights more (iPod: 4.8 ounces, Zune: 5.6 ounces).
Please give some real examples of this "nearly double" prices Apple asks for it's mp3-players. Go on, it shouldn't be that hard, right?
So what's the downside? I mean, if Latitude is so much more expensive than E1505, then surely the E1505 is missing something that the Latitude has? What is it? There is no such thing as a free lunch.
If you are talking about movies: All of them? Without them, the movies do not get made. If they prefer certain themes (that are more compatible with conservative viewpoints), then they will prefer those over some liberal stuff. Hell, Yes, the artist would complain, but at that point they have two choices: Either the movie gets made the way the producers want it, or it doesn't get made at all.
just look at Jerry Bruckheimer! You have more flag-waving in his movies than you do in the annual flag-waving contest!
The UI is same, the way you use them is different, since the actual content is different. Music is not same as audiobooks.
But how can you determine that some certain product from one certain company is crap, if you have only one point of reference? You simply can't make sweeping statements if you have only tested one product. Yes, some people have problems with their iPods. And there are millions of people who have no problems with them. There are lemons among iPods, just like there are lemons in just about all products out there.
"Both are audio recordings."
And that means they are the same? Does that mean that the voice-recordings I made with my cell-phone (for taking notes) are the same thing as music by Sibelius and Mozart? I mean, they are both "audio recordings"? By your logic, there is no difference between the two
Source of those two are different. We are talking about DRM in ITMS, right? Songs ripped from CD's play no part of that.
"Audiobooks and music are NOT, however, entirely different things. But Apple gives you different usage rights to the two."
Um, they are. Music is music, audiobooks are... well, audiobooks. They are most definitely not the same. For starters, audiobooks are long, whereas music is not. And that most likely the reason why you can bookmark audiobooks, but not music (duh!). Do you also think that comics and books are same thing? No you do not. While there might be similarities between the two (both books and comics are read), they are still two entirely different things.
"Nice try though"
I wish I could say the same.
"If Diamond and Creative were such dominant players in the market, as you put it, then how did Apple succeed in beating both of them when at the time the iPod wasn't even as good as other players?"
5 6-0.html
Because they provided a better product? Mp3-players sucked back then. Either you had a cheap player with tiny amounts of RAM. And those were next to useless. Or maybe one of those CD-players, that could play back data-cd:s with mp3-files im 'em? Or you could buy one of those HD-based players that looked like oversized CD-players with tiny LCD-screens. And let's not even talk about the software you used with those devices... Apple brought to market a device that was simply better. It felt better, it had better UI, it had big screen, it had lots of HD-space and you used it with intuitive software that "just worked". Yes, it does matter how the device feels in your hand. It does matter how easy it is to use it. It does matter how easy it is to move music to the device. It does matter how good the device looks. And Apple excelled at all of those things, whereas they competitors... Well, didn't. Their competitors focused on geeky features and geeky appearance, and the people buying those devices saw no value in them. They did see value in the features Apple gave them.
You say that "Their player wasn't even as good as the other players". But it was. Sure, there might have been players that had more space, more bells and whistles and so forth.... But in the end, that does not matter. Fact is that those players simply felt bad. I actually contemplated buying one of the first Nomad Jukeboxes. It felt cheap and flimsy. Sure, it might have had better specs than the iPod, but it felt like crap. And the UI consisted of crappy screen and multitude of cheap and plastique buttons. Same things is happening even today. We have people who say that iPod sucks because there are devices with more features etc. But those people are missing the point by a mile. iPod might not be better than some other player at all things, but it's better at things that matter.
This article does tell it quite well: http://www.wired.com/news/columns/cultofmac/0,719
"Again, if that were truly the case then why did consumers flock to the iPod by the 10's of millions."
Would those devices stop working the moment Apple went bankrupt? They flocked to those devices because they were simply better than what was available.
You are now comparing apples to oranges. explicit and clean music are both still music. Music and TV-shows are two entirely different things. They are different medium with different prices and with different usage-rights. If you are doing comparisons, make sure you actually compare the same thing.
So, from your statistical sample of ONE you have used your amazing powers of deduction and logic, and came to the conclusion that Apple sucks? Well, FWIW, I bought an iPod Mini close to two years ago, and it's still going strong.
"Apple wanting to use their own DRM to lock you into an all Apple solution is consistent with many of Apples other policies."
Since Apple gives the users the keys to remove that lock, it's not very effective, now is it?
"iTunes already has flags next to songs to indicate explicit content, podcast availability, and so on."
But the usage-rights are the same. You could say that explicit and clean versions of a song are two distinct songs, but they still have identical usage-rights associated to them. The user knows what he's getting when he buys that song. But DRM or lack of it changes the way the user can use that music. "Clean" and "explicit" does not. "Explicit" merely makes some small changes to the content, but everything else stays the same.