iPod turns 5: will it ever fall off?

mannybolonemannybolone Los Angeles, CA 15,025 Posts
edited October 2006 in Strut Central
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


  • MjukisMjukis 1,675 Posts
    My Ipod broke down a couple of months after the guarantee ran out. I probably should go crying on Apple supports shoulder, but right now I'm too pissed. If I don't get any kind of compensation, I'll be pretty reluctant to shell out for a new one though. What I'm still wondering: Will the Itunes consumers ever care about sound quality? 128 kbps sucks.

  • pjl2000xlpjl2000xl 1,795 Posts
    i think they will always be a dominant force in the whole mp3 player market. They will have competiton, but they will always be the big dogs. There stock will level off in the next couple of years and might rise again if they start doing more next level shit to the next generations of ipods and more intergration into the whole wifi technology. But i dont think they are going anywhere anytime soon. I think we will see ALOT of new products coming from apple from computers to services like itunes and there will be a brand loyality formed by the ipod users that will roll with them to other products. Once you monopolize and define a certain product or service, if you keep your shit straight, you can reign supreme. I can see them going off and making a super company like a yamaha or sony, where you will have all different kinds of products and divisons under one roof.

  • dgriotdgriot 388 Posts
    Isn't it safe to call the ipod the clear winner of the audio-only portable media player war on both the flash-based and hard drive-based fronts already?

    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?

  • alieNDNalieNDN 2,181 Posts
    there are tons that have superior product, iriver(but the fell the fuck off) and cowan, but no one can market like apple, and their ergonmics and design trimphs

  • luckluck 4,077 Posts
    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).

  • won't the phone/MP3 player combinations eventually dominate?

    who wants to have to carry two separate devices?

  • BrianBrian 7,618 Posts
    whoever comes up with an affordable cell phone with nano-like storage capabilities and markets it well will be taking over shit

  • whoever comes up with an affordable cell phone with nano-like storage capabilities and markets it well will be taking over shit

    saying. everyone carries a phone. nearly everyone carries an ipod. phone that allows you to do both = clear winner, right?

  • luckluck 4,077 Posts
    whoever comes up with an affordable cell phone with nano-like storage capabilities and markets it well will be taking over shit

    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

  • mannybolonemannybolone Los Angeles, CA 15,025 Posts
    won't the phone/MP3 player combinations eventually dominate?

    who wants to have to carry two separate devices?

    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).

  • JuniorJunior 4,853 Posts
    I've been arguing with friends now for nigh on a year that Apple are going to stumble into trouble by not cutting a deal with some phone manufacturer to combine an ipod with a mobile.

    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?

  • JimsterJimster Cruffiton.etsy.com 6,946 Posts
    Despite all the hype about it, the fact remains I can get a chinese mp3 player off ebay for 0.01 and a fiver post, and I can plug this straight into my PC and it appears as storage, and I just copy the mp3s across. No drama. I can't do that with an all-singin, all-dancing ipod. So I don't want one.

    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.

  • JuniorJunior 4,853 Posts
    Despite all the hype about it, the fact remains I can get a chinese mp3 player off ebay for 0.01 and a fiver post, and I can plug this straight into my PC and it appears as storage, and I just copy the mp3s across. No drama. I can't do that with an all-singin, all-dancing ipod. So I don't want one.

    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.

  • whoever comes up with an affordable cell phone with nano-like storage capabilities and markets it well will be taking over shit

    saying. everyone carries a phone. nearly everyone carries an ipod. phone that allows you to do both = clear winner, right?

    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.

  • BsidesBsides 4,244 Posts
    whoever comes up with an affordable cell phone with nano-like storage capabilities and markets it well will be taking over shit

    saying. everyone carries a phone. nearly everyone carries an ipod. phone that allows you to do both = clear winner, right?

    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.

  • HawkeyeHawkeye 896 Posts
    I would like to know what you guys are thinking about the ever growing bandwith ?

    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

  • I would like to know what you guys are thinking about the ever growing bandwith ?

    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.


    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.

  • won't the phone/MP3 player combinations eventually dominate?

    who wants to have to carry two separate devices?

    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).

    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.

  • won't the phone/MP3 player combinations eventually dominate?

    who wants to have to carry two separate devices?

    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).


    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.

  • FatbackFatback 6,746 Posts
    superior product, iriver(but the fell the fuck off)

    gee, i wonder why?

    Apple Buys iRiver: The iPod crew takes the iRiver crew under its alabaster wings. April 1, 2004

  • DORDOR Two Ron Toe 9,902 Posts


    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.

    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.

  • 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.

    Crazy, cause I love my KJam.

    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.

  • HawkeyeHawkeye 896 Posts
    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.


    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

  • asstroasstro 1,754 Posts
    Count me among the ones that doesn't want a combo phone/Music player. The last few phones I had before I went BlackBerry had players and I never once used them. I don't want to think about what music to load or remove from my player so the smaller capacity of a phone doesn't work for me, and I can't believe they can make one with a battery that lasts long enough to survive a NYC subway commute without being charged everyday either. I'm curious to see what Apple comes up with, but I'd rather they make a great smartphone in the Blackberry/Treo area. Those things could use improving, but they pretty much have the music player interface figured out, don't fix what ain't broke.

  • spelunkspelunk 3,400 Posts
    I was kickin' it with a friend of mine from Spain on Saturday and I noticed that she called her player an "mp4 player" because that's the standard there now. She had some ridiculously small, sleek player that was ipod nano sized and could play videos and had 4GB of storage. She also encoded all her stuff with a really high quality encoder, and had some amazingly tight visualizer, way better than the one on iTunes.

    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.

  • dgriotdgriot 388 Posts
    Despite all the hype about it, the fact remains I can get a chinese mp3 player off ebay for 0.01 and a fiver post, and I can plug this straight into my PC and it appears as storage, and I just copy the mp3s across. No drama. I can't do that with an all-singin, all-dancing ipod. So I don't want one.

    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.

    You can do that with ipod if you use rockbox ( http://www.rockbox.org ), which is what I do.

  • dgriotdgriot 388 Posts
    Aren't there usually download caps from most European providers, though?

  • alieNDNalieNDN 2,181 Posts
    this thread cannot exist without reference to this site:
    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

  • dgriotdgriot 388 Posts
    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.
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