iPod turns 5: will it ever fall off?
mannybolone
Los Angeles, CA 15,025 Posts
Yeah, yeah, people complain that they break more than they should, that they don't have all the features they could, that Apple and the iPod is overhyped like so many raer funk and random rap records......but after 5 years, the iPod reigns supreme over nearly everyone (70% marketshare. Beat that in the consumer electronics market, batches).I couldn't embed this for some reason, but here's Steve Jobs introducing the iPod back in 2001: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIdjdAWbdeU(The first gen looks like a brick compared to what we have these days).Question for the prognosticators: how long can Apple hope to keep this up? Mind you, they've sold over 2/3rds of their stock IN THE LAST YEAR. That means 20,000,000 in the first four years and then 40,000,000 in the last year. :O
Comments
Excellent hardware design (both from an aesthetic and interface viewpoint) + aggressive " alternative hip" marketing blitz = clear winner
I'm skeptical how much impact the database instead of file-tree approach had, and it seems that the avg. consumer doesn't really give a shit about the firmware itself (honestly, just about all of 'em are blah/suck ass to some degree) or having a bunch of misc. options like extensive file support (ogg, flac, etc.), gapless playback (how many years did it take, when at least one player had it natively for years and been around for awhile via alternative OS firmware like rockbox?), etc.
I think the better question is who is going to win the audio/video PMP war. Apple's off to a head start due to their established dominance so far, but it's still fairly open. What would a new entry into the fray need to accomplish to be a real competitor?
Ask Microsoft.
As far as the kbps are concerned, I thought that they were kept low purposefully, so as not to infringe on the higher-fidelity CD market. But I suppose the music industry guessed that the general public might care slightly more about kbps (apparently, portability > quality).
The title of this thread will undeniably be a front-page headline in The Onion's Our Dumb History, Part 2 in 30 years (ref: The Walkman).
who wants to have to carry two separate devices?
saying. everyone carries a phone. nearly everyone carries an ipod. phone that allows you to do both = clear winner, right?
Not so fast, buster.
-The RIAA
Everyone does it already. The idea that convergence is going to be a magic consumer bullet makes sense in general theory but in practice, it's harder to say.
The reason why the iPod works is a combination of design and simplicity. People who don't worship at the House of Jobs ask why it is the iPod is so popular despite the fact that, feature-wise, there's more tricked out products out there but it comes back to Apple's ability to maintain a brand that is appealing by keeping shit clean and simple.
I'm not saying you couldn't achieve a similar synergy with a phone/MP3 player combo (and of course, Apple's been trying to game that same idea but with middling success) but just because people the RAZR and iPod doesn't mean fusing the two together would work.
I don't expect big things but I'll be curious to see how the Zune plays out this holiday season. At least MS figured out how to make shit look better than the average Zen Creative player (even if they're biting the iPod design hard enough to leave teeth marks).
I think Sony quickly realised they would never be able to beat Apple on the mp3 player market so signed up with Ericsson as quickly as possible to try and deliver a similar item. With contract phones as well you can get a 4gb player and phone for free on conmtract compared to over ??100 for an ipod.
While I've had a number of mp3 phones (had the w700, now got the k800) they certainly haven't perfected it yet though they may need to seperate camera phones from mp3 phones to get the required slimness.
Having said that they actually only appear to be going from strength to strength at the moment so what do I know?
And why all this f*ckery-foo with iTunes? It's never been able to list my music collection properly. And don't even get me going on .m4p and all that shit.
Design-wise, beautiful though. But when other products are cheaper and simpler to use, it's a no brainer for me.
Actually this is similar to how I've felt as the bonus with mp3 phones is that you can skip all the software (after the minidisc I'll never use any sony music transfer system again) and just drag and drop.
I've always wondered about the sound quality though - is the ipod a superior system to, say, a Zen?
One major gripe, how fucking hard would it be to include a remote control on the ipod headphones as standard? Just displays an insulting level of money grabbing IMO.
Well, you can already install A HREF="http://www.apple.com/itunes/mobile/">iTunes on a cellphone/A>, so... I'm not an iPod person so I can't claim to be on top of anything that's Apple or iPod/iTunes related, but I also seem to recall there was some phone released a while back that attempted to integrate an mp3 player into a phone and it didn't seem to sell very well.
Personally, I like my phone to do a lot of things but playing mp3's isn't really one of them. Music is just one of those things I'd much rather have a dedicated player for, for various reasons. That, and if I had a cellphone/mp3 player combined into one it better have one HELL of a battery or else you'd be recharging that bitch constantly. The battery on my cellphone already doesn't last incredibly long when I'm using it to do things like check the web, etc; I can't imagine how short the lifespan of a charge would be if the thing was constantly in use for hours at a time.
But then, that's just me. I'm sure there's a market out there for these things.
cosign, i dont need an mp3 player in my phone. My nano just busted, so i might go for that super cheap chinese jump off.
Its getting bigger and bigger and cheaper at the same time. Here in europe some conpanys are dropping the prices for bandwith/broadband so that you can transfer huge amounts of data with no problem and almost no cost.
This means to mean that MP3 will be dead in the future becasue why should I transfer my 16 Bit / 44.1 Khz CD quality sound files into a shitty and fucked up sounding 128 kbs MP3 when I can download a good sounding sounfile with the same tempo ??
The only problem at this moment is the storage medium you put that on. But this is expanding too. Last christmas I got a 2 GB USB stick and I heard that they are scratching on the goal of a 20 GB USB stick.
Will those technical advances change something on the Ipod and whatelse-you-play-your -shitty-MP3s-on market ???
Peace
Hawkeye
Well, there's one key element to your post: "here in Europe". Here in America it's a very different story. In America they still have bandwidth fairly throttled so most of us don't get the blazing speeds we could, and the internet providers charge us an arm and a leg for what downstream we get. The providers know they basically have monopolies on the services so they can get away with charging us more for less because there's nothing much we can do about it. Whereas the trend in Europe and Asia is faster speeds and less cost in America they're still charging us a lot for broadband as if it's still the new kid on the block and dialup is the norm, but obviously this is increasingly false.
Personally, I pay $45/month for cable modem and my download speeds aren't all that spectacular as compared to what I've heard of European providers giving. According to dslreports.com's speedtest, my connection is 1.15 Mbps down, 309 Kbps up, which equals out to 141.3K/sec and 37.7K/sec respectively. That's balls slow. You're in Europe so maybe you can shed light, but I've heard of things like 4 Mbps downstream overseas and for much less than we pay in America.
So yeah, in America there's still issues with having truly fast internet to the point that mp3's would become unnecessary and lossless formats would prevail. Even if that were true it wouldn't change things much for me mp3-wise because I'd still convert music to mp3 and listen to that on my mp3 player. I'd keep backups of everything in lossless format but portable music players are hardly audiophile quality or listened to in the most acoustically-conducive environments so I'm not all that concerned about using a lossy format for my listening on-the-go.
Odub is right on here. Short version: simplicity and quality sell.
There are a few schools of thought when it comes to convergence. First you have the "big black box" pushers. You may remember when the Internet first began to become popular, people started talking about how you would only have one home appliance, which would be a cable box, stereo, microwave, etc.
This will never happen for many reasons, not the least of which is companies are unlikely to pull together any time soon to facilitate this. For instance, Cisco just patented the so-called "triple play", a "system and method for providing integrated voice, video and data to customer premises over a single network." This means that if anybody else tries to do this (they kind of already are), they could have a lawsuit on their hands.
There is also new research showing that people do not prefer to have a PDA that acts as a cellphone, mp3 player and movie player. They are not cognitively predisposed to want all these features at once. It's not how people generally shop for appliances or devices. Plus, like Oliver said, most of the multi-function MP3 players out there are junk. Hence Job's famed distaste for PDAs.
Convergence is also used to describe not the devices themselves, but the way similar messages are produced and transmitted over multiple channels (for instance, cable, the Internet, and print). In this sense, I find that the word "convergence" itself is a little confusing. Henry Jenkins uses "transmedia" to describe the massive advertising campaigns that span movies, video games, television, and comics.
Anyhow. I haven't seen it mentioned here, but if I'm the only rumor junkie here:
Apple will take the plunge with the iPhone, despite Jobs' dislike for PDAs/hand held devices. (seen anybody with a Newton lately?) The iPhone is A HREF="http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2006/10/20061008031708.shtml">rumored to be A HREF="http://www.macrumors.com/pages/2006/10/20061016171333.shtml">coming on the market in a few months. This is the next sure step for the iPod, although wireless may come into play as well, it is unclear if it would be bluetooth or 802.11b/g/a.
yeah but no one really does it well yet. trust me when they figure out how to couple the iPod with a really good, sleek phone design it will be game over.
and yeah, fuck iTunes. I have a little chinese jawn that doubles as my flash memory stick. plugs into the USB, shows up as a hard drive. not huge capacity, but then I can't jog for more than 15 minutes anyway.
gee, i wonder why?
Crazy, cause I love my KJam.
Does it all.
PDA - Yes
Cell - Yes
Music - Yes
Internet - Yes
Movies - Yes
TV - Yes
Wireless everything - Yes
Mind you. Some things it doesn't do amazingly well. But thats nothing that can't be done with a better cpu and a lil more memory. And I've had mine for over a year. Wondering how newer versions fair.
Hey, some people do. I should amend my post to say by "people" I did not mean "all people." There will always be gadget heads who want the latest and greatest multifunction devices.... I count myself among them. But we are talking about the average American consumer. The history of consumer devices is littered with failures that were technologically superior, but failed for other reasons: 8-track, betamax, minidisc, laserdisc, etc. Complexity or even technological superiority does not typically determine winners who can break from a niche market to mainstream.
We got like 6 Mbit download, which is now standart here in germany (in South Korea they have 100 Mbit as a standart)for like 35-45 Euros. Which is like $ 40-50 bucks.
But we got other devolopments too, right now you get your homeline telephone, your DSL and a digital TV line all for this 35-45 Euros.
It seems that the US is pretty fucked up when it comes to those things.
Peace
Hawkeye
My point is that I think in many ways the iPod craze is a very American phenomenon. They are the "in" thing, and to have anything but an iPod makes you either a geek or cheap. They're status symbols, just like sleek cell phones are, just like a pair of BAPEs is. Sure they're cool, but an element of that cool is that they're valuable and brand-name.
The other element of it is that when you show your friend your iPod, he or she instantly knows how to operate it. Everyone has one of those iPod to USB connectors, there are easy ways to get around copy protection, etc. If you've got another brand, you have to figure it out yourself, which for the technologically illiterate (and it surprises me every day how many of them there still are), that's a big task.
Apple will keep this up until someone comes up with a true iPod killer with an equally chic design and intuitive interface. And honestly, I don't see any of the current competitors doing that anytime soon.
You can do that with ipod if you use rockbox ( http://www.rockbox.org ), which is what I do.
http://dapreview.net
its a website purely dedicated to up and coming mp3 players. even though i dont buy a new mp3 players (my iriver 320 is mine for life...though the battery is dying), i look at this site weekly. its a reflection of what makers thing consumers want, and its really cool to see how people try to come up with a design that will challenge the ipod. very cool to witness the evolution. you got mp3 player, mp3 phones, mp3 toilets.
what i dont understand is why there's so many flash based and small capacity players ie, 4, 6gb...when creative was doing 30 gb like 4 years ago
Well, flash players don't have moving parts inside. I found that with my iRiver 120 (40 GB HD based), it would start having hiccups during playback and get more and more bad sectors on my HD because it couldn't handle the small shocks and sways from my daily commute (walk-subway-train-walk) after half a year or so. I've heard similar complaints from friends who tried using HD-based ones for strenuous workouts on the regular after a few months, as well.
My flash player has fell from my pocket onto concrete and only has aesthetic damage (some scratches) to show for it - still functions as normal. Unfortunately, it's really cost prohibitive right now to make a flash player beyond like 4-8 GB.
But yeah, small HD-capacity players make no sense to me, either. The small space of a flash player w/o the movement benefit.