The 32GB SSD you can buy for 250USD will be unlikely to provide any performance or reliability increase over what that same 250gb would buy you in traditional magnetic media. I've done perf/reliability testing on all the current generation SSDs from mtron, stec, memoright, and ritek. And even the 800-1000USD SSD drives fall way short of their predicted write lifetime when put into any environment where i/o is primarily small random r/w operations vs large sequential stream r/w operations. Write leveling is generally limited to 512b or larger blocks which makes it ineffective for these types of loads, furthermore the cheaper devices tend to use MLC flash nand vs. the less dense SLC.
It doesn't ignore any of that. I expect when I pay big money for Sun Hardware that the OS support I see from Sun should be more advanced on their own hardware than on beige hardware. As of a few months ago that is not the case. If today I wanted the OS to boot on a T2000 from a ZFS pool I'd be SOL; OTOH I could easily get that same config working using 3rd party hardware for half the cost.
Working, yes, however, there are is no ZFS support in the Solaris installer or jumpstart system, and Sparc Solaris still has no way to boot ZFS which is something that has been doable on X86 for months. Sun needs to step up and show some serious production level ZFS support if they want to keep us Solaris admins from defecting away from Sun hardware.
Nothing complicated about it, ground out one of the wires and the port acts as host, let it float and it acts as a device. Only limitation it has that doesn't exist as part of the regular USB standard is the available current is only half (IIRC) of the regular usb standard. Some usb chipsets allow the switching to be down with software instead of using special cables even, something like 'echo "host" >/proc/usb/0' or somesuch, check the internet tablet forums to see how the Nokia IT users are already making good use of both methods.
The thing here, as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, is this. Playback is really CPU intensive under linux because there aren't any drivers that support the HW acceleration on modern video cards (some light mpeg2 accel is supported in some configurations) So your back end computer can capture an sd stream which is essentially just copying an mpeg2 stream from the card to a disk and you can capture an HD stream which is essentially copying an mpeg4 stream directly to disk. Then you can playback one of any stream type on a separate computer in on of several rooms.... This isn't fundamentally difficult to setup nor use. However I don't want a whole cluster of media machines eating up my electricity and creating fan and disk noise in every room of the house. I have one machine with not too highend specs which can capture 2 HD streams and 2 SD stream while playing back one of either type of stream and/or playing a video game and/or playing an hd-dvd movie and/or playing any captured or downloaded media back on my workstation upstairs over CIFs if I m so inclined.
This works fine and I'm happy with the results. Vista does a decent job of it and is more stable than the majority of commercial DVRs as can be seen in some other response to this thread. It is not the PERFECT OS but neither are any of the others. It just works well in this role (perhaps XP with it's recent backported nvidia drivers) would be similarly good at the task. I dunno, I haven't tried that yet. I'm just saying that I'm pretty satisfied and I think that the vast majority of Vista bashers either never gave it a chance or were expecting it to be some ground shattering departure from previous windows releases...
This isn't a boast, merely an observation. When attempting to do similar tasks under linux I was left with crash happy binary blob video drivers with no support for hardware mpeg4 and vc-1 acceleration OR stable-ish yet slow as mud OSS drivers with no support for hardware vc-1 and mpeg4 acceleration. This alone leaves you with the inability to do anywhere near as much work with the hardware (60% cpu utilization for mpeg4 playback vs 4% with HW accelerated playback) and the drivers themselves are just as much of a black box as on windows... Just a less capable black box;) On top of the playback issues there are basically no drivers for most of the current generation of pci-e capture devices. You spend a few hours capturing HD video while playing back a different stream under linux and let me know how long your X session goes before it flips out and takes a nap.
This is the distinction I was trying to point out. As a few others in this thread have mentioned, my average Solaris up time is more closely linked to power maintenance windows than to any underlying fundamental OS problems.
I'm probably in the minority here, but I've been reasonably happy with Vista as an HTPC/mediacenter OS. Seems much more stable than any previous pre-sp windows release; I often see 30+ days of uptime which was previously something I only experienced on solaris/linux/bsd machines and I'm not talking 30 idle days, my htpc can record 2 HD streams and 2 analog streams while playing back another hd stream and/or playing civilizations 4. Some of the interface felt a little wonky at first but after giving it a few weeks it felt much more tightly put together than XP and certainly more so than gnome or kde. Truly the only problems I really have with vista are easily enumerated as such:
No way to auto install security updates w/o also auto installing all other updates.
No built in support for hd-dvd or bluray playback, even with Microsoft's own hd-dvd hardware.
The price.
No support for unencrypted digital cable tuners in media center.
No good visual configuration options for REALLY BIG displays (I'm on a 47" at 1080p and it is always difficult getting the fonts balanced for readability and usability)
Now, most of the issues exist in xp and linux as well. I'll reserve my final judgment for vista until it gets a bit past sp1.
P.S. I'm not an MS fanboy nor an MS apologist, I just call them like I see them. I am a professional Solaris/Linux system administrator with over a decade of nearly exclusive use of linux. I think that there just really isn't much serious innovation left to be had on the desktop, but vista makes a pretty decent living room OS...
MS points aren't pegged to the US dollar because they don't cost the same in every market. I think the wikipedia page for live points gives a cost break down. I think it is stupid, but look at the cost of music through the zune store and it seems that at an equivalent of 98.5 cents per track that the savings of the bulk purchase is passed on vs the 99 cents it costs through itunes;)
How old are you?
I've been reading for about 22 years give or take and even with about (a conservative) estimated 25% to 30% of my books having been lost to lending without expectation of return I have several hundred books. Enough to require 3 large book cases in my house. I don't consider myself a heavy reader, so I can only imagine someone who is could easily have 3-4 times the number of books that I have. Point being, I'm curious if maybe this is a generational gap we are seeing wherein younger people (aside from having less time to amass a collection) actually spend less time reading traditional media... perhaps your browser history and bookmarks are an order of magnitude greater in number than mine.
Nobody cares. I bought a 30 Gig player to listen to my own music. And I bought a zune because it was cheap and I wanted to listen to music I already owned, listen to new music at a price I find reasonable, listen podcasts, and listen to FM radio... I'm not sure why it is so impossible for people to realize that the features they want out of a product are not the same as the features that everybody else wants.
Dogshit slow wireless syncing that requires you have a cable connected to the Zune. This is patently false. While the wireless sync isn't a huge bonus for me, it does work reasonably quickly and doesn't require anything to be attached to the device.
...is an abysmal failure, just like the Zune, and purposely, with malice aforethought, broke existing PlayForSure compatibility. Similarly to how I like having FM and you see no value in that... I don't care that it doesn't work with playforsure, that is a format/drm encumberence which I never bought into and thusly am not losing anything by not having support.
I won't bother to point out that subscription models are also an abysmal failure (oops), so I will just point out that you pay that fee forever and ever and ever, or you lose your ability to play anything. And you can't burn it to back it up. Good job. Great idea! For almost half that cost, you can download 40 tracks a month from eMusic and OWN YOUR TRACKS FOREVER AND EVER! I'm curious if you are self-centered about everything in real life, or if you only do it to make foolish troll arguments on slashdot... at any rate, *I* find a great value in the all you can download music plan for 15 bucks a month, I listen to a wide variety of music which I wouldn't hear otherwise since I'm certainly not going to go buy individual tracks without knowing that I want to own them first. Also the 100 dollars or so that I saved by buying an 80 dullar zune vs a 180 dollar ipod offests several months worth of my subscription cost which, had I similar values to yours, I could easily have applied that difference BUY many drm free tracks from any number of sources...
Really I'm confused how others can be so up in arms over something as simple as this. Nobody is forcing anything on you and if you don't find any value in the deal presented you are welcome to spend your dollars however and wherever you like. Personally I think I got a good deal and I think that the GGP's post saying that paying 180 bucks for an ipod is a better deal than paying 80ish for a zune just doesn't hold water. or to put it another way you could buy an ipod with no fm, no wifi, no music and no option to get a subscription music plan or a zune with fm, wifi, a 100 dollars worth of music, and the option to subscribe to an all you can download music plan... I've had ipods before I'm not a fan boy I'm just breaking down the values that I see here and nobody has yet to actually point out a feature or value that I'm failing to account for.
Speculation as to what they would be doing were things different is pretty worthless, as it is only speculation. Their motivations for providing something that has some value to me as a customer isn't a very interesting topic, IMHO, because in the end their motivation neither increases nor decreases the value of their offering. Similarly their restructuring of the DRM terms for "zune pass" AYCE downloads has tilted the cost/benefit strongly towards making this service something which I find valuable and the limits seem not to impede too much on how I wish to use the music (fair use principle may say I should be able to play this music on whatever device I want, but in reality I'm fine with playing it on up to 3 windows computers and up to 3 zune devices.). I'm a little confused as to the critics of the zune hardware and the zune marketplace; both products truly seem, from my perspective, to offer a lot of features not available with the competitors devices and services.
As i've done previously, I'll save the trolls the trouble of calling me a MS fanboy or some other non-sense in response to this post. I am a professional computer systems administrator for a tier 1 ISP and clustered internet software services provider. I work mostly with Solaris, Linux, and freebsd but am a self described Os agnostic. I believe in using the software which provides the best solution for the problem at hand. Currently my only windows machine is a X64 Vista HTPC which works great as a central media repo and access point and also makes MS's own PMP and music library software the natural choice for me.
Well, er, except for every existing Apple customer that bought a Mac in or after 1999 (i.e., every Mac since 24 months prior to the release of the iPod). As far as I can tell that would have included every early adopter of the 2001 Mac-only iPod.
(18 months later were the first Windows-supported iPods, and with them the first concerns about firewire-only connectivity. Lo and behold, 10 months later, USB support was added in the third generation model.)
Thanks for clearing up the timeline I was a little fogy on the exact order and timing of those events seeing as it was a number of years ago now. The point I was trying to make was that I wanted a 1st gen ipod but was left in the cold because they didn't support my chosen OS (windows and linux) similar to the current situation with zune. So the people complaining about the zune having some lock in factor and intention have short memories for the similar ipod situation. Heck it hasn't even been 18 months since the the first zune hit store shelves, to think that now is a good time to make clear predictions as to how this will all turn out just feels premature in light of the history of consumer electronics and the long game which microsoft is willing to spend plenty to ensure. Anybody recall how ms spent years chipping away at lotus' early lead in office/productivity software (notes, 1-2-3) and now has excel, exchange, word, and outlook?
The songs are priced identically (within 2/3rds of a cent in USD) as on itunes, seems like MS passed the savings on if it is indeed on the order of a fraction of cent. But, generally we are in a agreement on this point.
Thats why the radio is useless to me Ascribing your values to be those of people in general is stupid.
ridiculous since the device itself is MADE for playing music you already own. It seems to me that the zune is also made for listening to FM radio... which is, regardless of your feelings, a feature that the ipod lacks.
blah blah microsoft blah blah monopoly blah unfair blah blah blah Whatever, spend your dollars where you want. I'm going to purchase goods and services that I want at a price which I feel provides me with adequate value for my dollars. If I want to BUY a drm-free track from microsoft I will and do, likewise if I want to rent from them I will and do do that as well. You arguments with regards to DRM are ridiculous and make not a lick of sense since apple has use the exact same tactics in the past and continues to use them today. I have zero interest in what motivates either company (in so far as they are not doing actual harm to human live or something equally egregious) and I have a feeling that the majority of the market place feels the same way.
I'm not a microsoft fanboy and as i said earlier I don't really care as to which company takes the bigger slice of the pie in the end, I'm just pointing out that I think the zune in it's current form is a good value and that Microsoft should not be discounted as a serious competitor in this marketspace for the foreseeable future.
2 Million drm free of 50 million total tracks does not one half make... Zune market place also has drm free mp3 tracks, I'm not sure what percentage of their tracks are available like that, but a quick browse seems to indicate a large percentage.
Maybe the device itself support open(ish) formats, but the sync features on the device are specific to itunes and 3rd party software which has reverse engineered itunes sync methods. It'll be a wonderful day when all PMPs appear as vanilla USB attached storage formated in an OS agnostic filesystem.
If people wanted subscription music with Windows only cheap devices, people would have done that instead, because brand name can only take the iPod so far. That model failed a long time ago (MS seems to agree, dropping every partner for their own system), in part because MS used the entire thing as an opportunity to edge out competition to Windows. They are doing the same thing again, so you will forgive me if I don't reward them for it. I'd hardly call it a failure since I and many others that I know have wanted something like this that works well and has a good selection for quite a while now. I'm not sure what you are going on about with regards to "dropping partners" since MS already has over 30 million tracks available to download and is inking new deals for more distribution. They have acquired musiwave which has distribution deals with all the major players, including EMI, Universal, Warner, and BMG.
WiFi is nice, but the old Zune should have had it a year ago, instead MS screwed around letting the entire market beta test a literal brick, and let the iPod Touch and iPhone become the first devices with a real use for the capability. Radio isn't all that useful either, the point is to listen to high quality music you already own on a small device you can actually carry around. Wifi is nice, you saying that Microsoft didn't have the sync capability at launch of the V1 Zune is stupid is also true, however I hardly see how that is a blow against zune when comparing to the ipod which didn't even have the hardware for wifi in their device at the time. And radio is a seriously awesome feature that apple should be including in their ipods, but seeing as how they are so driven to keep reducing the footprint of their devices (even at the cost of sound quality) they simply just can't/won't add that. Oh well, as I point out further down the comment page, not everybody wants the same features or values them equally. Which makes it foolish to discredit a feature on one device as being not useful when clearly there are many others out there who not only find it useful, but end up using the radio more frequently than some other features i.e. video payback (gimme a fucking break, who watches movies on a 2.5" screen?!?!?).
Then you have the ridiculous Zune "Points", real stores use money and refrain from using stupid tricks to make it look like songs are cheaper than they are. You have me on this one. The use of Microsoft Points is pretty stupid, I'd much rather see real dollar values. The reason is somewhat understandable, by selling points in blocks rather than doing individual charges per item MS reduces then number of CC transactions they have to process which reduces their costs and limits third party auth dependency i.e. I can still buy stuff from zune or xbox live when their credit processing company is down, but on itunes the transactions will just fail. Yeah, but I agree it is stupid...
You complain about Firewire back in 2002, but when Apple released the iPod, there was no installed base of USB 2.0, so Firewire was important for making the iPod sync much faster than other systems. Apple has always owned the market because it innovated. Microsoft doesn't have to innovate anything, it can simply copy. Even so, its doing a really bad job of ripping Apple off. It can't compete even in a fairly mature market.
Well, as an early ipod adopter I can tell you that "no installed base of usb 2.0" is a red herring because there was also virtually no installed base of firewire adaptors. Effectively tacking an extra 100 bucks on to the final price.
The $80 Zune is indeed a low priced item. However, remember that there were only about 1.2 million ever made. So its not like those fire sale Zunes from last year are going to outsell the 20-25 million iPods Apple will sell this winter. There are also a few things the Zune can't do that make it a problem. It can't play iTunes purchases without re-ripping them, it can't play games, and it doesn't work with Macs. It also looks clunky, and has more hardware problems than the iPod (loud hard drives, flakey software that crashes, battery problems).
I'm not saying that it is going to outsell ipod, or that it currently is, or that I care which sells more. The lack of ability to play purchases off of itunes is of zero consequence to people who don't use itunes and seems more of a criticism of itunes choice of formats... All my music is in mp3 except for the stuff I download from the zune marketplace; I expect that is the same situation as most other people who are in the market for a new PMP and haven't yet drank deeply of apple's koolaid. As for the complaints about loud hard drive, crashy software, battery problems; I haven't experienced any instability in the software (although they dropped a few features in the latest release which I miss), the hard drive is silent as far as I can tell, and the battery works fine and plays audio for me throughout my day and hasn't yet ever run all the way down. And lets not forget that apple had plenty of similar and more sizable problems, early itunes and music match were wickedly unstable, all us early adopters got pretty well screwed on the battery life and Apple's total lack of firmware updates for older gen devices. The big one for me is that latest ipods just don't sound good and the Zune does.
Microsoft also hasn't "hit gold" with the Xbox 360; it's losing billions on it
I could care less whether the 360 is profitable, it will be a cold day in hell when a company's bottom line influence's my buying decision. The 360 has better games, stronger online features, and a huge install base. Compared to the PS2 vs. the original Xbox the 360 vs ps3 is clearly a win for Microsoft's device and I don't really compare either to the wii since everyone I know who has a 360 or a ps3 has a wii as well, but they don't really compete in the same marketspace.
Apple is also aggressively bringing prices down--for hardware (it forced Microsoft to sell the original Zune at a loss right out of the gate) and for media. Apple is also pushing sales of non-DRM content, which from its powerful position is a strong message about the difference from Apple in control vs Microsoft in control. Do you think Microsoft would be releasing non-DRM tracks if it had any power in the industry?
I'm confused by this argument, firstly Microsoft does sell drm free mp3 track on the zune marketplace. I think that they would do whatever it would take to capture more customers regardless of the amount of power they have in that particular arena.
However, the iPod is already migrating into a mobile device far thinner and far more capable than Microsoft has ever produced.
This is honestly just retarded speculation on how things will turn out. Microsoft has only made 2 generations worth of PMPs AND they have never (AFAIK) made their own mobile hardware dev
You have got to be high to pay 180USD for a 30GB ipod from the previous generation when the previous gen 30gb zune can be had for less than half of that (I paid 80 + 5 s&h). The 30gb zune runs the latest zune firmware which gives it all the features of the zune 2 aside from native mpeg4 video and the touch sensitive navigation pad. The zune just blows the 5.5g ipod out of the water, you get FM radio, wireless syncing, and access to the zune marketplace which, unlike itunes, has an ALL YOU CAN DOWNLOAD subscription model for 15USD monthly (about the same price I paid for my last CD purchase).
As far as I'm concerned the only thing the zune doesn't have over the ipod is non-windows based software. But Apple had that same problem When I bought a 2g 20g ipod, itunes didn't run on windows, Apple had a terrible 3rd party software package, heck the ipod didn't even support usb; instead they opted to go with the almost entirely (at the time) Apple used connectivity provided by firewire. Apple learned to move towards the middle to eat up that segment of the market, Microsoft is now in the unenviable position of playing catchup, but so far they seem much quicker to adapt than apple has been. Lets not forget that nobody took the xbox as a serious competitor to the PS2 a few years ago and then Microsoft really poured on the R&D for their second attempt and hit gold with the XB360. It may be premature to predict a similar outcome in the PMP wars, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised were it to turn out that way. I'm certainly not planting my flag in either camp based on the type of ad-populum arguments which have littered the comments of this headline nor on ridiculous brand loyalty which would run contrary to a pure cost/benefit analysis (I.E. more features for less money sounds like the smart buying decision to me).
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The 32GB SSD you can buy for 250USD will be unlikely to provide any performance or reliability increase over what that same 250gb would buy you in traditional magnetic media. I've done perf/reliability testing on all the current generation SSDs from mtron, stec, memoright, and ritek. And even the 800-1000USD SSD drives fall way short of their predicted write lifetime when put into any environment where i/o is primarily small random r/w operations vs large sequential stream r/w operations. Write leveling is generally limited to 512b or larger blocks which makes it ineffective for these types of loads, furthermore the cheaper devices tend to use MLC flash nand vs. the less dense SLC.
It doesn't ignore any of that. I expect when I pay big money for Sun Hardware that the OS support I see from Sun should be more advanced on their own hardware than on beige hardware. As of a few months ago that is not the case. If today I wanted the OS to boot on a T2000 from a ZFS pool I'd be SOL; OTOH I could easily get that same config working using 3rd party hardware for half the cost.
Working, yes, however, there are is no ZFS support in the Solaris installer or jumpstart system, and Sparc Solaris still has no way to boot ZFS which is something that has been doable on X86 for months. Sun needs to step up and show some serious production level ZFS support if they want to keep us Solaris admins from defecting away from Sun hardware.
Nothing complicated about it, ground out one of the wires and the port acts as host, let it float and it acts as a device. Only limitation it has that doesn't exist as part of the regular USB standard is the available current is only half (IIRC) of the regular usb standard. Some usb chipsets allow the switching to be down with software instead of using special cables even, something like 'echo "host" >/proc/usb/0' or somesuch, check the internet tablet forums to see how the Nokia IT users are already making good use of both methods.
The thing here, as I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, is this. Playback is really CPU intensive under linux because there aren't any drivers that support the HW acceleration on modern video cards (some light mpeg2 accel is supported in some configurations) So your back end computer can capture an sd stream which is essentially just copying an mpeg2 stream from the card to a disk and you can capture an HD stream which is essentially copying an mpeg4 stream directly to disk. Then you can playback one of any stream type on a separate computer in on of several rooms.... This isn't fundamentally difficult to setup nor use. However I don't want a whole cluster of media machines eating up my electricity and creating fan and disk noise in every room of the house. I have one machine with not too highend specs which can capture 2 HD streams and 2 SD stream while playing back one of either type of stream and/or playing a video game and/or playing an hd-dvd movie and/or playing any captured or downloaded media back on my workstation upstairs over CIFs if I m so inclined.
This works fine and I'm happy with the results. Vista does a decent job of it and is more stable than the majority of commercial DVRs as can be seen in some other response to this thread. It is not the PERFECT OS but neither are any of the others. It just works well in this role (perhaps XP with it's recent backported nvidia drivers) would be similarly good at the task. I dunno, I haven't tried that yet. I'm just saying that I'm pretty satisfied and I think that the vast majority of Vista bashers either never gave it a chance or were expecting it to be some ground shattering departure from previous windows releases...
This isn't a boast, merely an observation. When attempting to do similar tasks under linux I was left with crash happy binary blob video drivers with no support for hardware mpeg4 and vc-1 acceleration OR stable-ish yet slow as mud OSS drivers with no support for hardware vc-1 and mpeg4 acceleration. This alone leaves you with the inability to do anywhere near as much work with the hardware (60% cpu utilization for mpeg4 playback vs 4% with HW accelerated playback) and the drivers themselves are just as much of a black box as on windows... Just a less capable black box;) On top of the playback issues there are basically no drivers for most of the current generation of pci-e capture devices. You spend a few hours capturing HD video while playing back a different stream under linux and let me know how long your X session goes before it flips out and takes a nap.
This is the distinction I was trying to point out. As a few others in this thread have mentioned, my average Solaris up time is more closely linked to power maintenance windows than to any underlying fundamental OS problems.
No way to auto install security updates w/o also auto installing all other updates.
No built in support for hd-dvd or bluray playback, even with Microsoft's own hd-dvd hardware.
The price.
No support for unencrypted digital cable tuners in media center.
No good visual configuration options for REALLY BIG displays (I'm on a 47" at 1080p and it is always difficult getting the fonts balanced for readability and usability) Now, most of the issues exist in xp and linux as well. I'll reserve my final judgment for vista until it gets a bit past sp1.
P.S. I'm not an MS fanboy nor an MS apologist, I just call them like I see them. I am a professional Solaris/Linux system administrator with over a decade of nearly exclusive use of linux. I think that there just really isn't much serious innovation left to be had on the desktop, but vista makes a pretty decent living room OS...
MS points aren't pegged to the US dollar because they don't cost the same in every market. I think the wikipedia page for live points gives a cost break down. I think it is stupid, but look at the cost of music through the zune store and it seems that at an equivalent of 98.5 cents per track that the savings of the bulk purchase is passed on vs the 99 cents it costs through itunes ;)
How old are you?
I've been reading for about 22 years give or take and even with about (a conservative) estimated 25% to 30% of my books having been lost to lending without expectation of return I have several hundred books. Enough to require 3 large book cases in my house. I don't consider myself a heavy reader, so I can only imagine someone who is could easily have 3-4 times the number of books that I have. Point being, I'm curious if maybe this is a generational gap we are seeing wherein younger people (aside from having less time to amass a collection) actually spend less time reading traditional media... perhaps your browser history and bookmarks are an order of magnitude greater in number than mine.
...is an abysmal failure, just like the Zune, and purposely, with malice aforethought, broke existing PlayForSure compatibility. Similarly to how I like having FM and you see no value in that... I don't care that it doesn't work with playforsure, that is a format/drm encumberence which I never bought into and thusly am not losing anything by not having support. I won't bother to point out that subscription models are also an abysmal failure (oops), so I will just point out that you pay that fee forever and ever and ever, or you lose your ability to play anything. And you can't burn it to back it up. Good job. Great idea! For almost half that cost, you can download 40 tracks a month from eMusic and OWN YOUR TRACKS FOREVER AND EVER! I'm curious if you are self-centered about everything in real life, or if you only do it to make foolish troll arguments on slashdot... at any rate, *I* find a great value in the all you can download music plan for 15 bucks a month, I listen to a wide variety of music which I wouldn't hear otherwise since I'm certainly not going to go buy individual tracks without knowing that I want to own them first. Also the 100 dollars or so that I saved by buying an 80 dullar zune vs a 180 dollar ipod offests several months worth of my subscription cost which, had I similar values to yours, I could easily have applied that difference BUY many drm free tracks from any number of sources...Really I'm confused how others can be so up in arms over something as simple as this. Nobody is forcing anything on you and if you don't find any value in the deal presented you are welcome to spend your dollars however and wherever you like. Personally I think I got a good deal and I think that the GGP's post saying that paying 180 bucks for an ipod is a better deal than paying 80ish for a zune just doesn't hold water. or to put it another way you could buy an ipod with no fm, no wifi, no music and no option to get a subscription music plan or a zune with fm, wifi, a 100 dollars worth of music, and the option to subscribe to an all you can download music plan... I've had ipods before I'm not a fan boy I'm just breaking down the values that I see here and nobody has yet to actually point out a feature or value that I'm failing to account for.
Speculation as to what they would be doing were things different is pretty worthless, as it is only speculation. Their motivations for providing something that has some value to me as a customer isn't a very interesting topic, IMHO, because in the end their motivation neither increases nor decreases the value of their offering. Similarly their restructuring of the DRM terms for "zune pass" AYCE downloads has tilted the cost/benefit strongly towards making this service something which I find valuable and the limits seem not to impede too much on how I wish to use the music (fair use principle may say I should be able to play this music on whatever device I want, but in reality I'm fine with playing it on up to 3 windows computers and up to 3 zune devices.). I'm a little confused as to the critics of the zune hardware and the zune marketplace; both products truly seem, from my perspective, to offer a lot of features not available with the competitors devices and services.
As i've done previously, I'll save the trolls the trouble of calling me a MS fanboy or some other non-sense in response to this post. I am a professional computer systems administrator for a tier 1 ISP and clustered internet software services provider. I work mostly with Solaris, Linux, and freebsd but am a self described Os agnostic. I believe in using the software which provides the best solution for the problem at hand. Currently my only windows machine is a X64 Vista HTPC which works great as a central media repo and access point and also makes MS's own PMP and music library software the natural choice for me.
The sword cuts both ways my friend, Microsoft likewise offers DRM free mp3 tracks though the zune market place...
Seems like a common series of integers to me...
The problem I see with your plan is this... We already know that the rocks move, does this actually answer the "how" question?
The Horta culture is really complex like that ;)
The songs are priced identically (within 2/3rds of a cent in USD) as on itunes, seems like MS passed the savings on if it is indeed on the order of a fraction of cent. But, generally we are in a agreement on this point.
I'm not a microsoft fanboy and as i said earlier I don't really care as to which company takes the bigger slice of the pie in the end, I'm just pointing out that I think the zune in it's current form is a good value and that Microsoft should not be discounted as a serious competitor in this marketspace for the foreseeable future.
2 Million drm free of 50 million total tracks does not one half make... Zune market place also has drm free mp3 tracks, I'm not sure what percentage of their tracks are available like that, but a quick browse seems to indicate a large percentage.
Maybe the device itself support open(ish) formats, but the sync features on the device are specific to itunes and 3rd party software which has reverse engineered itunes sync methods. It'll be a wonderful day when all PMPs appear as vanilla USB attached storage formated in an OS agnostic filesystem.
This is insightful and certainly shows a better understanding of the dynamics of the marketplace than nearly any other comment on this page.
You complain about Firewire back in 2002, but when Apple released the iPod, there was no installed base of USB 2.0, so Firewire was important for making the iPod sync much faster than other systems. Apple has always owned the market because it innovated. Microsoft doesn't have to innovate anything, it can simply copy. Even so, its doing a really bad job of ripping Apple off. It can't compete even in a fairly mature market.
Well, as an early ipod adopter I can tell you that "no installed base of usb 2.0" is a red herring because there was also virtually no installed base of firewire adaptors. Effectively tacking an extra 100 bucks on to the final price.
The $80 Zune is indeed a low priced item. However, remember that there were only about 1.2 million ever made. So its not like those fire sale Zunes from last year are going to outsell the 20-25 million iPods Apple will sell this winter. There are also a few things the Zune can't do that make it a problem. It can't play iTunes purchases without re-ripping them, it can't play games, and it doesn't work with Macs. It also looks clunky, and has more hardware problems than the iPod (loud hard drives, flakey software that crashes, battery problems).
I'm not saying that it is going to outsell ipod, or that it currently is, or that I care which sells more. The lack of ability to play purchases off of itunes is of zero consequence to people who don't use itunes and seems more of a criticism of itunes choice of formats... All my music is in mp3 except for the stuff I download from the zune marketplace; I expect that is the same situation as most other people who are in the market for a new PMP and haven't yet drank deeply of apple's koolaid. As for the complaints about loud hard drive, crashy software, battery problems; I haven't experienced any instability in the software (although they dropped a few features in the latest release which I miss), the hard drive is silent as far as I can tell, and the battery works fine and plays audio for me throughout my day and hasn't yet ever run all the way down. And lets not forget that apple had plenty of similar and more sizable problems, early itunes and music match were wickedly unstable, all us early adopters got pretty well screwed on the battery life and Apple's total lack of firmware updates for older gen devices. The big one for me is that latest ipods just don't sound good and the Zune does.
Microsoft also hasn't "hit gold" with the Xbox 360; it's losing billions on it
I could care less whether the 360 is profitable, it will be a cold day in hell when a company's bottom line influence's my buying decision. The 360 has better games, stronger online features, and a huge install base. Compared to the PS2 vs. the original Xbox the 360 vs ps3 is clearly a win for Microsoft's device and I don't really compare either to the wii since everyone I know who has a 360 or a ps3 has a wii as well, but they don't really compete in the same marketspace.
Apple is also aggressively bringing prices down--for hardware (it forced Microsoft to sell the original Zune at a loss right out of the gate) and for media. Apple is also pushing sales of non-DRM content, which from its powerful position is a strong message about the difference from Apple in control vs Microsoft in control. Do you think Microsoft would be releasing non-DRM tracks if it had any power in the industry?
I'm confused by this argument, firstly Microsoft does sell drm free mp3 track on the zune marketplace. I think that they would do whatever it would take to capture more customers regardless of the amount of power they have in that particular arena.
However, the iPod is already migrating into a mobile device far thinner and far more capable than Microsoft has ever produced.
This is honestly just retarded speculation on how things will turn out. Microsoft has only made 2 generations worth of PMPs AND they have never (AFAIK) made their own mobile hardware dev
As far as I'm concerned the only thing the zune doesn't have over the ipod is non-windows based software. But Apple had that same problem When I bought a 2g 20g ipod, itunes didn't run on windows, Apple had a terrible 3rd party software package, heck the ipod didn't even support usb; instead they opted to go with the almost entirely (at the time) Apple used connectivity provided by firewire. Apple learned to move towards the middle to eat up that segment of the market, Microsoft is now in the unenviable position of playing catchup, but so far they seem much quicker to adapt than apple has been. Lets not forget that nobody took the xbox as a serious competitor to the PS2 a few years ago and then Microsoft really poured on the R&D for their second attempt and hit gold with the XB360. It may be premature to predict a similar outcome in the PMP wars, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised were it to turn out that way. I'm certainly not planting my flag in either camp based on the type of ad-populum arguments which have littered the comments of this headline nor on ridiculous brand loyalty which would run contrary to a pure cost/benefit analysis (I.E. more features for less money sounds like the smart buying decision to me).