Except that not everyone in the US owns a cell phone, not everyone replaces it in 2 year intervals, and the initial iPhone sales are most certainly not part of any 2 year upgrade plan. Initial iPhone sales produced a short term spike in cellphone sales at their introduction and nothing more. Whatever Apple's percentage of the total market was over that week is irrelevent. I'd venture to say that Apple owned near 100% of the cellphone market between 6-7pm on 6/29. So what?
"I don't think he was suggesting that iPhone has outsold all other phones in total volume just in its first few days."
No, he was suggesting that no other phone has been as successful as the iPhone---a claim equally ridiculous.
"So iPhone is very popular."
Initial sales indicate there are a number of early adopters. Popularity can't be determined on an entirely new product after only a week in the market. Sales will need to be sustained first.
"It's Compaq's one and only claim to fame, and the reason their name is a play on "compatible." "
Others have refuted that obvious misstatement already. IBM most certainly did open their design however. IBM published detailed documentation of the PC including full source to the BIOS.
"The IBM PC came out in 1982 and competed with the Apple II throughout the 80's. That was Apple's business machine."
Haha. The Apple II wasn't a business machine of any sort.
"The Apple II had more slots than IBM PC and years of hardware hacking documentation behind it, as well as color display, and Woz' encouragement."
Since when does slot count make a business machine? Since when is a business machine determined by the amount of "hacking documentation" and how does the availability of full technical documentation from the source not trump that? IBM PCs had color displays from the beginning. "Woz' encouragement" counts for what? What did he know about business needs? The Apple II was a travesty of hardware engineering.
"If the battle was openness then Apple II would win."
It wasn't a battle of openness though. Apple was a small fry with an old, outdated 40-column 1 MHz 6502 play toy targeted at hobbiests. The Apple II was not intended as a serious business machine.
"As for the Mac, it sold really well to an entirely different market because it was the only computer with graphics, typography, laser printer."
The mac had a laser printer? I thought it was a computer? If you are referring to the LaserWriter, it spoke standard PostScript which could be used on platforms other than the mac. Furthermore, HP introduced a far cheaper laser printer at the exact same time as Apple and it used an identical laser engine. The advent of affordable laser printers was far more a PC development than a mac one.
"The IBM PC and the Mac simply did not compete with each other."
You got that right. Macs had already been relegated to fringe uses by then.
The best location for apps is the bottom row. I don't think its a leftie/rightie thing at all. SMS for me will get far, far more use than the Mail app will. I'm a leftie and it really annoys me.
Regardless of how the iPhone or AT&T handle SMS, the person receiving your message may not comprehend what you send when the message is broken up and pieced together automatically. Not everyone you are talking to is using AT&T or the iPhone and it is important to me to avoid sending SMS messages that are too long. It sucks that Apple doesn't provide such basic assistance. It could have been an optional setting for those of us who care about what others are using.
Funny, I thought he was absolutely dead-on accurate.
If there wasn't an advantage to the bottom row apps, then why did Apple make them special? Those apps are supposed to be the main ones and I, like the author of that comment, believe that SMS is more important than Mail. I don't really even care about email at all personally.
It is good that phones increasingly compete with computers but the iPhone is not one of those. It may have the most sophisticated OS of any phone but, unlike computers and other smartphones, the iPhone is strictly fixed-function.
"It's not that people like me want to see it go down in flames."
Only fools wish for such things.
"What annoys some of us is that it's being presented as revolutionary. It's not."
That and they're inclined to not learn from the mistakes of others. Apple's arrogance is generally what annoys people, that and the fanboys who buy into it.
"From what I hear it has the same UI problems as the first smartphones."
No, not really. It has problems but it's pretty much unique. Cut and paste is a problem for some smartphones but not all.
"From reading about people using it, some of the UI is an improvement but it needs work in many places."
That's more like it.
"Having the internet in your pocket is awesome, as is the lack of needing to carry around a separate media player. The integration of SMS and email is also very handy."
Lots of smartphones give you the internet in your pocket and an integrated media player. Media functions of the iPhone are clearly better than what we've seen before but I'm not convinced Safari is. There are plenty of things it cannot do such as configuring my home page! You cannot drag and drop in Safari. The iPhone doesn't integrate SMS and email in any way.
Frankly, I see integration of a GPS receiver to be a compelling feature that they excluded. Google maps with GPS on the iPhone would be great.
The activation process is what is used to enforce the 2 year contract. Existing AT&T customers COULD have simply used their existing SIM and gotten service just like with any other unlocked GSM phone. Special activation isn't a technical requirement, it's a business one. No way to re-obligate you without it.
Of course, Apple couldn't sell iPhones with new service without having a means of estabishing that service. Activating through iTunes is a clever way of doing that without training their sales staff and making the purchase experience agonizingly slow like it is with every other cellphone purchase.
It's very annoying that Apple locks the phone to AT&T without any apparent subsidy coming in to them. Yes, I've tried my Tmobile SIM in one and it doesn't work. After activation everything else appears to.
"The real problem is that nobody at AT&T or Apple seem to really know whats going on during the process, and because both companies are involved, it's easy for their reps to blame each other."
Oh yes they do, just not the ones you are talking to.
Interesting story, one of my friends went to activate his iPhone using an existing iTunes account. That account had a 5 letter password and the minimum is 6 letters. As a result, he could log into iTS but but not activate. He tried to change the password but was unable to. Instead, he created an entirely new account for activation and it worked fine.
My experience with AT&T is that they know absolutely nothing about the activation process and what it requires.
"It's too high to give the battery time in the form factor Apple wanted. Had they gone with 3G, they would have reduced the performance for the majority of users in terms of battery time, so that a few users can have 3G speeds between home and office."
That's nothing but speculation. In fact, what Apple, or anyone else, says publicly isn't frequently the truth. All we know is that 3G is more power hungry. Apple may have omitted it for any number of reasons.
"The problem with this is that usually that is a decision made in hindsight:"
Not if 3G isn't available to you at all. You leave it off permanently. Furthermore, 3G could automatically be disabled when WiFi is connected. It's basically BS to claim that Apple couldn't have offered 3G in a desirable package. If the iPhone were 2-3mm thicker I doubt anyone would complain.
"What? My battery is at 2%?! Why oh why did I leave 3G turned on! Now I have a dead box until I can find a power outlet!"
Forcably disable 3G when the battery drops below 20%. All phones have emergency power conservation features.
"Talk about a "bad user experience.""
Funny how you give Apple absolutely no credit for being able to cope with this. You're being ridiculous. How is an iPhone running out of battery not a "bad user experience" now? They offer power-hungry WiFi, don't they?
"So I can understand Apple's argument on the subject."
It's not Apple argument on the subject. It's Apple fanboy argument.
"So you can't have anything that munches too much power because it's not like you have a work-around (like buy extra batteries)."
You don't know that it's "too much power" nor do you know what alternate form factors might have been acceptable. Frankly, I think Apple left it off because 3G isn't sufficiently pervasive and doing so allows them to release 3G later to encourage upgrading. One thing you can be certain of is that, if iPhone succeeds, there will be a 3G version. When that happens you will forget arguing that it can't be done because of power.
What irritates the crap out of me is that the only reason for me to switch from tmobile is to get 3G, yet now I am switching to use a device and it doesn't take advantage of the one compelling feature that AT&T has.
Exactly right. I was told that new accounts had to run the credit preapproval and existing ones had to record the number and account name they would be activated on. My AT&T store had 5 sales people and 25 people in front me and it took me an hour to get out. That's better than the 20 minute average they told us to expect. The next day I went to the Apple store for accessories and bought two additional iPhones for friends. It took less than a minute.
The AT&T rep told be that iTunes must be logged into iTS and the account used must have the same name as the AT&T account. Of course, neither of these things turned out to be true. They also said that I had to match my iPhone serial number to the activation they'd recorded in the store. That also can't be true since Apple wasn't doing any of that.
On the plus side, my activation went smoothly and it may not have without the preapproval code. Who knows.
The AT&T store I went to had 40 in the line and the Apple store upstairs had 300. Each line was emptied in about 90 minutes yet the Apple store didn't run out of product. Interesting.
Re:products did not end with a whimper
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All Things iPhone
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"The assumption that everyone who says positive things about Apple never admits that Apple makes mistakes is also preposterous. Look, dude, either we're both guilty of gross generalization here, or neither of us are."
Not in the context of a thread declaring the superiority of the Newton to current PDAs we're not. You are generalizing about those who react to fanboys while I am generalizing about fanboys. My generalization is accurate regarding fanatics, yours is not because anti-fanatics are not necessarily fanatical themselves.
"All you have to do is admit that you own a Mac and like it."
That's not true. I own a mac and like it yet I'm accused of being an Apple hater. That's because I call zealots on their crap. I am not a zealot nor a "hater", I am anti-zealot.
"...apparently the act of owning a Macintosh is seen as a rebuke to those who do not."
Not owning a mac is seen as a rebuke to mac zealots as well. Merely posting a non-positive comment regarding Apple here results in a fanboy moderation shitstorm. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
"Maybe you think this says something about the zealotry of Apple owners; I think it says a lot more about the insecurity of people who respond that way to Apple owners."
The constant boasting and evangelizing of Apple owners is a testament to their insecurities. You don't see constant evangelizing about many products yet you see them for EVERY Apple product, even the ones that are long dead and buried. This is unique to Apple because their groupies are incredibly insecure. They are also, as a group, more technically ignorant that PC owners yet they are consistently convinced Apple products are superior in every way and that each and every Apple product is superior. When compared to Apple zealots, virtually any other kind of zealot appears reasonable.
Fanboyism grows out of a need for validation. They need to believe they're "on the right team" yet they can't be sure of it themselves. They need others to tell them that they're superior because they have the best. Fanboys can't stand that people buy products other than from their chosen vendor because they don't receive that validation.
"No, the Newton isn't better than a modern PDA. It's a product of its time, and it was a flawed product in many ways. It was also an advanced product in many ways; someone saying "It was ahead of its time" was essentially met in this thread by "no, it sucked ass." The first statement doesn't require the Newton to have been flawless (or even successful); the second statement refuses to acknowledge any positives. Do you see the difference?"
I would if it were true but it's not. The Newton sucked ass and I say that without implying that it had no redeeming qualities. It was too big, too heavy, too expensive, and too flawed in its capabilities. It lost resoundingly in the marketplace so "sucked ass" is appropriate even if some of its ideas were ahead of their time. As flawed and unsuccessful as the Newton was, it hasn't stopped Microsoft from trying to establish that very form factor again. I think that's even more absurd!
That's pure speculation. We don't know the reason Apple didn't do 3G.
Some 3G phones offer the ability to disable 3G features in order to save battery life. There's no reason Apple couldn't have done that in the same manner that they allow WiFi to be disabled.
Re:products did not end with a whimper
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All Things iPhone
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I haven't forgetten that the Newton was too big, too expensive, and worked too poorly to be interesting. The Newton was a failure because it sucked. Apple failed to realize what the form factor and function was that people wanted. That is NOT technical superiority.
"What made it a "flop" was tacky people who shop at Wal-Mart couldn't afford one."
Feeling superior, are you?
"Let's not confuse "good product" with "product that sells well", please."
Why not? Apple people do that ALL the time.
Re:products did not end with a whimper
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All Things iPhone
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· Score: 1
"Mocking a PDA that shipped 14 years ago for having a lot of obsolete technology in it strikes me as, to be kind, dubious."
It's not mocking an obsolete device, it's putting proper perspective to a claim that such a device isn't really useful today as fanboys like to say it is. The Newton is no more and no less obsolete than all other devices of its time.
"You don't hear much about the Newton's same-era competition these days."
No, the only claims we here are about the Newton. Funny that the Newton got its ass kicked when it was current, yet now some believe that its better than devices made today.
"Incidentally, you can use some PCMCIA wi-fi and ethernet cards in a Newton. Done that lately with a 1996 Palm Pilot?"
No, but that PCMCIA WiFi card (not PCCard mind you) wouldn't make the Newton any more desirable than the 1996 Palm Pilot. They would both still suck but I could hide the Palm in my pocket to avoid ridicule.
"Well, anti-Apple people will say anything rather than admit that Apple deserves praise on occasion, so maybe it all evens out in the end."
No it doesn't. If there weren't Apple zealots evangelizing through lies there's wouldn't be anyone responding to them. The assumption that everyone that responds to pro-Apple propaganda is anti-Apple is preposterous.
"You're the one who sounds like you don't know anything."
Now you're getting foolish.
"RAM is easily thousands of times faster than a hard drive."
True, but only when the data is in RAM. To get it there, you still need the hard drive.
"An MP3 player pulling songs from a HD can, at best, read at about 15mb/s (or 3 songs per second, assuming no fragmentation and no seeking)."
That varies greatly over time, technology and the songs we're talking about, but isn't 3 songs per second plenty fast enough when it will take 10 minutes to play them? A HDD device NEEDS buffer space to function. Adding more buffer beyond what is needed do not make the device faster. Who sounds like he doesn't know anything now?
"An MP3 player pulling songs directly from RAM can load songs at, literally, 100mb/s."
There goes that "literally" comment again. How do you know that RAM bandwidth of an mp3 player? Not that it matters, because ALL HDD players play their music out or RAM. The job of the hard drive is to fill those buffers in advance. You don't need much buffer space to do that effectively and adding more does not result in even the slightest increase in performance.
"Anyway, back to the iPhone: I think the whole reason the iPhone is going to be fantastic is the UI; the same lessons they learned about UI from the iPod, iTunes, and AppleTV UIs will be in effect with the iPhone."
You could have said that originally since that makes more sense. I think it could be said that the iPhone will live or die based on its UI. As a piece of hardware there really isn't anything to recommend it. The UI must make the device compelling. It is fortunate, and I think Apple realizes this, that today's smartphones have HORRIBLE software and UIs. The iPhone is NOT differentiated on hardware no matter how hard people try to say otherwise. It's advantage is the UI. Hopefully they deliver on what they promise (and release unlocked, 3G versions with GPS soon).
"But regardless, the proof will be a year from now. Maybe you're right... and maybe I am."
I have never argued that the iPhone won't be a success, I simply objected to your arguments that it will be. I also believe that it all comes down to the UI. I don't believe that the iPod UI in any way influences that though I believe that Apple is more thorough when it thinks through UI issues than anyone else.
"Funny, I think that's what I am doing. Defending my claims. It's not my fault you decide to reject them."
Your claims were:
(1) Apple makes the iPod perfect. (2) No one but Apple is, or has ever been, hip. (3) Some irrelevent crap about the n-gage (4) Apple does things "right"
and then there was some irrational diatribe against Treos. You have capitulated on the "hip" claim and the "Treo" claim. The 4th claim is a matter of pure subjectivity and the 3rd is irrelevent. That leaves the "perfection" of the iPod.
In defense of your iPod claim, you said the iPod was "hugely more accessible" and that its failure rates are not unreasonable. Of course, that hardly makes it perfect even if it were true. Sadly neither claim is true. iPod failure rates are "officially" average and unofficially pretty bad. To support your claim of "hugely more accessible" you argued that competing devices were 4x larger, 5x heavier, and 10x slower. In fact, only one of those claims (4x larger) can be justified at all. In contrast, that 4x larger device offered 6x more storage capacity, a fact you not only ignored but suggested was not the case by chaning the subject of the comparisons. Basically, you lie, deceive and fabricate to support your arguments. Is there any doubt why I would reject them?
"You still haven't accepted the fact that the iPod was at least 10x faster (in upload, access, and usability), it was smaller (4x by volume) than the comparable HDD players, had more storage than the comparable flash players."
No I haven't because it wasn't true, and there you go again changing what you compare against in midstream. If you are comparing to HDD players then stick to it. If you are comparing to flash players, then stick to that.
"All that, combined, made it more attractive than the existing MP3 players; each feature was incremental, but putting it all together made for a much nicer, easier to use, and ultimately "accessible" player that appealed to non-geeks."
Ignoring "All that" because they are untruths, none of those are "features" much less incremental features. Even if they were, they would not constitute "hugely more accessible", a claim that you are now ignoring that you made. Not once have you offered substance to back that up.
I would really like to see who you define as a "geek" versus a "non-geek". No argument can be made one way or another regarding which device appeals to which consumer when there's no standard. I'd agree that "non-geeks" are more easily swayed by Apple's advertising than geeks are. My experience is that non-technical types, as a group, believe Apple's hype more than technical types do. Those were the first targets of the iPod, probably because they would buy anything hip from Apple and they wouldn't already know about alternatives.
"Add the UI and now you have something other manufacturers couldn't copy for several years."
Horseshit. Apple's UI got sued for patent infringement by Creative. It was Apple that was a follower and it was Apple who copied others, not the other way around. They got a patent on the application of the clickwheel for media players. No one has been able to adopt that so that has become the battlecry for iPod superiority. Funny that it's abandoned on the iPhone.
"The iPhone doesn't have that advantage, because in size and form factor there are already similar phones. All the iPhone has is it's UI."
Finally, something insightful! I would add that Apple does not enjoy a market position with cell phones that is anything remotely like what it had with mp3 players. With the iPod, the market was young, the competition was obscure, and the products were crude. The exact opposite, for the most part, is true with cell phones though I'd argue that smartphone software is still crude. As you said, all Apple has is the UI, yet its UI is entirely new and unproven. The technologies the iPhone is based on have, so far, failed in the market. What Apple has now that it didn't then is a snowballing of a decade of success and mindshare. Sadly, I believe that Apple's insistence on shacking up with AT&T and not delivering 3G are big problems as is the lack of a true keyboard.
"10x faster claim: USB was 1mb/s, Firewire was easily 12mb/s, 10x faster transfer speed"
Oh! 10x faster transfer rate! Now that's what I call "hugely more accessible"!;-)
"Access speed: Hard drive seek is in the milliseconds, when a song isn't in RAM, and load time is something like 10-12mb/s, so it would take about 1/3 of a second to spool up and load a song from HD to RAM. The iPod, with 32mb of RAM, could store easily 8 or so songs. So to access a song from RAM only takes, at 100MHz, 1/1,000,000 of a second, which is trivially 10,000 times faster"
God, you are an idiot. Do you know anything about software? More buffer memory does not make an mp3 player faster. Memory size does not equate to number of songs and processor speeds of these devices aren't published. Maybe you should stop making crap up hoping to support a spurious argument.
"Because the entire library is loaded in RAM (not the songs, just metadata)..."
Oh, I thought all that extra memory was used to buffer a lot more songs. I guess Apple can use memory for more than one thing at the same time, especially when you want them to!
"UI speed: Because the entire library is loaded in RAM (not the songs, just metadata), you can browse through an iPod at the speed of RAM; with a Nomad, you had to at the time spool up the hard drive when you needed to scroll through a screen of data;..."
No you didn't. Did you even own one?
"...practical experience shows that the user was slower than the library, or in other words you had to read a screen of text, even at 1/100 of a second, before scrolling to the next."
I love it when you get technical. So now the iPod was 10,000 times faster than the Nomad?
"Today, which I never disputed, those differences are gone. All the Zunes and Zens and Clixes now store all the metadata in RAM, all use caches like the iPod, etc. All navigate with much easier UIs."
How do you know and why do you care? What purpose does it serve for you to present speculation as fact? You think Apple invented buffering?
"But when you were looking for an MP3 player in 2001, 2002, and even 2003, the iPod was best."
No they weren't. They lacked sufficient capacity, their battery life sucked, their batteries weren't changable, and their reliability sucked (and they still do for the hard drive ones). When Apple switched away from the true clickwheel in Gen2 it's usability took a crap. The iPod has never had an on/off switch (except the shuffle) and it never actually turned off (still don't). Because of that, the iPod had only a 2 day standby time regardless of usage. For those of us who travelled, the iPod was useless on a plane. For those, like I'm sure you were, that bought the iPod as a status symbol, it was certainly the best for that.
The iPod dominated because it was a fashionable product from a big-name company in a market where none of the competitors were well known. It was marketed to the ultra hip (remember Jobs saying that the iPod was reserved for the superior mac user experience so it wouldn't support Windows?) where size and appearance mattered more than function. At the time, most buyers weren't necessarily familiar with mp3 players and not that many managed any kind of mp3 music library. The fact that it didn't offer some capabilities of other players was completely lost on new purchasers. Apple introduced a crappy product with the iPod and improved it over the generations. The original/. proclamation ("lame"), as infamous as it is now, was actually correct at the time and claims to the contrary are revisionist history. Just because the iPod is dominant now does not mean the first generation was good.
Now, back to your claim that the iPhone is going to be so fantastic. Why is that again? It's because they make the iPod "perfect", right? Or is it because Apple does everything right? Or because no one can be hip like Apple? Or because their products can be used by everyone? Any more bullshit for us?
"The original Jukebox had 4 hours battery; the iPod had 12, the new Jukebox lengthened it to 12."
Yes, but the Nomad had interchangable AA batteries. I owned a first generation iPod and never got more than 6 hours on a battery. I never got 4 on the Nomad either. Those ratings were for 128Kb files which I didn't use and most don't anymore. Of course, you never compared battery life before.
"The RAM was boosted from 8mb to 16mb... still half that of the iPod."
Is this your "huge accessibility" argument?
"The Nomad Jukebox was 14oz, more than twice the weight"
but not the 5x weight difference you claimed.
"The Nomad Jukebox measured 5x5.5x1.5, double the iPod in two dimensions (or 4x the volume). You could literally squeeze 5 iPods into the space of a Nomad Jukebox"
So now you claim by volume.
So it is 4x larger by volume, but not 5x heavier nor 10x faster. You lose (but we already knew that).
Care to offer another explanation for "huge accessibility"? I know you're searching for an argument you can win. How about sticking to defending the claims you've made?
"I was comparing the original iPod to the original Nomad Jukebox, both of which existed in 2001."
No you weren't. You barely mentioned the Nomad once here:
"I think access speed increases (from CD->HD, HD->RAM, etc) the iPod implemented were huge... they certainly impressed the world when everyone was used to the seek times of CDs, the UI of the Nomad Jukebox, etc."
The Nomad existed in the market long before the iPod, BTW. In fact, Creative succcessfully sued Apple over patent infringement, remember?
"In practice this means the Nomad had 2 songs in queue where the iPod had 8; this noticably speed up seek times while skipping through a playlist."
Bullshit. The amount of memory a device has is not proof that it is faster or slower than another. You claimed that the iPod was 10x faster and this unsubstantiated speculation is the best you can come up with?
BTW, songs are highly variable in size. 8MB of buffer, 4, 32, or any other number can't be converted into "number of songs". Buffering is done on a finer level of granularity anyway and all you need is the next sector preread for performance to be seamless. Larger buffers *could* mean better battery management, but we all know that battery life was always a weak point of the iPod.
I noticed that there was absolutely NO iPod information in the link you provided. How can you make any comparative claims and use that article as a reference?
The article made no mention whatsoever about sluggish performance or slow response times looking into the song database, so how can the iPod possibly be faster? Did you even own a Nomad? I did and I also owned a 1G iPod. You claims are absurd.
Some things the (crappy) Nomad did have to compensate for it larger size were 30GB of capacity (6x the iPod) and user-changable AA batteries. Those batteries didn't offer good runtimes but they were plentiful. An iPod couldn't be used on a long flight; a Nomad could.
"I was also comparing the original iPod to the then current 32mb and 64mb flash players."
Yes, you were picking and choosing what to compare against dependent on what you wanted to claim as an advantage. When comparing size, you chose the hard drive-based competitor. When comparing storage, you chose the flash-based competitor. When comparing performance, you chose a CD-based player. It's clear how your objectivity is measured. There is none.
The iPod was the smallest, weakest hard drive-based player when it came out. It was the only such player with a sealed battery. It was the only player that did not support Windows. It was only player limited to less than 10GB (and it only offered half that). It's popularity came from the fact that it was Apple that made it, much like IBM dominated the PC market when it entered. Other manufacturers were off-brands and Apple brought legitimacy to the concept in spite of the fact that it's product, like the IBM PC, was technically weak. The iPod took additional generations to become technically competent. There were no innovations in the iPod other than packaging (and the scroll wheel if you're stupid enough to believe that Apple invented that). The iPod wasn't even originally developed by Apple. They obtained it from an outside company and reworked it to their liking.
Of course, all these incorrect arguments you put forth for the iPod are just a cover for your mistaken boasts in your original post. This thread, according to you, is about how great the iPhone will be because Apple is so perfect and its competitors are so lame. Apple fumbled its way through iPod success and "usability" and "accessability" had nothing to do with it. The rest of your points you've given up even arguing or have outright conceded. Face it, you've offered nothing "insightful".
Transfer speed differences are ancient history and at that time the iPod was only 5GB. Regardless, transfer speed differences are not an example of "huge accessibility" advantages that you claimed the iPod has. Why don't you defend you claim rather than argue meaningless and obsolete differences?
"In comparing to existing hard drive players, the iPod was literally 1/4 the size and weight."
But that's not what you claimed. Since you now say it "literally", care to provide references? While you are at it, provide some proof that it was "10x faster".
"I like how you think I'm technically illiterate for comparing the speed of access on a MP3 CD at 2x with speed of access on the iPod at 4200rpm."
No, you proved your illiteracy with the following comment:
"I think access speed increases (from CD->HD, HD->RAM, etc) the iPod implemented were huge..."
That statement is totally without meaning or relevance. I'll remind you that hard drive players were well established already. The iPod did nothing new when it was introduced.
Now, comparing the iPod to mp3 CD players is totally spurious. Why don't you compare it to an iPod then declare the iPod a huge leap forward in sound quality while you're at it?
"Anyway, I don't think we need to discuss any more; I still think I'm right, and you still think I'm wrong."
No, you're now going to stick you head in the sand. That is, unless you can think of some other point you can argue to make an Apple product sound superior.
Re:products did not end with a whimper
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All Things iPhone
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Always an excuse, eh? How do you know the itunes phone wasn't Apple's work? Because other fanboys say so?
If my company produced an obvious failure and I was obligated to ship it anyway, I'd probably avoid spending time on it as well. That means nothing.
The Newton was a laughingstock even as it was still being sold.
The Cube had cosmetic issues regarding crazing of it's clear plastic housing. While it's generally excepted that Apple gets a pass for such quality problems, that's certainly evidence that it wasn't "well designed".
The Edsel is also a collector's item but it was an enormous failure as a product.
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Except that not everyone in the US owns a cell phone, not everyone replaces it in 2 year intervals, and the initial iPhone sales are most certainly not part of any 2 year upgrade plan. Initial iPhone sales produced a short term spike in cellphone sales at their introduction and nothing more. Whatever Apple's percentage of the total market was over that week is irrelevent. I'd venture to say that Apple owned near 100% of the cellphone market between 6-7pm on 6/29. So what?
"I don't think he was suggesting that iPhone has outsold all other phones in total volume just in its first few days."
No, he was suggesting that no other phone has been as successful as the iPhone---a claim equally ridiculous.
"So iPhone is very popular."
Initial sales indicate there are a number of early adopters. Popularity can't be determined on an entirely new product after only a week in the market. Sales will need to be sustained first.
"Said by someone who thinks a PC BIOS is a boot loader."
What an asshole. Since when isn't it?
"It's Compaq's one and only claim to fame, and the reason their name is a play on "compatible." "
Others have refuted that obvious misstatement already. IBM most certainly did open their design however. IBM published detailed documentation of the PC including full source to the BIOS.
"The IBM PC came out in 1982 and competed with the Apple II throughout the 80's. That was Apple's business machine."
Haha. The Apple II wasn't a business machine of any sort.
"The Apple II had more slots than IBM PC and years of hardware hacking documentation behind it, as well as color display, and Woz' encouragement."
Since when does slot count make a business machine? Since when is a business machine determined by the amount of "hacking documentation" and how does the availability of full technical documentation from the source not trump that? IBM PCs had color displays from the beginning. "Woz' encouragement" counts for what? What did he know about business needs? The Apple II was a travesty of hardware engineering.
"If the battle was openness then Apple II would win."
It wasn't a battle of openness though. Apple was a small fry with an old, outdated 40-column 1 MHz 6502 play toy targeted at hobbiests. The Apple II was not intended as a serious business machine.
"As for the Mac, it sold really well to an entirely different market because it was the only computer with graphics, typography, laser printer."
The mac had a laser printer? I thought it was a computer? If you are referring to the LaserWriter, it spoke standard PostScript which could be used on platforms other than the mac. Furthermore, HP introduced a far cheaper laser printer at the exact same time as Apple and it used an identical laser engine. The advent of affordable laser printers was far more a PC development than a mac one.
"The IBM PC and the Mac simply did not compete with each other."
You got that right. Macs had already been relegated to fringe uses by then.
...and calling a fanboy a fanboy is just saying it like it is. Not all such comments come from trolls.
"Parent did not label people who disagreed with him "trolls." That title was reserved to a specific, hostile subset of those who disagree."
So what? You think the following is a reasoned comment?
"Calling anyone a "fanboy" immediately identifies you an ignorant troll..."
What is the matter with you?
"Also, FYI: Calling anyone a "fanboy" immediately identifies you an ignorant troll and ensures that nothing you have to say is worth hearing."
Why not if it's the truth? Since when does truth count under only some circumstances?
Saying something as moronic as you have just done proves that you cannot be unbiased.
The best location for apps is the bottom row. I don't think its a leftie/rightie thing at all. SMS for me will get far, far more use than the Mail app will. I'm a leftie and it really annoys me.
Regardless of how the iPhone or AT&T handle SMS, the person receiving your message may not comprehend what you send when the message is broken up and pieced together automatically. Not everyone you are talking to is using AT&T or the iPhone and it is important to me to avoid sending SMS messages that are too long. It sucks that Apple doesn't provide such basic assistance. It could have been an optional setting for those of us who care about what others are using.
Funny, I thought he was absolutely dead-on accurate.
If there wasn't an advantage to the bottom row apps, then why did Apple make them special? Those apps are supposed to be the main ones and I, like the author of that comment, believe that SMS is more important than Mail. I don't really even care about email at all personally.
So what other of his listed mistakes are silly?
If Jobs would say it like that it would be fine.
It is good that phones increasingly compete with computers but the iPhone is not one of those. It may have the most sophisticated OS of any phone but, unlike computers and other smartphones, the iPhone is strictly fixed-function.
"It's not that people like me want to see it go down in flames."
Only fools wish for such things.
"What annoys some of us is that it's being presented as revolutionary. It's not."
That and they're inclined to not learn from the mistakes of others. Apple's arrogance is generally what annoys people, that and the fanboys who buy into it.
"From what I hear it has the same UI problems as the first smartphones."
No, not really. It has problems but it's pretty much unique. Cut and paste is a problem for some smartphones but not all.
"From reading about people using it, some of the UI is an improvement but it needs work in many places."
That's more like it.
"Having the internet in your pocket is awesome, as is the lack of needing to carry around a separate media player. The integration of SMS and email is also very handy."
Lots of smartphones give you the internet in your pocket and an integrated media player. Media functions of the iPhone are clearly better than what we've seen before but I'm not convinced Safari is. There are plenty of things it cannot do such as configuring my home page! You cannot drag and drop in Safari. The iPhone doesn't integrate SMS and email in any way.
Frankly, I see integration of a GPS receiver to be a compelling feature that they excluded. Google maps with GPS on the iPhone would be great.
The activation process is what is used to enforce the 2 year contract. Existing AT&T customers COULD have simply used their existing SIM and gotten service just like with any other unlocked GSM phone. Special activation isn't a technical requirement, it's a business one. No way to re-obligate you without it.
Of course, Apple couldn't sell iPhones with new service without having a means of estabishing that service. Activating through iTunes is a clever way of doing that without training their sales staff and making the purchase experience agonizingly slow like it is with every other cellphone purchase.
It's very annoying that Apple locks the phone to AT&T without any apparent subsidy coming in to them. Yes, I've tried my Tmobile SIM in one and it doesn't work. After activation everything else appears to.
"The real problem is that nobody at AT&T or Apple seem to really know whats going on during the process, and because both companies are involved, it's easy for their reps to blame each other."
Oh yes they do, just not the ones you are talking to.
Interesting story, one of my friends went to activate his iPhone using an existing iTunes account. That account had a 5 letter password and the minimum is 6 letters. As a result, he could log into iTS but but not activate. He tried to change the password but was unable to. Instead, he created an entirely new account for activation and it worked fine.
My experience with AT&T is that they know absolutely nothing about the activation process and what it requires.
Apple didn't say this:
"It's too high to give the battery time in the form factor Apple wanted. Had they gone with 3G, they would have reduced the performance for the majority of users in terms of battery time, so that a few users can have 3G speeds between home and office."
That's nothing but speculation. In fact, what Apple, or anyone else, says publicly isn't frequently the truth. All we know is that 3G is more power hungry. Apple may have omitted it for any number of reasons.
"The problem with this is that usually that is a decision made in hindsight:"
Not if 3G isn't available to you at all. You leave it off permanently. Furthermore, 3G could automatically be disabled when WiFi is connected. It's basically BS to claim that Apple couldn't have offered 3G in a desirable package. If the iPhone were 2-3mm thicker I doubt anyone would complain.
"What? My battery is at 2%?! Why oh why did I leave 3G turned on! Now I have a dead box until I can find a power outlet!"
Forcably disable 3G when the battery drops below 20%. All phones have emergency power conservation features.
"Talk about a "bad user experience.""
Funny how you give Apple absolutely no credit for being able to cope with this. You're being ridiculous. How is an iPhone running out of battery not a "bad user experience" now? They offer power-hungry WiFi, don't they?
"So I can understand Apple's argument on the subject."
It's not Apple argument on the subject. It's Apple fanboy argument.
"So you can't have anything that munches too much power because it's not like you have a work-around (like buy extra batteries)."
You don't know that it's "too much power" nor do you know what alternate form factors might have been acceptable. Frankly, I think Apple left it off because 3G isn't sufficiently pervasive and doing so allows them to release 3G later to encourage upgrading. One thing you can be certain of is that, if iPhone succeeds, there will be a 3G version. When that happens you will forget arguing that it can't be done because of power.
What irritates the crap out of me is that the only reason for me to switch from tmobile is to get 3G, yet now I am switching to use a device and it doesn't take advantage of the one compelling feature that AT&T has.
Exactly right. I was told that new accounts had to run the credit preapproval and existing ones had to record the number and account name they would be activated on. My AT&T store had 5 sales people and 25 people in front me and it took me an hour to get out. That's better than the 20 minute average they told us to expect. The next day I went to the Apple store for accessories and bought two additional iPhones for friends. It took less than a minute.
The AT&T rep told be that iTunes must be logged into iTS and the account used must have the same name as the AT&T account. Of course, neither of these things turned out to be true. They also said that I had to match my iPhone serial number to the activation they'd recorded in the store. That also can't be true since Apple wasn't doing any of that.
On the plus side, my activation went smoothly and it may not have without the preapproval code. Who knows.
The AT&T store I went to had 40 in the line and the Apple store upstairs had 300. Each line was emptied in about 90 minutes yet the Apple store didn't run out of product. Interesting.
"The assumption that everyone who says positive things about Apple never admits that Apple makes mistakes is also preposterous. Look, dude, either we're both guilty of gross generalization here, or neither of us are."
Not in the context of a thread declaring the superiority of the Newton to current PDAs we're not. You are generalizing about those who react to fanboys while I am generalizing about fanboys. My generalization is accurate regarding fanatics, yours is not because anti-fanatics are not necessarily fanatical themselves.
"All you have to do is admit that you own a Mac and like it."
That's not true. I own a mac and like it yet I'm accused of being an Apple hater. That's because I call zealots on their crap. I am not a zealot nor a "hater", I am anti-zealot.
"...apparently the act of owning a Macintosh is seen as a rebuke to those who do not."
Not owning a mac is seen as a rebuke to mac zealots as well. Merely posting a non-positive comment regarding Apple here results in a fanboy moderation shitstorm. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
"Maybe you think this says something about the zealotry of Apple owners; I think it says a lot more about the insecurity of people who respond that way to Apple owners."
The constant boasting and evangelizing of Apple owners is a testament to their insecurities. You don't see constant evangelizing about many products yet you see them for EVERY Apple product, even the ones that are long dead and buried. This is unique to Apple because their groupies are incredibly insecure. They are also, as a group, more technically ignorant that PC owners yet they are consistently convinced Apple products are superior in every way and that each and every Apple product is superior. When compared to Apple zealots, virtually any other kind of zealot appears reasonable.
Fanboyism grows out of a need for validation. They need to believe they're "on the right team" yet they can't be sure of it themselves. They need others to tell them that they're superior because they have the best. Fanboys can't stand that people buy products other than from their chosen vendor because they don't receive that validation.
"No, the Newton isn't better than a modern PDA. It's a product of its time, and it was a flawed product in many ways. It was also an advanced product in many ways; someone saying "It was ahead of its time" was essentially met in this thread by "no, it sucked ass." The first statement doesn't require the Newton to have been flawless (or even successful); the second statement refuses to acknowledge any positives. Do you see the difference?"
I would if it were true but it's not. The Newton sucked ass and I say that without implying that it had no redeeming qualities. It was too big, too heavy, too expensive, and too flawed in its capabilities. It lost resoundingly in the marketplace so "sucked ass" is appropriate even if some of its ideas were ahead of their time. As flawed and unsuccessful as the Newton was, it hasn't stopped Microsoft from trying to establish that very form factor again. I think that's even more absurd!
That's pure speculation. We don't know the reason Apple didn't do 3G.
Some 3G phones offer the ability to disable 3G features in order to save battery life. There's no reason Apple couldn't have done that in the same manner that they allow WiFi to be disabled.
I haven't forgetten that the Newton was too big, too expensive, and worked too poorly to be interesting. The Newton was a failure because it sucked. Apple failed to realize what the form factor and function was that people wanted. That is NOT technical superiority.
"What made it a "flop" was tacky people who shop at Wal-Mart couldn't afford one."
Feeling superior, are you?
"Let's not confuse "good product" with "product that sells well", please."
Why not? Apple people do that ALL the time.
"Mocking a PDA that shipped 14 years ago for having a lot of obsolete technology in it strikes me as, to be kind, dubious."
It's not mocking an obsolete device, it's putting proper perspective to a claim that such a device isn't really useful today as fanboys like to say it is. The Newton is no more and no less obsolete than all other devices of its time.
"You don't hear much about the Newton's same-era competition these days."
No, the only claims we here are about the Newton. Funny that the Newton got its ass kicked when it was current, yet now some believe that its better than devices made today.
"Incidentally, you can use some PCMCIA wi-fi and ethernet cards in a Newton. Done that lately with a 1996 Palm Pilot?"
No, but that PCMCIA WiFi card (not PCCard mind you) wouldn't make the Newton any more desirable than the 1996 Palm Pilot. They would both still suck but I could hide the Palm in my pocket to avoid ridicule.
"Well, anti-Apple people will say anything rather than admit that Apple deserves praise on occasion, so maybe it all evens out in the end."
No it doesn't. If there weren't Apple zealots evangelizing through lies there's wouldn't be anyone responding to them. The assumption that everyone that responds to pro-Apple propaganda is anti-Apple is preposterous.
"You're the one who sounds like you don't know anything."
Now you're getting foolish.
"RAM is easily thousands of times faster than a hard drive."
True, but only when the data is in RAM. To get it there, you still need the hard drive.
"An MP3 player pulling songs from a HD can, at best, read at about 15mb/s (or 3 songs per second, assuming no fragmentation and no seeking)."
That varies greatly over time, technology and the songs we're talking about, but isn't 3 songs per second plenty fast enough when it will take 10 minutes to play them? A HDD device NEEDS buffer space to function. Adding more buffer beyond what is needed do not make the device faster. Who sounds like he doesn't know anything now?
"An MP3 player pulling songs directly from RAM can load songs at, literally, 100mb/s."
There goes that "literally" comment again. How do you know that RAM bandwidth of an mp3 player? Not that it matters, because ALL HDD players play their music out or RAM. The job of the hard drive is to fill those buffers in advance. You don't need much buffer space to do that effectively and adding more does not result in even the slightest increase in performance.
"Anyway, back to the iPhone: I think the whole reason the iPhone is going to be fantastic is the UI; the same lessons they learned about UI from the iPod, iTunes, and AppleTV UIs will be in effect with the iPhone."
You could have said that originally since that makes more sense. I think it could be said that the iPhone will live or die based on its UI. As a piece of hardware there really isn't anything to recommend it. The UI must make the device compelling. It is fortunate, and I think Apple realizes this, that today's smartphones have HORRIBLE software and UIs. The iPhone is NOT differentiated on hardware no matter how hard people try to say otherwise. It's advantage is the UI. Hopefully they deliver on what they promise (and release unlocked, 3G versions with GPS soon).
"But regardless, the proof will be a year from now. Maybe you're right... and maybe I am."
I have never argued that the iPhone won't be a success, I simply objected to your arguments that it will be. I also believe that it all comes down to the UI. I don't believe that the iPod UI in any way influences that though I believe that Apple is more thorough when it thinks through UI issues than anyone else.
"Funny, I think that's what I am doing. Defending my claims. It's not my fault you decide to reject them."
Your claims were:
(1) Apple makes the iPod perfect.
(2) No one but Apple is, or has ever been, hip.
(3) Some irrelevent crap about the n-gage
(4) Apple does things "right"
and then there was some irrational diatribe against Treos. You have capitulated on the "hip" claim and the "Treo" claim. The 4th claim is a matter of pure subjectivity and the 3rd is irrelevent. That leaves the "perfection" of the iPod.
In defense of your iPod claim, you said the iPod was "hugely more accessible" and that its failure rates are not unreasonable. Of course, that hardly makes it perfect even if it were true. Sadly neither claim is true. iPod failure rates are "officially" average and unofficially pretty bad. To support your claim of "hugely more accessible" you argued that competing devices were 4x larger, 5x heavier, and 10x slower. In fact, only one of those claims (4x larger) can be justified at all. In contrast, that 4x larger device offered 6x more storage capacity, a fact you not only ignored but suggested was not the case by chaning the subject of the comparisons. Basically, you lie, deceive and fabricate to support your arguments. Is there any doubt why I would reject them?
"You still haven't accepted the fact that the iPod was at least 10x faster (in upload, access, and usability), it was smaller (4x by volume) than the comparable HDD players, had more storage than the comparable flash players."
No I haven't because it wasn't true, and there you go again changing what you compare against in midstream. If you are comparing to HDD players then stick to it. If you are comparing to flash players, then stick to that.
"All that, combined, made it more attractive than the existing MP3 players; each feature was incremental, but putting it all together made for a much nicer, easier to use, and ultimately "accessible" player that appealed to non-geeks."
Ignoring "All that" because they are untruths, none of those are "features" much less incremental features. Even if they were, they would not constitute "hugely more accessible", a claim that you are now ignoring that you made. Not once have you offered substance to back that up.
I would really like to see who you define as a "geek" versus a "non-geek". No argument can be made one way or another regarding which device appeals to which consumer when there's no standard. I'd agree that "non-geeks" are more easily swayed by Apple's advertising than geeks are. My experience is that non-technical types, as a group, believe Apple's hype more than technical types do. Those were the first targets of the iPod, probably because they would buy anything hip from Apple and they wouldn't already know about alternatives.
"Add the UI and now you have something other manufacturers couldn't copy for several years."
Horseshit. Apple's UI got sued for patent infringement by Creative. It was Apple that was a follower and it was Apple who copied others, not the other way around. They got a patent on the application of the clickwheel for media players. No one has been able to adopt that so that has become the battlecry for iPod superiority. Funny that it's abandoned on the iPhone.
"The iPhone doesn't have that advantage, because in size and form factor there are already similar phones. All the iPhone has is it's UI."
Finally, something insightful! I would add that Apple does not enjoy a market position with cell phones that is anything remotely like what it had with mp3 players. With the iPod, the market was young, the competition was obscure, and the products were crude. The exact opposite, for the most part, is true with cell phones though I'd argue that smartphone software is still crude. As you said, all Apple has is the UI, yet its UI is entirely new and unproven. The technologies the iPhone is based on have, so far, failed in the market. What Apple has now that it didn't then is a snowballing of a decade of success and mindshare. Sadly, I believe that Apple's insistence on shacking up with AT&T and not delivering 3G are big problems as is the lack of a true keyboard.
"10x faster claim: USB was 1mb/s, Firewire was easily 12mb/s, 10x faster transfer speed"
;-)
..."
/. proclamation ("lame"), as infamous as it is now, was actually correct at the time and claims to the contrary are revisionist history. Just because the iPod is dominant now does not mean the first generation was good.
Oh! 10x faster transfer rate! Now that's what I call "hugely more accessible"!
"Access speed: Hard drive seek is in the milliseconds, when a song isn't in RAM, and load time is something like 10-12mb/s, so it would take about 1/3 of a second to spool up and load a song from HD to RAM. The iPod, with 32mb of RAM, could store easily 8 or so songs. So to access a song from RAM only takes, at 100MHz, 1/1,000,000 of a second, which is trivially 10,000 times faster"
God, you are an idiot. Do you know anything about software? More buffer memory does not make an mp3 player faster. Memory size does not equate to number of songs and processor speeds of these devices aren't published. Maybe you should stop making crap up hoping to support a spurious argument.
"Because the entire library is loaded in RAM (not the songs, just metadata)..."
Oh, I thought all that extra memory was used to buffer a lot more songs. I guess Apple can use memory for more than one thing at the same time, especially when you want them to!
"UI speed: Because the entire library is loaded in RAM (not the songs, just metadata), you can browse through an iPod at the speed of RAM; with a Nomad, you had to at the time spool up the hard drive when you needed to scroll through a screen of data;
No you didn't. Did you even own one?
"...practical experience shows that the user was slower than the library, or in other words you had to read a screen of text, even at 1/100 of a second, before scrolling to the next."
I love it when you get technical. So now the iPod was 10,000 times faster than the Nomad?
"Today, which I never disputed, those differences are gone. All the Zunes and Zens and Clixes now store all the metadata in RAM, all use caches like the iPod, etc. All navigate with much easier UIs."
How do you know and why do you care? What purpose does it serve for you to present speculation as fact? You think Apple invented buffering?
"But when you were looking for an MP3 player in 2001, 2002, and even 2003, the iPod was best."
No they weren't. They lacked sufficient capacity, their battery life sucked, their batteries weren't changable, and their reliability sucked (and they still do for the hard drive ones). When Apple switched away from the true clickwheel in Gen2 it's usability took a crap. The iPod has never had an on/off switch (except the shuffle) and it never actually turned off (still don't). Because of that, the iPod had only a 2 day standby time regardless of usage. For those of us who travelled, the iPod was useless on a plane. For those, like I'm sure you were, that bought the iPod as a status symbol, it was certainly the best for that.
The iPod dominated because it was a fashionable product from a big-name company in a market where none of the competitors were well known. It was marketed to the ultra hip (remember Jobs saying that the iPod was reserved for the superior mac user experience so it wouldn't support Windows?) where size and appearance mattered more than function. At the time, most buyers weren't necessarily familiar with mp3 players and not that many managed any kind of mp3 music library. The fact that it didn't offer some capabilities of other players was completely lost on new purchasers. Apple introduced a crappy product with the iPod and improved it over the generations. The original
Now, back to your claim that the iPhone is going to be so fantastic. Why is that again? It's because they make the iPod "perfect", right? Or is it because Apple does everything right? Or because no one can be hip like Apple? Or because their products can be used by everyone? Any more bullshit for us?
"The original Jukebox had 4 hours battery; the iPod had 12, the new Jukebox lengthened it to 12."
Yes, but the Nomad had interchangable AA batteries. I owned a first generation iPod and never got more than 6 hours on a battery. I never got 4 on the Nomad either. Those ratings were for 128Kb files which I didn't use and most don't anymore. Of course, you never compared battery life before.
"The RAM was boosted from 8mb to 16mb... still half that of the iPod."
Is this your "huge accessibility" argument?
"The Nomad Jukebox was 14oz, more than twice the weight"
but not the 5x weight difference you claimed.
"The Nomad Jukebox measured 5x5.5x1.5, double the iPod in two dimensions (or 4x the volume). You could literally squeeze 5 iPods into the space of a Nomad Jukebox"
So now you claim by volume.
So it is 4x larger by volume, but not 5x heavier nor 10x faster. You lose (but we already knew that).
Care to offer another explanation for "huge accessibility"? I know you're searching for an argument you can win. How about sticking to defending the claims you've made?
"I was comparing the original iPod to the original Nomad Jukebox, both of which existed in 2001."
No you weren't. You barely mentioned the Nomad once here:
"I think access speed increases (from CD->HD, HD->RAM, etc) the iPod implemented were huge... they certainly impressed the world when everyone was used to the seek times of CDs, the UI of the Nomad Jukebox, etc."
The Nomad existed in the market long before the iPod, BTW. In fact, Creative succcessfully sued Apple over patent infringement, remember?
"In practice this means the Nomad had 2 songs in queue where the iPod had 8; this noticably speed up seek times while skipping through a playlist."
Bullshit. The amount of memory a device has is not proof that it is faster or slower than another. You claimed that the iPod was 10x faster and this unsubstantiated speculation is the best you can come up with?
BTW, songs are highly variable in size. 8MB of buffer, 4, 32, or any other number can't be converted into "number of songs". Buffering is done on a finer level of granularity anyway and all you need is the next sector preread for performance to be seamless. Larger buffers *could* mean better battery management, but we all know that battery life was always a weak point of the iPod.
I noticed that there was absolutely NO iPod information in the link you provided. How can you make any comparative claims and use that article as a reference?
The article made no mention whatsoever about sluggish performance or slow response times looking into the song database, so how can the iPod possibly be faster? Did you even own a Nomad? I did and I also owned a 1G iPod. You claims are absurd.
Some things the (crappy) Nomad did have to compensate for it larger size were 30GB of capacity (6x the iPod) and user-changable AA batteries. Those batteries didn't offer good runtimes but they were plentiful. An iPod couldn't be used on a long flight; a Nomad could.
"I was also comparing the original iPod to the then current 32mb and 64mb flash players."
Yes, you were picking and choosing what to compare against dependent on what you wanted to claim as an advantage. When comparing size, you chose the hard drive-based competitor. When comparing storage, you chose the flash-based competitor. When comparing performance, you chose a CD-based player. It's clear how your objectivity is measured. There is none.
The iPod was the smallest, weakest hard drive-based player when it came out. It was the only such player with a sealed battery. It was the only player that did not support Windows. It was only player limited to less than 10GB (and it only offered half that). It's popularity came from the fact that it was Apple that made it, much like IBM dominated the PC market when it entered. Other manufacturers were off-brands and Apple brought legitimacy to the concept in spite of the fact that it's product, like the IBM PC, was technically weak. The iPod took additional generations to become technically competent. There were no innovations in the iPod other than packaging (and the scroll wheel if you're stupid enough to believe that Apple invented that). The iPod wasn't even originally developed by Apple. They obtained it from an outside company and reworked it to their liking.
Of course, all these incorrect arguments you put forth for the iPod are just a cover for your mistaken boasts in your original post. This thread, according to you, is about how great the iPhone will be because Apple is so perfect and its competitors are so lame. Apple fumbled its way through iPod success and "usability" and "accessability" had nothing to do with it. The rest of your points you've given up even arguing or have outright conceded. Face it, you've offered nothing "insightful".
Transfer speed differences are ancient history and at that time the iPod was only 5GB. Regardless, transfer speed differences are not an example of "huge accessibility" advantages that you claimed the iPod has. Why don't you defend you claim rather than argue meaningless and obsolete differences?
"In comparing to existing hard drive players, the iPod was literally 1/4 the size and weight."
But that's not what you claimed. Since you now say it "literally", care to provide references? While you are at it, provide some proof that it was "10x faster".
"I like how you think I'm technically illiterate for comparing the speed of access on a MP3 CD at 2x with speed of access on the iPod at 4200rpm."
No, you proved your illiteracy with the following comment:
"I think access speed increases (from CD->HD, HD->RAM, etc) the iPod implemented were huge..."
That statement is totally without meaning or relevance. I'll remind you that hard drive players were well established already. The iPod did nothing new when it was introduced.
Now, comparing the iPod to mp3 CD players is totally spurious. Why don't you compare it to an iPod then declare the iPod a huge leap forward in sound quality while you're at it?
"Anyway, I don't think we need to discuss any more; I still think I'm right, and you still think I'm wrong."
No, you're now going to stick you head in the sand. That is, unless you can think of some other point you can argue to make an Apple product sound superior.
Always an excuse, eh? How do you know the itunes phone wasn't Apple's work? Because other fanboys say so?
If my company produced an obvious failure and I was obligated to ship it anyway, I'd probably avoid spending time on it as well. That means nothing.
The Newton was a laughingstock even as it was still being sold.
The Cube had cosmetic issues regarding crazing of it's clear plastic housing. While it's generally excepted that Apple gets a pass for such quality problems, that's certainly evidence that it wasn't "well designed".
The Edsel is also a collector's item but it was an enormous failure as a product.
Loved your revisionist history though.