Oh, you can't just click a single button without holding it down for a second or two to get those in Mac OS [X]?
*sigh*
Step one: Plug in any fucking two-button USB mouse on the market. Step two: Press the right mouse button.
If you were trying to be accurate instead of disingenuous, you would have specified "you can't...with the OEM Apple mouse" since context menu support is built into Mac OS X, the product you seemed to be referring to. Instead you blamed the hardware shortcoming (in your opinion) on the software. Which is what this thread is about. Software.
Oh, and "click-and-hold" never really caught on and it's only implemented in a few places--Dock icons being the only one I can think of at the moment. Normally Mac users with OEM mice use the Ctrl-click method to bring up the context menu.
What's funny, though, is that since I switched (I'm using my same Logitech from my PC) I rarely find the need to "right-click." Mac OS X just doesn't require you to use that. Ever. For most things, keyboard shortcuts are just better. Most Windows users use right-click to rename files (F2 on Windows or "Return" on Mac), change the desktop background (which there are a million ways to do), and delete files (Del on Windows, Cmd+Delete on Mac). Just as an amusing sidenote, my father (on Windows) uses the right button for everything. Even opening a file or program. Right-click, Open. Right-click, Open. Drives me insane.
What I do miss about the multi-button mouse when I'm using an OEM Apple mouse is just the wheel*. :-D
*...support for which is also built into Mac OS X.
The barrier to entry in software, as in everything else, is financial. This will be true as long as time and effort have a dollar value associated with them.
No, the financial barrier to entry in software is significantly lower than other industries. Why do you think countries like India are able to outcompete western programmers? They aren't rich countries, quite on the contrary, poverty is quite rife.
Obviously you have not taken microeconomics. India has such a comparative advantage over industrialized countries in the area of IT, among other reasons, because their opportunity cost of doing an hour of programming is much lower than someone in the US--in other words, they don't have a lot of very good alternatives. This allows them to command less money since their time is worth less to them. Therein lies their competitive advantage--their time is worth less and they can therefore export their services for cheaper than we can provide them domestically.
Ok, so every online CD store is now part of Amazon.com, but my original point was just going to be that they all offer the same thing too (the 30-second preview is the most common standard).
> To compare to a test drive of a car, maybe they should allow a free sample, say the first 25% of the song.
A free portion of the song...you had better watch out, that's such a good idea, it wouldn't surprise me if all the otherdownloadsites outright stole it from you!
> 1) The Windows Update is installed by default, and (annoyingly) pops up when using a new computer until you tell it what to do. The options are simple:
And I will tell you from firsthand experience that many Windows XP users let that little "Set Up Your Computer for Automatic Updates" popup balloon open every single time they boot the computer, for years. They click the little "close box" ("the X") on the balloon usually. It's an exceptionally easy-to-ignore thing since it uses the same cute little popup-balloon interface as these extremely non-urgent "Please ignore us!" gems:
"Take a tour of Windows XP. Click here to take a tour of the features of Windows XP, just in case you've been living in a cave for three years."
"You have unused desktop items on your desktop. Click here to have us help you move them to a different folder."
"We've hidden some of the spyware tray icons you used to have in your system tray since they were covering most of the taskbar. If you ever feel the need to view or use them, click the (<<) here.
"The USB keychain drive you just plugged in has been detected and this New Hardware has been Installed and is now Ready To Use. Basically, we're just letting you know that no error occurred in this process."
See now, how it's easy to just ignore those balloons? These are usually just annoyances. Combine this with the popups Windows users have to close all day because IE still doesn't include a popup blocker, and you can see how strong the tendency is to "click the X" on anything that pops up unexpectedly. My roommate had this still popping up after he had his computer for at least a year. Please note that until you click this balloon and answer its question(s), Automatic Updates does not check for or download any updates, at all.
The first thing MS can do to fix this is to enable the most draconian update policy by default. Anyone too stupid to know how to change it wouldn't raise any objections to the patches anyway, and stand to be hurt far more by the trojans and viruses than from MS patch incompatibilities.
The next thing MS should do is to take a cue from annoying advertisers and, when preferences or the law indicate the user must be asked permission to install a security update, the window should occupy the bottom 60 pixels of the screen, bumping the taskbar and everything else up and forcing itself "Always on top." The window should be solid red with slowly scrolling white text, "EMERGENCY SECURITY UPDATE! Click here to review and install updates for your computer or else it will be destroyed by malicious hackers." There should be no close box (or any standard controls like a titlebar) on this big notification thingy and no option to defer action. The user has to stare at it there until he clicks it. Then on the window that pops up when you click, there is a description of the problem suitable for a five-year-old: "There is a mistake in Windows and it lets mean people break your computer from over the Internet." Under that, a huge, perhaps 320x240, green button says "Fix this problem now." A tiny "Allow my computer to stay insecure" button should be off in the corner of the window and should require three confirmations:
"Are you sure you want to leave your computer open to being owned by 12-year-old crackers?" [Yes] / [No, Install the patch]
"Do you realize that RIGHT NOW someone can destroy your computer and all the data on it?" [Yes, I realize that right now...yadda yadda] / [No, I didn't get it but now I do. Install the patch.]
"Well then, why the hell don't you want to install the patch? [Because I'm an idiot] / [No, wait, install the patch.]
Then they could keep their computers safe. But Windows does not make it easy enough for the mentally deficient people that comprise their most loyal (Notice I did NOT say only) userbase. Of course, anyone with half a brain could tone it down to the way it is
> If they don't want me reading a book, then just don't give it to me.
This is flawed thinking. The "view of ownership the Constitution was based on" was from an era where digital distribution was not even imagined yet.
DRM is not entirely bad. There is nothing wrong with distributing your intellectual property free to all, encrypted, and then selling the key. It makes a lot of things easier. Huge software vendors do this with software. I remember downloading a Dreamweaver trial once and then buying an unlock key to turn it into the full version. This is a perfectly legitimate way of doing business and just because you have the encrypted version of the song doesn't entitle you to the unencrypted version unless the rightsholder wants you to have it.
If you don't like that fact, don't buy on iTunes. Isn't that the point of a free market system? Quit whining and just buy whatever format you're comfortable buying. iTunes tracks aren't designed to convert to another format besides CDs, just as audiocassettes don't convert very well to digital media. It's not a grand conspiracy.
> In the United States, we do have the right to read books.
Yeah, I think you're right about books that someone is publishing with that intention, but it looked like the poster was indicating that someone else has the right to make a book you cannot read without buying his/her "decoder glasses." You do have a right to read books, but you do not have the right to read just any old book. For example, say I have a personal diary and an unfinished autobiography. They are both my property that I explicitly state on the cover are NOT for anyone else's use. So trim that down to any book that you have lawfully acquired or obtained the author's permission to read (such as the implicit arrangement at the library, where you are free to read it without paying money).
Now, the example of private books aside, just because someone wants to communicate an idea at all doesn't give you the right to hear it. Only if they intend that idea to be readable by all do you have a right come into play, the right not to have it be censored by the government. If I intend to write a book for my 5 closest friends to read, and I use this book encoding and give them "decoder glasses," you have no right to read it, and it is wrong for you to break the encryption. I'm not going to bother to think about whether it is/should be legal because by now any correlation between "right" and "legal" has been washed away by a crapload of lobbyist bribe money so it's a pointless exercise.
Anyway, in the same way, if I want to write a book for my paying customers to read, and I use the same book encoding, and give my customers the decoder glasses, you should not break the encryption. Just like you should not trespass and you should not read your friend's diary you find lying around. Even if you do have a key to either of those, or find a way to pick the lock.
And I can't believe this has strayed so far from the ITMS. In this case, publishers have made some "encoded" books that in some ways require "publisher-controlled" technology. This is basically only the restriction that you have to have iTunes in order to buy the songs. Which is free. But if you don't have a Mac or Windows box, they aren't really targeting you (since they refuse to sell you this version of the "book" at all if you aren't already using iTunes), so it's not nearly as sinister as the "book-and-glasses" racket we keep discussing here. So the "decoder glasses" are free and fit on 98% of people's heads. If you don't have an iPod or a CD player, then no, you can't play it on a portable without about 5 minutes of burn-and-rip per CD. In the same way, you can't play a CD on a tape player without one of those little tape adapters you buy for $15. Life is hard. Some formats are different and incompatible with others. It's not a sinister plot against you. It's just that no one cares that deeply about your needs here. The store is there just to sell iPods in the first place. Break the encryption if you can, to avoid having to burn-and-rip, that's fine, it's the same as burn-and-rip so it doesn't really bother my ethical nerve. But some people need to shut up with the sense of entitlement here. (Not referring the parent personally, just all the whiners.) Just because you don't have an iPod doesn't mean Apple's obligated to make it easy for you to play your ITMS tracks on a WMA player. Just as Honda's not obligated to help you fit Honda parts on your Nissan. Honda parts are made for the benefit of their customers, and ITMS tracks are published in the format they are in for the benefit of (A) Apple iPod customers, and, because Apple's not evil, (B) anybody who can play a Compact Disc.
Speaking of Compact Discs, they DO provide a "non-encoded" version of these "books." Perhaps you've heard of it. It's called Compact Disc Digital Audio. Have a look at one next time you see a Virgin Megastore or Tower Records. Or even deepdiscountcd.com. That's the reason why all this is a moot point. You aren't being deprived here. A store-boug
Dumbass troll. The sony converts (transcodes, even--ick!) YOUR music to DRM'd ATRAC, a format ONLY SONY [cares to] support.
iTunes rips your CDs to whatever real format you want (MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF, AL) and NEVER adds DRM. The only place there's DRM is in music you choose to buy from the music store. If you don't want DRM, use AllofMP3 or rip a CD. That's not Apple's fault, ask the labels why they won't sell it without DRM.
The difference is that music you rip with iTunes is also compatible with any other decent player out there. Music you rip with Sony's software is compatible with other people with the Sony software, but oh wait, it has DRM so it's playable on the Sony portable and only your computer there. (And what happens if you have to reformat your hard drive and your GUID changes, will you have to re-rip and re-transcode your collection? So now you need two copies of your music. One real, one Sony Fantasy World. Great.)
Sony's entertainment division just brings down the electronics division. If they were this asinine back in the 90s, Sony would have quit making VCRs when they were still a must-have item, because clearly letting people record video is just asking for piracy. I think Sony should dump the entertainment division, spin it off and never speak to them again. Their hardware would improve immensely if they didn't have to worry about offending the dumbasses in the entertainment division who have no sense about technology.
Unfortunately, it's probably more like the labels are going to start selling the music to Apple for $0.26 more than before. If Apple wanted to, they are free to eat that and keep reselling the songs for 99 cents, but that won't happen because that would make the store more unprofitable than it already is.
Not that it isn't also a scummy business practice, but what did we expect from those assholes?
> Who wants to bet that, if I take my DVDs down to the Target and ask for the same movie in the new format, I'm gonna get laughed into the ground? People's Betamax tapes are probably rotting too, you know?
It's funny you mention this. Walking into my building today, I saw two plastic bags full of VHS tapes sitting out where bins of trash are picked up by the garbage collector. The endless march of technology has passed them by.
Well if it works in the areas that are important to you, then you're fine. Unfortunately in California the GSM coverage is pathetic. Cingular users especially are derided by the rest of us because no one can understand them. About every third syllable gets eliminated.
(A girlfriend I had in Massachusetts was also on Cingular and it was equally hard to understand her on her Cingular phone, but it's an older phone and probably on their TDMA network, and thus I probably can't speak for that area's GSM coverage one way or the other.)
In California AT&T still operates both, and if you demand it, they'll sell you a new TDMA phone. It pays. Their TDMA service is pretty respectable, but the GSM, like the others here, just doesn't cut it.
I do like Bluetooth and the concept of SIM cards, but besides that I don't have a problem with the CDMA phones. Until GSM provides the broadest coverage available in the US, I'm staying on CDMA.
> Your OS might get patched to fix vulnerabilities but your applications won't; the new versions won't run on your version of the OS.
So basically what you're saying is, you don't mind paying each application vendor every time they release new versions, but it pisses you off to have to pay Apple to release new versions of the operating system? Is Apple's software somehow not worth the same as other software vendors?
I don't see how Microsoft is worlds better. There are a lot of programs now that don't run on Windows 9x (iTunes is one of them, lol). People don't bother to test their code on old OS versions because they suck. Really. In comparison to the current OS, using the last version always seems archaic and annoying. And it's the same for developers who learn new APIs and get used to them, and later can't be arsed to go rip out their cool new way of doing things and replace it with a kludge for the previous OS. It's not Apple's fault. The only things they could do would be (A) start giving the OS away for free (see "bad business idea") or (B) give the OS away for free and charge a subscription (which seems to bother most of us too) or (C) cease any development that changes APIs. OS updates would just change colors, fonts, and maybe the included applications. This sounds like a daft idea as well; there's no point in releasing an upgrade if you don't make real improvements and add new APIs as necessary.
The following is directed at everyone, not really the parent: If you resent paying for a new version of an application or an OS, then don't ever update your apps or your OS. Apple will continue to release security updates for the old versions as long as it's sane,
Yes, if you're still running OS 8.6 and expect updates every couple weeks, you're out of your mind. Supporting every previous OS version would require constant expansion to support a few crackpots who are too cheap to ever upgrade. Tour guide: "This building is home to the System 7.5 team, who still release updates to that OS on a regular basis. Nearby is the 8.0 team, who constantly monitors 8.0 for bugs and security issues on that mid-90s OS..." But don't worry, by the time Apple quits releasing critical security updates for your OS version, I doubt anyone will be bothering to try to exploit it either, since only you and 14 other people are running it anyway, it's not a very big target. Go Google for "Atari 1200XL exploits" and let me know what you find.
As for your apps, don't upgrade them either. If you're so cheap that you can't afford $129 every two years (which is how long you can go without losing a serious amount of compatibility with new apps), then it shouldn't be too hard to not buy upgrades to other apps. If you're the type that doesn't mind being a version or two out of date, which you indicate when you refuse to upgrade your OS, you probably won't miss the app upgrades either!
Another hint, if you want your cake and to eat it as well: eBay. You can usually pick it up there for way less than retail.
Perhaps if you count every PocketPC that's been sold that can play MP3's, and Clies and fancy phones, there might even be more of them out there than iPods. But I don't know any music lovers that use those for MP3 players. Most of them have the hard-drive-based ones.
The problem with most non-dedicated MP3 players for me is that they are typically flash-based players and they're not very good at playing music. I mean, you can add a headphone jack and an MP3 decoder to a watch (nevermind, ThinkGeek already has) or a remote-control or a calculator, but it probably won't become the primary means of listening to music for most people that buy them. I can't imagine listening to MP3s on my PDA. The battery would drain too quickly, it's too wide to carry comfortably in pockets or belt clips, and it takes expensive SD versus a hard drive. (In fact, conversely, since i have a minimal actual need for a PDA, I've transitioned to iPod-as-PDA because [A] I actually carry the iPod, and [B] I never need to input things on the PDA anyway, and wasn't efficient on entering data on one anyway.) But as far as phones, it's not that it's impossible to combine that with an MP3 player; I'd certainly consider a phone that played MP3's--if it had a hard drive. That's still the key for me. Perhaps that tiny Toshiba drive will make this happen. But with the phone as well you need to beware the curse of every multipurpose device--they tend to to each task more poorly than the "real" (dedicated) device. The PDA features of my phone (and most others I've tried) are pathetic when compared to PalmOS (and even my iPod to be honest). I wouldn't trust SE, Motorola, or Nokia to know how to make a good MP3 player--and still a good phone at the same time. It's hard.
Now, I do have an HP PSC multifunction printer. This is because scanning and copying are very unimportant to me, but it's neat and pretty cheap to get them added on. Also I never print photos. If any of those facts weren't true I'd have a nicer printer and a separate scanner. In the same way, I see people who very casually listen to music getting it as an add-on--in other words, buy a phone or PDA or Sony's new PlayStation Portable* that they need anyway, that happens to include MP3-playing capability, load a few songs on it and listen to it every couple of weeks. But as for people who are serious about music, the desire for capacity coupled with the multifunction "curse" will probably keep them in the hard-drive-based player market. And it will grow more as costs come down, lowering the barrier to entry.
Fortunately my pockets are big enough to carry an iPod and a phone, because I see a long wait before a device comes along that can consolidate my gear any further.
*And I won't be surprised if Sony sells more of these than Apple does iPods, however I will still bet money that most users of that device will not frequently use it to play music in any way that attempts to compete with the iPod. It's kind of like the DVD player they're putting in the back seat of SUVs these days. When you're riding in it, you might watch a movie and you might find it a nice feature to have, but that doesn't mean GM is competing with Sony and Panasonic for your entertainment dollars. If you watch many DVDs, you'll probably get a DVD player for your house too.
And as you mentioned, at least they allow you to burn to a CD. My free itunes songs I got from Pepsi were burned to CD encoded in FLAC, and now they play just fine on Linux*.
*Any purchases from them however will be few and far between because I don't own a Windows box or a Mac.
The first rational thing I've read all day. That's what I'd do if I didn't have a Mac (nor Windows, *shudder*) When you have to get music from them, just circumvent it the easy way and other times, just don't buy it. In fact, when my Apple ID got screwed up (really dumb thing I did) and I found myself unable to authorize another machine, I quickly burned all my purchased songs to a single CD-RW (in four passes) and re-ripped them to unencrypted 128K AAC, and then created a new account.
Hmm...I didn't realize Sony was much more than a figurehead in the SE organization. I was under this impression since Ericsson made phones before they were called "Sony Ericsson" and Sony didn't really make any serious ones (or any phones at all outside of Japan). It looks to me like Sony bought Ericsson and slapped their name on it so they could say they had a viable phone division. I doubt Sony's people (meaning people who didn't come from Ericsson) are very much involved with the actual phone division. It's probably the people who were at Ericsson, and people that Ericsson managers have hired since the buyout. I bet the Sony guys just come by from time to time to make sure they don't embrace a standard like SD. I wonder if the Sony people tried to push for a Sony alternative to Bluetooth? That must have been a hoot for the engineers. PHSB: "We need to get rid of this, blue tooth. I want something that will only communicate with other Sony products!"
But that's all just speculation.
The P900 does seem like an excellent phone. If SE didn't make just GSM phones, I'd definitely try them out. But function over form for me, when it comes to phones so I'll stick to CDMA. (I live in the US.)
I think you're seriously overestimating the importance of audio format to the average person. So you're saying that sales would be almost four times what they are now? What format is so important? The iPod is the marketshare leader, so that means by definition that the number of people who would buy WMA or MP3 but not AAC could not be more than the number of people who do buy AAC. So what format would the other 140 million songs have been downloaded in? OGG and FLAC? You're out of your mind.
> Apple has sold 70M songs, only caters to Apple users You know, that's just total BS. I'd say porting a huge application to your competitor's platform constitutes "catering," and if you don't think that, you're an idiot. By your logic, if someone translated a whole Russian novel into English for you, you would say they don't cater to you? How far do they have to go? Right, of course, provide 19 more ports of iTunes, one for each Linux distro, right? Not going to happen, and it's a matter of marketshare. Linux users hate iPod anyway, and porting iTunes 19 more times isn't going to net them many increased iPod sales, but it would cost a crapload of money. Don't bitch about Apple's market share not being any bigger than Linux either. A. The program was already written for Mac OS. B. They ARE Apple, their whole reason for existing is to sell their platform so of course they're going to have iTunes on it. C. Supporting Mac OS is easy. They're all running a finite number of versions, which they wrote. Linux is so many different distros, so many different hardware configurations, so many different everything. It'd take years just to get out a beta. Therefore, outside of Mac OS X (see "B"), you're only going to get a port if you have a significant portion of the market. And at this point in time, Windows is the only OS that meets this criteria. If you don't like it then work on Linux's marketshare! Do you think Apple's supporting it on Windows for love of Microsoft? If Linux had 30% marketshare, iTMS would probably have been on Linux first just to spite MS. But spite is not worth it with things as they stand, because it's just too small a group.
> only works on the iPod
Repeat after me, troll. AND CD'S. AND CD'S. AND CD'S.
The average cheap person ( = the mass market) plays music on CD's. iTunes lets you burn basically as many copies of your downloaded music as you want! (If you really feel the need to make 8 or more, just burn one and use Nero or CloneCD!) That is all most people need! Here's the market:
[==============CDs===========xxx][--iPod--][Other] xx = MP3-capable CD players
The reason for this is that normal people don't care about audio format, and most people don't have the time to waste learning the stupid interface on the cheapie MP3 players, and the fact that the flash players only offer their small size as a benefit over a burned audio CD and a CD-player. Burning a CD takes 2 minutes and everyone already has the technology. And the media costs very little.
I've never heard a single person outside of/. complain about music formats OR iTMS' DRM. Now, when there's really restrictive DRM, sure they do complain. But iTMS' DRM basically respects your fair use rights, and it's pretty fair about it. Don't lie, it is. And it's been cracked anyway, because some people still weren't satisfied. Anyway, because it's nice about it, people don't mind it. The only thing that would increase their sales is either a drop in price (which would mean Apple taking a loss on every song sold cos we KNOW the RIAA isn't going any lower; or P2P disappearing, thus making legal downloads the only way to get downloads. Which isn't going to happen either. So they'll just have to wait and win more "hearts and minds" over to the side of legal music.
The PS2 was released October 2000 in North America--three and one-half years ago.
I purposely worded my question to exclude the PS2. I kinda feel like PlayStation is the only line that Sony's really handled well. And the quality of games available is its best attribute.
PS: You have no clue how many times I had to Google to get that date. The obvious, "playstation 2 release date" just gets list after list of when each game was/will be released.
Well, taking my iTunes statistics, I'll try to answer your question objectively:
I have a smart playlist called "Recently played." The criteria are songs that I've listened to in the past six weeks or that I've added in the past fourteen days. We could call this list the minimum allowable amount of storage I'd require to even consider a player.
The size: 602 songs, 1.6 days, 2.36 GB.
So I could probably get by on an iPod mini, but 2.36 GB of flash would be out of a sane person's budget.
If I had someone who knew me really well and would spend their time choosing and loading music onto it every day for me, that I would enjoy, then sure, I might do fine with 256MB of Flash since that would probably last me the 4 hours or so that I listen per day. But I don't have any such music servant. And after four years or so of doing it, I just got tired of having to make playlists and burn them to Audio CD, and then I got tired *very* quickly of copying bunches of MP3s to burn an MP3 CD (because in this case you want over 200 songs to fill a CD and you also need to organize them by folder or it's a huge mess). And I got tired of buying or recharging AA batteries. In the end, I decided that spending a few dollars more one time would be worth it to have everything at my fingertips, permanently.
Sometimes I'm on the train and something reminds me of a song I haven't listened to in four years. Now I can navigate to that song in seconds and relive a memory right then and there. Isn't that worth something?
In terms of organization, I have 1859 songs(7.25GB). I've always been pretty particular about my ID3 tags. So all my music has the correct artist, most has the correct album, and I've never really care to sort by Genre. iTunes lets me create smart playlists that are great for organizing my music. The "recent" playlist I made also has an opposite, "Haven't heard in a while," that I go to when I want to hear something fresh and less commonly played.
I just know that I could never choose 128MB of music and be satisfied. I'm not saying at all that you should move up if you're happy. It's just that taking 1% of my (2.36GB) set of favorite music would be really hard for me to do each time. And I'd still find myself sitting there wishing I could hear some song that wasn't on the player.
Now if it cost, let's say, over $600 for an iPod* I would understand your reservations. Then it'd be a rich-people-toy and a luxury, and it would be wasteful and foolish to buy one because the benefits don't merit that kind of premium. But it's really not that bad a deal considering that my Sony (coincidence that this came up in the Sony discussion) MP3 CD player cost me $150 (in '02). My iPod** cost me $269 (2003, on ed. discount), will last longer because it's not made by Sony (I went through three Sony "CD Walkman" in high school), and I use it ten times more than I used the Sony. So to me it was a no-brainer that I wanted an iPod. Sure, it's a good portion of my paycheck, one time, but then it's paid for and you enjoy it for a long time. Or use a credit card like I did and it's no big deal. Or a piece of a tax return. For those of us to whom it's important, we work it into the budget. If it's not important to you then by all means, save your money.
I hope I've done an adequate job of answering the question of "What are those iPod users thinking?" I know it's difficult to understand if you don't have the same requirements and needs.
--- * And in my opinion, the 20GB is enough for any normal person so don't look at the 40 and think "$500 is almost as much." Think about the 299-399 range of 15 and 20GB (or 269-369 if you're a student).
** And also, if you don't care about style, elegance, or ease of use at all, you can get a hard-drive-based player from someone else and save a few more bucks, bringing the barrier to entry even lower. I don't recommend it, but some people feel better knowing that they got the cheapest player.
> Cheap media. Sure they don't hold much, but at $2 per 170MB disk, I can carry arround good amount of music. Not as much as an iPod
When I wrote this reply, I interpreted your comment differently. I thought you were saying the media is "not as much [cost] as an iPod" when you apparently meant "not as much music as an iPod." But this is still something to consider.
$2 per 170MB disk First, observe how ridiculous Sony's pricing here is in itself, when a 700MB standards-based disk called CD-ROM is $0.10.
Second, consider how many of these it would take to carry a substantial portion of music on you:
Let's take my 15GB iPod to compare. That's 88.2 MiniDiscs. Aren't they encased in little sleeves like floppy disks? So that would only take up your entire backpack. And the cost... 89 * $2.00 = $178. So add $166 to the cost of the player (which you quoted as $130). So at least $308. So for $9 less you could have all your music on the player at the same time, and you wouldn't need a backpack-load of discs to carry it. And it would take about 20 minutes to transfer it the first time instead of having to record 89 MiniDiscs which I'm pretty sure would require a few days and a LOT of patience.
MiniDisc players are good for recording high quality audio, if you ever do that. And if you find the CD player a convenient way of listening to your music collection, but want something smaller, you probably wouldn't be disappointed by MD. But the whole point of good MP3 players (at least for me) is that you can put ALL of your music (or at least all the music that's important to you) on this player and never have to sit down for twenty minutes and think about "which 1% of my music should I take with me today?" With hard-drive based players, you can decide what you want to hear whenever you want, and have it playing five seconds later. Sony can't offer that with Memory Stick or with MD. They need to discover the hard drive. i don't see a real disadvantage to it.
I mean, what's the big incentive to switch from CD to MD? "Well, it's a little smaller. And you can use our proprietary software to restrict your rights to listen to your own music!"
Whereas the incentive to switch from CD to hard-drive players is much more tangible--carry all your music in a package much smaller than your CD [or MD] player, and it also doubles as an external hard drive. To update your collection, you plug it in and it downloads any new songs. This is much more compelling, and it's why Sony will lose this battle by a wide margin.
> Unfortunately there are a few markets where Sony make the best products
I realize that "best" is somewhat subjective, but I honestly haven't seen a Sony product in a long time that technologically was the best. I truly believe, based on observation and not prejudice, that Sony is not a technological leader in any market. Their products are almost universally overpriced, though.
I'm no Microsoft fan, but the Clie is not the best PDA. The best is probably one of the many PocketPC devices.
Are there any other markets where you can demonstrate Sony's offering is truly superior?
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Oh, you can't just click a single button without holding it down for a second or two to get those in Mac OS [X]?
:-D
*sigh*
Step one: Plug in any fucking two-button USB mouse on the market.
Step two: Press the right mouse button.
If you were trying to be accurate instead of disingenuous, you would have specified "you can't...with the OEM Apple mouse" since context menu support is built into Mac OS X, the product you seemed to be referring to. Instead you blamed the hardware shortcoming (in your opinion) on the software. Which is what this thread is about. Software.
Oh, and "click-and-hold" never really caught on and it's only implemented in a few places--Dock icons being the only one I can think of at the moment. Normally Mac users with OEM mice use the Ctrl-click method to bring up the context menu.
What's funny, though, is that since I switched (I'm using my same Logitech from my PC) I rarely find the need to "right-click." Mac OS X just doesn't require you to use that. Ever. For most things, keyboard shortcuts are just better. Most Windows users use right-click to rename files (F2 on Windows or "Return" on Mac), change the desktop background (which there are a million ways to do), and delete files (Del on Windows, Cmd+Delete on Mac). Just as an amusing sidenote, my father (on Windows) uses the right button for everything. Even opening a file or program. Right-click, Open. Right-click, Open. Drives me insane.
What I do miss about the multi-button mouse when I'm using an OEM Apple mouse is just the wheel*.
*...support for which is also built into Mac OS X.
But surely you have visited, say, a product page at Amazon.com, or CDNow...I mean, Amazon.com. Or VirginMega.com...I mean, Amazon.com.
Ok, so every online CD store is now part of Amazon.com, but my original point was just going to be that they all offer the same thing too (the 30-second preview is the most common standard).
But I was mostly kidding around.
> To compare to a test drive of a car, maybe they should allow a free sample, say the first 25% of the song.
A free portion of the song...you had better watch out, that's such a good idea, it wouldn't surprise me if all the other download sites outright stole it from you!
And I will tell you from firsthand experience that many Windows XP users let that little "Set Up Your Computer for Automatic Updates" popup balloon open every single time they boot the computer, for years. They click the little "close box" ("the X") on the balloon usually. It's an exceptionally easy-to-ignore thing since it uses the same cute little popup-balloon interface as these extremely non-urgent "Please ignore us!" gems:
See now, how it's easy to just ignore those balloons? These are usually just annoyances. Combine this with the popups Windows users have to close all day because IE still doesn't include a popup blocker, and you can see how strong the tendency is to "click the X" on anything that pops up unexpectedly. My roommate had this still popping up after he had his computer for at least a year. Please note that until you click this balloon and answer its question(s), Automatic Updates does not check for or download any updates, at all.
The first thing MS can do to fix this is to enable the most draconian update policy by default. Anyone too stupid to know how to change it wouldn't raise any objections to the patches anyway, and stand to be hurt far more by the trojans and viruses than from MS patch incompatibilities.
The next thing MS should do is to take a cue from annoying advertisers and, when preferences or the law indicate the user must be asked permission to install a security update, the window should occupy the bottom 60 pixels of the screen, bumping the taskbar and everything else up and forcing itself "Always on top." The window should be solid red with slowly scrolling white text, "EMERGENCY SECURITY UPDATE! Click here to review and install updates for your computer or else it will be destroyed by malicious hackers." There should be no close box (or any standard controls like a titlebar) on this big notification thingy and no option to defer action. The user has to stare at it there until he clicks it. Then on the window that pops up when you click, there is a description of the problem suitable for a five-year-old: "There is a mistake in Windows and it lets mean people break your computer from over the Internet." Under that, a huge, perhaps 320x240, green button says "Fix this problem now." A tiny "Allow my computer to stay insecure" button should be off in the corner of the window and should require three confirmations:
"Are you sure you want to leave your computer open to being owned by 12-year-old crackers?"
[Yes] / [No, Install the patch]
"Do you realize that RIGHT NOW someone can destroy your computer and all the data on it?"
[Yes, I realize that right now...yadda yadda] / [No, I didn't get it but now I do. Install the patch.]
"Well then, why the hell don't you want to install the patch?
[Because I'm an idiot] / [No, wait, install the patch.]
Then they could keep their computers safe. But Windows does not make it easy enough for the mentally deficient people that comprise their most loyal (Notice I did NOT say only) userbase. Of course, anyone with half a brain could tone it down to the way it is
> view of ownership the Constitution was based on
> If they don't want me reading a book, then just don't give it to me.
This is flawed thinking. The "view of ownership the Constitution was based on" was from an era where digital distribution was not even imagined yet.
DRM is not entirely bad. There is nothing wrong with distributing your intellectual property free to all, encrypted, and then selling the key. It makes a lot of things easier. Huge software vendors do this with software. I remember downloading a Dreamweaver trial once and then buying an unlock key to turn it into the full version. This is a perfectly legitimate way of doing business and just because you have the encrypted version of the song doesn't entitle you to the unencrypted version unless the rightsholder wants you to have it.
If you don't like that fact, don't buy on iTunes. Isn't that the point of a free market system? Quit whining and just buy whatever format you're comfortable buying. iTunes tracks aren't designed to convert to another format besides CDs, just as audiocassettes don't convert very well to digital media. It's not a grand conspiracy.
Extinguisher fires YOU!!
> In the United States, we do have the right to read books.
Yeah, I think you're right about books that someone is publishing with that intention, but it looked like the poster was indicating that someone else has the right to make a book you cannot read without buying his/her "decoder glasses." You do have a right to read books, but you do not have the right to read just any old book. For example, say I have a personal diary and an unfinished autobiography. They are both my property that I explicitly state on the cover are NOT for anyone else's use. So trim that down to any book that you have lawfully acquired or obtained the author's permission to read (such as the implicit arrangement at the library, where you are free to read it without paying money).
Now, the example of private books aside, just because someone wants to communicate an idea at all doesn't give you the right to hear it. Only if they intend that idea to be readable by all do you have a right come into play, the right not to have it be censored by the government. If I intend to write a book for my 5 closest friends to read, and I use this book encoding and give them "decoder glasses," you have no right to read it, and it is wrong for you to break the encryption. I'm not going to bother to think about whether it is/should be legal because by now any correlation between "right" and "legal" has been washed away by a crapload of lobbyist bribe money so it's a pointless exercise.
Anyway, in the same way, if I want to write a book for my paying customers to read, and I use the same book encoding, and give my customers the decoder glasses, you should not break the encryption. Just like you should not trespass and you should not read your friend's diary you find lying around. Even if you do have a key to either of those, or find a way to pick the lock.
And I can't believe this has strayed so far from the ITMS. In this case, publishers have made some "encoded" books that in some ways require "publisher-controlled" technology. This is basically only the restriction that you have to have iTunes in order to buy the songs. Which is free. But if you don't have a Mac or Windows box, they aren't really targeting you (since they refuse to sell you this version of the "book" at all if you aren't already using iTunes), so it's not nearly as sinister as the "book-and-glasses" racket we keep discussing here. So the "decoder glasses" are free and fit on 98% of people's heads. If you don't have an iPod or a CD player, then no, you can't play it on a portable without about 5 minutes of burn-and-rip per CD. In the same way, you can't play a CD on a tape player without one of those little tape adapters you buy for $15. Life is hard. Some formats are different and incompatible with others. It's not a sinister plot against you. It's just that no one cares that deeply about your needs here. The store is there just to sell iPods in the first place. Break the encryption if you can, to avoid having to burn-and-rip, that's fine, it's the same as burn-and-rip so it doesn't really bother my ethical nerve. But some people need to shut up with the sense of entitlement here. (Not referring the parent personally, just all the whiners.) Just because you don't have an iPod doesn't mean Apple's obligated to make it easy for you to play your ITMS tracks on a WMA player. Just as Honda's not obligated to help you fit Honda parts on your Nissan. Honda parts are made for the benefit of their customers, and ITMS tracks are published in the format they are in for the benefit of (A) Apple iPod customers, and, because Apple's not evil, (B) anybody who can play a Compact Disc.
Speaking of Compact Discs, they DO provide a "non-encoded" version of these "books." Perhaps you've heard of it. It's called Compact Disc Digital Audio. Have a look at one next time you see a Virgin Megastore or Tower Records. Or even deepdiscountcd.com. That's the reason why all this is a moot point. You aren't being deprived here. A store-boug
Dumbass troll. The sony converts (transcodes, even--ick!) YOUR music to DRM'd ATRAC, a format ONLY SONY [cares to] support.
iTunes rips your CDs to whatever real format you want (MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF, AL) and NEVER adds DRM. The only place there's DRM is in music you choose to buy from the music store. If you don't want DRM, use AllofMP3 or rip a CD. That's not Apple's fault, ask the labels why they won't sell it without DRM.
The difference is that music you rip with iTunes is also compatible with any other decent player out there. Music you rip with Sony's software is compatible with other people with the Sony software, but oh wait, it has DRM so it's playable on the Sony portable and only your computer there. (And what happens if you have to reformat your hard drive and your GUID changes, will you have to re-rip and re-transcode your collection? So now you need two copies of your music. One real, one Sony Fantasy World. Great.)
Sony's entertainment division just brings down the electronics division. If they were this asinine back in the 90s, Sony would have quit making VCRs when they were still a must-have item, because clearly letting people record video is just asking for piracy. I think Sony should dump the entertainment division, spin it off and never speak to them again. Their hardware would improve immensely if they didn't have to worry about offending the dumbasses in the entertainment division who have no sense about technology.
Unfortunately, it's probably more like the labels are going to start selling the music to Apple for $0.26 more than before. If Apple wanted to, they are free to eat that and keep reselling the songs for 99 cents, but that won't happen because that would make the store more unprofitable than it already is.
Not that it isn't also a scummy business practice, but what did we expect from those assholes?
That was awesome. Welcome to my "Friends" list.
> "Pizza hut at 15th and Lincoln will sell you a Large pepperoni pizza if you stop in the next 10 minutes"
Wow. Pizza Hut will sell you a pizza! For a limited time only. That's got to be the best ad campaign ever!!
Heh. I didn't think of that, either. What an efficient Catch-22 we have in the tax code.
> Article: They'll then press and enable the GPS...
COKE: WE GET SIGNAL!
- GPS PHONE TURN ON!
> Who wants to bet that, if I take my DVDs down to the Target and ask for the same movie in the new format, I'm gonna get laughed into the ground? People's Betamax tapes are probably rotting too, you know?
It's funny you mention this. Walking into my building today, I saw two plastic bags full of VHS tapes sitting out where bins of trash are picked up by the garbage collector. The endless march of technology has passed them by.
Well if it works in the areas that are important to you, then you're fine. Unfortunately in California the GSM coverage is pathetic. Cingular users especially are derided by the rest of us because no one can understand them. About every third syllable gets eliminated.
(A girlfriend I had in Massachusetts was also on Cingular and it was equally hard to understand her on her Cingular phone, but it's an older phone and probably on their TDMA network, and thus I probably can't speak for that area's GSM coverage one way or the other.)
In California AT&T still operates both, and if you demand it, they'll sell you a new TDMA phone. It pays. Their TDMA service is pretty respectable, but the GSM, like the others here, just doesn't cut it.
Meanwhile, Verizon CDMA is crystal-clear pretty much everywhere I've been (most of CA and much of New England). Judging from their coverage map, they're pretty much the only service out there that can truly claim national coverage. GSM is cool in all the major markets, but if you ever need to use your phone outside them, VZW is the best deal.
I do like Bluetooth and the concept of SIM cards, but besides that I don't have a problem with the CDMA phones. Until GSM provides the broadest coverage available in the US, I'm staying on CDMA.
> Your OS might get patched to fix vulnerabilities but your applications won't; the new versions won't run on your version of the OS.
So basically what you're saying is, you don't mind paying each application vendor every time they release new versions, but it pisses you off to have to pay Apple to release new versions of the operating system? Is Apple's software somehow not worth the same as other software vendors?
I don't see how Microsoft is worlds better. There are a lot of programs now that don't run on Windows 9x (iTunes is one of them, lol). People don't bother to test their code on old OS versions because they suck. Really. In comparison to the current OS, using the last version always seems archaic and annoying. And it's the same for developers who learn new APIs and get used to them, and later can't be arsed to go rip out their cool new way of doing things and replace it with a kludge for the previous OS. It's not Apple's fault. The only things they could do would be (A) start giving the OS away for free (see "bad business idea") or (B) give the OS away for free and charge a subscription (which seems to bother most of us too) or (C) cease any development that changes APIs. OS updates would just change colors, fonts, and maybe the included applications. This sounds like a daft idea as well; there's no point in releasing an upgrade if you don't make real improvements and add new APIs as necessary.
The following is directed at everyone, not really the parent:
If you resent paying for a new version of an application or an OS, then don't ever update your apps or your OS. Apple will continue to release security updates for the old versions as long as it's sane,
Yes, if you're still running OS 8.6 and expect updates every couple weeks, you're out of your mind. Supporting every previous OS version would require constant expansion to support a few crackpots who are too cheap to ever upgrade. Tour guide: "This building is home to the System 7.5 team, who still release updates to that OS on a regular basis. Nearby is the 8.0 team, who constantly monitors 8.0 for bugs and security issues on that mid-90s OS..." But don't worry, by the time Apple quits releasing critical security updates for your OS version, I doubt anyone will be bothering to try to exploit it either, since only you and 14 other people are running it anyway, it's not a very big target. Go Google for "Atari 1200XL exploits" and let me know what you find.
As for your apps, don't upgrade them either. If you're so cheap that you can't afford $129 every two years (which is how long you can go without losing a serious amount of compatibility with new apps), then it shouldn't be too hard to not buy upgrades to other apps. If you're the type that doesn't mind being a version or two out of date, which you indicate when you refuse to upgrade your OS, you probably won't miss the app upgrades either!
Another hint, if you want your cake and to eat it as well: eBay. You can usually pick it up there for way less than retail.
Perhaps if you count every PocketPC that's been sold that can play MP3's, and Clies and fancy phones, there might even be more of them out there than iPods. But I don't know any music lovers that use those for MP3 players. Most of them have the hard-drive-based ones.
The problem with most non-dedicated MP3 players for me is that they are typically flash-based players and they're not very good at playing music. I mean, you can add a headphone jack and an MP3 decoder to a watch (nevermind, ThinkGeek already has) or a remote-control or a calculator, but it probably won't become the primary means of listening to music for most people that buy them. I can't imagine listening to MP3s on my PDA. The battery would drain too quickly, it's too wide to carry comfortably in pockets or belt clips, and it takes expensive SD versus a hard drive. (In fact, conversely, since i have a minimal actual need for a PDA, I've transitioned to iPod-as-PDA because [A] I actually carry the iPod, and [B] I never need to input things on the PDA anyway, and wasn't efficient on entering data on one anyway.) But as far as phones, it's not that it's impossible to combine that with an MP3 player; I'd certainly consider a phone that played MP3's--if it had a hard drive. That's still the key for me. Perhaps that tiny Toshiba drive will make this happen. But with the phone as well you need to beware the curse of every multipurpose device--they tend to to each task more poorly than the "real" (dedicated) device. The PDA features of my phone (and most others I've tried) are pathetic when compared to PalmOS (and even my iPod to be honest). I wouldn't trust SE, Motorola, or Nokia to know how to make a good MP3 player--and still a good phone at the same time. It's hard.
Now, I do have an HP PSC multifunction printer. This is because scanning and copying are very unimportant to me, but it's neat and pretty cheap to get them added on. Also I never print photos. If any of those facts weren't true I'd have a nicer printer and a separate scanner. In the same way, I see people who very casually listen to music getting it as an add-on--in other words, buy a phone or PDA or Sony's new PlayStation Portable* that they need anyway, that happens to include MP3-playing capability, load a few songs on it and listen to it every couple of weeks. But as for people who are serious about music, the desire for capacity coupled with the multifunction "curse" will probably keep them in the hard-drive-based player market. And it will grow more as costs come down, lowering the barrier to entry.
Fortunately my pockets are big enough to carry an iPod and a phone, because I see a long wait before a device comes along that can consolidate my gear any further.
*And I won't be surprised if Sony sells more of these than Apple does iPods, however I will still bet money that most users of that device will not frequently use it to play music in any way that attempts to compete with the iPod. It's kind of like the DVD player they're putting in the back seat of SUVs these days. When you're riding in it, you might watch a movie and you might find it a nice feature to have, but that doesn't mean GM is competing with Sony and Panasonic for your entertainment dollars. If you watch many DVDs, you'll probably get a DVD player for your house too.
And as you mentioned, at least they allow you to burn to a CD. My free itunes songs I got from Pepsi were burned to CD encoded in FLAC, and now they play just fine on Linux*.
*Any purchases from them however will be few and far between because I don't own a Windows box or a Mac.
The first rational thing I've read all day. That's what I'd do if I didn't have a Mac (nor Windows, *shudder*) When you have to get music from them, just circumvent it the easy way and other times, just don't buy it. In fact, when my Apple ID got screwed up (really dumb thing I did) and I found myself unable to authorize another machine, I quickly burned all my purchased songs to a single CD-RW (in four passes) and re-ripped them to unencrypted 128K AAC, and then created a new account.
Hmm...I didn't realize Sony was much more than a figurehead in the SE organization. I was under this impression since Ericsson made phones before they were called "Sony Ericsson" and Sony didn't really make any serious ones (or any phones at all outside of Japan). It looks to me like Sony bought Ericsson and slapped their name on it so they could say they had a viable phone division. I doubt Sony's people (meaning people who didn't come from Ericsson) are very much involved with the actual phone division. It's probably the people who were at Ericsson, and people that Ericsson managers have hired since the buyout. I bet the Sony guys just come by from time to time to make sure they don't embrace a standard like SD. I wonder if the Sony people tried to push for a Sony alternative to Bluetooth? That must have been a hoot for the engineers. PHSB: "We need to get rid of this, blue tooth. I want something that will only communicate with other Sony products!"
But that's all just speculation.
The P900 does seem like an excellent phone. If SE didn't make just GSM phones, I'd definitely try them out. But function over form for me, when it comes to phones so I'll stick to CDMA. (I live in the US.)
> Apple has sold 70M songs, only caters to Apple users
You know, that's just total BS. I'd say porting a huge application to your competitor's platform constitutes "catering," and if you don't think that, you're an idiot. By your logic, if someone translated a whole Russian novel into English for you, you would say they don't cater to you? How far do they have to go? Right, of course, provide 19 more ports of iTunes, one for each Linux distro, right? Not going to happen, and it's a matter of marketshare. Linux users hate iPod anyway, and porting iTunes 19 more times isn't going to net them many increased iPod sales, but it would cost a crapload of money. Don't bitch about Apple's market share not being any bigger than Linux either.
A. The program was already written for Mac OS.
B. They ARE Apple, their whole reason for existing is to sell their platform so of course they're going to have iTunes on it.
C. Supporting Mac OS is easy. They're all running a finite number of versions, which they wrote. Linux is so many different distros, so many different hardware configurations, so many different everything. It'd take years just to get out a beta.
Therefore, outside of Mac OS X (see "B"), you're only going to get a port if you have a significant portion of the market. And at this point in time, Windows is the only OS that meets this criteria. If you don't like it then work on Linux's marketshare! Do you think Apple's supporting it on Windows for love of Microsoft? If Linux had 30% marketshare, iTMS would probably have been on Linux first just to spite MS. But spite is not worth it with things as they stand, because it's just too small a group.
> only works on the iPod
Repeat after me, troll. AND CD'S. AND CD'S. AND CD'S.
The average cheap person ( = the mass market) plays music on CD's. iTunes lets you burn basically as many copies of your downloaded music as you want! (If you really feel the need to make 8 or more, just burn one and use Nero or CloneCD!) That is all most people need! Here's the market:The reason for this is that normal people don't care about audio format, and most people don't have the time to waste learning the stupid interface on the cheapie MP3 players, and the fact that the flash players only offer their small size as a benefit over a burned audio CD and a CD-player. Burning a CD takes 2 minutes and everyone already has the technology. And the media costs very little.
I've never heard a single person outside of
The PS2 was released October 2000 in North America--three and one-half years ago.
I purposely worded my question to exclude the PS2. I kinda feel like PlayStation is the only line that Sony's really handled well. And the quality of games available is its best attribute.
PS: You have no clue how many times I had to Google to get that date. The obvious, "playstation 2 release date" just gets list after list of when each game was/will be released.
Well, taking my iTunes statistics, I'll try to answer your question objectively:
I have a smart playlist called "Recently played." The criteria are songs that I've listened to in the past six weeks or that I've added in the past fourteen days. We could call this list the minimum allowable amount of storage I'd require to even consider a player.
The size: 602 songs, 1.6 days, 2.36 GB.
So I could probably get by on an iPod mini, but 2.36 GB of flash would be out of a sane person's budget.
If I had someone who knew me really well and would spend their time choosing and loading music onto it every day for me, that I would enjoy, then sure, I might do fine with 256MB of Flash since that would probably last me the 4 hours or so that I listen per day. But I don't have any such music servant. And after four years or so of doing it, I just got tired of having to make playlists and burn them to Audio CD, and then I got tired *very* quickly of copying bunches of MP3s to burn an MP3 CD (because in this case you want over 200 songs to fill a CD and you also need to organize them by folder or it's a huge mess). And I got tired of buying or recharging AA batteries. In the end, I decided that spending a few dollars more one time would be worth it to have everything at my fingertips, permanently.
Sometimes I'm on the train and something reminds me of a song I haven't listened to in four years. Now I can navigate to that song in seconds and relive a memory right then and there. Isn't that worth something?
In terms of organization, I have 1859 songs(7.25GB). I've always been pretty particular about my ID3 tags. So all my music has the correct artist, most has the correct album, and I've never really care to sort by Genre. iTunes lets me create smart playlists that are great for organizing my music. The "recent" playlist I made also has an opposite, "Haven't heard in a while," that I go to when I want to hear something fresh and less commonly played.
I just know that I could never choose 128MB of music and be satisfied. I'm not saying at all that you should move up if you're happy. It's just that taking 1% of my (2.36GB) set of favorite music would be really hard for me to do each time. And I'd still find myself sitting there wishing I could hear some song that wasn't on the player.
Now if it cost, let's say, over $600 for an iPod* I would understand your reservations. Then it'd be a rich-people-toy and a luxury, and it would be wasteful and foolish to buy one because the benefits don't merit that kind of premium. But it's really not that bad a deal considering that my Sony (coincidence that this came up in the Sony discussion) MP3 CD player cost me $150 (in '02). My iPod** cost me $269 (2003, on ed. discount), will last longer because it's not made by Sony (I went through three Sony "CD Walkman" in high school), and I use it ten times more than I used the Sony. So to me it was a no-brainer that I wanted an iPod. Sure, it's a good portion of my paycheck, one time, but then it's paid for and you enjoy it for a long time. Or use a credit card like I did and it's no big deal. Or a piece of a tax return. For those of us to whom it's important, we work it into the budget. If it's not important to you then by all means, save your money.
I hope I've done an adequate job of answering the question of "What are those iPod users thinking?" I know it's difficult to understand if you don't have the same requirements and needs.
---
* And in my opinion, the 20GB is enough for any normal person so don't look at the 40 and think "$500 is almost as much." Think about the 299-399 range of 15 and 20GB (or 269-369 if you're a student).
** And also, if you don't care about style, elegance, or ease of use at all, you can get a hard-drive-based player from someone else and save a few more bucks, bringing the barrier to entry even lower. I don't recommend it, but some people feel better knowing that they got the cheapest player.
> Cheap media. Sure they don't hold much, but at $2 per 170MB disk, I can carry arround good amount of music. Not as much as an iPod
When I wrote this reply, I interpreted your comment differently. I thought you were saying the media is "not as much [cost] as an iPod" when you apparently meant "not as much music as an iPod." But this is still something to consider.
$2 per 170MB disk
First, observe how ridiculous Sony's pricing here is in itself, when a 700MB standards-based disk called CD-ROM is $0.10.
Second, consider how many of these it would take to carry a substantial portion of music on you:
Let's take my 15GB iPod to compare. That's 88.2 MiniDiscs. Aren't they encased in little sleeves like floppy disks? So that would only take up your entire backpack. And the cost...
89 * $2.00 = $178.
So add $166 to the cost of the player (which you quoted as $130). So at least $308. So for $9 less you could have all your music on the player at the same time, and you wouldn't need a backpack-load of discs to carry it. And it would take about 20 minutes to transfer it the first time instead of having to record 89 MiniDiscs which I'm pretty sure would require a few days and a LOT of patience.
MiniDisc players are good for recording high quality audio, if you ever do that. And if you find the CD player a convenient way of listening to your music collection, but want something smaller, you probably wouldn't be disappointed by MD. But the whole point of good MP3 players (at least for me) is that you can put ALL of your music (or at least all the music that's important to you) on this player and never have to sit down for twenty minutes and think about "which 1% of my music should I take with me today?" With hard-drive based players, you can decide what you want to hear whenever you want, and have it playing five seconds later. Sony can't offer that with Memory Stick or with MD. They need to discover the hard drive. i don't see a real disadvantage to it.
I mean, what's the big incentive to switch from CD to MD? "Well, it's a little smaller. And you can use our proprietary software to restrict your rights to listen to your own music!"
Whereas the incentive to switch from CD to hard-drive players is much more tangible--carry all your music in a package much smaller than your CD [or MD] player, and it also doubles as an external hard drive. To update your collection, you plug it in and it downloads any new songs. This is much more compelling, and it's why Sony will lose this battle by a wide margin.
> Unfortunately there are a few markets where Sony make the best products
I realize that "best" is somewhat subjective, but I honestly haven't seen a Sony product in a long time that technologically was the best. I truly believe, based on observation and not prejudice, that Sony is not a technological leader in any market. Their products are almost universally overpriced, though.
I'm no Microsoft fan, but the Clie is not the best PDA. The best is probably one of the many PocketPC devices.
Are there any other markets where you can demonstrate Sony's offering is truly superior?