ipod hype
Just my 2 cents to the iPod discussion on p.g.o: I don’t understand the hype and I think it’s just that, a hype. None of the players in the iPod family is an outstanding product and for almost everyone’s needs there’s a better product available for less money. You might think that an iPod is cool. But, seriously, if you need a music player to define your personality, something went terribly wrong.
November 14th, 2005 at 1:08 pm
iPod *is* a nice product. And speaking about the two new iterations, the iPod nano and iPod video, they have amazing screens and a great interface.
If there is one single feature missing from all the iPods and iTunes, it’s gapless playback (noticable mostly at ripped Live CDs).
November 14th, 2005 at 1:49 pm
But, everything we buy/have defines our personalities: me/you have a certain taste, and that is what defines us as individuals. iPod is (for most people) great player, and that is what they want. Shure it cost so much, but (as with free software) you can walk away, or you can stay and enjoy it (if that is what you want). Imagine everything that becomes successful we tag as *fancy*… strange world that would be!
November 14th, 2005 at 2:56 pm
it’s just ipod is a reeaaaally simple and straight forward device to use. and reeaaaally well integrated with the software (itunes).
I love it for the exact same reason I love mac os X and apple hardware.
and in fact, I love gnome for the same reasons, (simplicity, straight forward, elegant design )
“design” is not simply “nice box and colors” , it’s a process, a feel , a way of use.
you cannot undersand itunes OR ipod alone. you have to use ipod AND itunes together.
November 14th, 2005 at 3:02 pm
Hey, I didn’t say anything bad about the iPod. I just wished people would stop talking about it as if it was something special. It’s just a music player. If it fits your needs, fine, buy one and use it. But stop talking about it as if it was a revolutionary device.
November 14th, 2005 at 3:08 pm
The iPod is not revolutionary featurewise, but *designwise* surely you must admit it stands out from the crowd? I certainly admit I make purchase decsions also based on aesthetics (if other features are comparable), and am prepared to pay a bit extra for nice design, be it in music players, kitchen utils, sunglasses or whatever. (Sadly, or luckily, the same doesn’t usually hold for my clothes purchases
November 14th, 2005 at 3:22 pm
The iPod *is* a revolutionary device to anyone who loves music, just as the Walkman was revolutionary so many years ago.
(Note that I used ‘iPod’ and ‘Walkman’, copyrighted terms describing specific products that define the genre, rather than laboriously explaining that I mean the general category of products of which those two brands are the most public, prolific and successful examples and have therefore, with good reason, become shorthand for these products in the mind of the general public.)
November 14th, 2005 at 4:13 pm
Uh oh, only four comments and already one that makes me wary (yep, I think Appleism is a cult
November 14th, 2005 at 4:15 pm
But it *is* special in that it’s greatly *designed* product. That’s what HP wrote about. The product has a key design goal. And even now companies are struggling to find it.
Just like the first responses on the shuffle. It doesn’t have a display! It’s useless! Not it isn’t. The design goal here comes from its target audience – “I want to grab my music quick, I want to jog listening to the best of my music and I don’t want to fiddle with it a lot”. Ever tried to even make a phonecall while running? How useful is a display there?
Having said all this, I’m a corner case in that a free codec support is important to me, so it’s great to see alternatives. As for the contrast between US and europe in terms of market share, I’d say it’s mainly because of the price difference which is huge for all Apple products.
November 14th, 2005 at 4:25 pm
(“hype”, “define your personality”)
..and your nickname is “neo”.
Hype it is, but it is a really great product.
Since I bought an Apple computer, I realize that the specs do not define the whole product, and so its prize.
I don’t have an iPod, but I’m sure it’s a great player and it doesn’t cost that much.
I even think it deserves its success.
I give you my opinion as mine, not as right.
November 14th, 2005 at 5:02 pm
Well said, neo!
November 14th, 2005 at 5:34 pm
My nickname is neo simply because my last name is Neumann which was turned into Neoman and Neo by some of my friends long before the Matrix trilogy.
And no, I don’t think the iPod design is extraordinarily good. The iPod products have quite a few design shortcomings. For example the fact that it isn’t possible to quickly replace an empty battery with a full one, or the lack of a radio receiver. If I was in the need to buy a new player today, I would consider an iPod Nano but I would definitely check for alternatives and I think I would end up buying a different product. Probably one that plays OGG files and has a decent line-in and encoding capabilities.
November 14th, 2005 at 5:42 pm
Gapless playback is an mp3 problem (and it sucks)…
I would be absolutely featherbrained, if I would spend around 200 or 300,-€ for a music player. That is absolutely ridiculous. Not to mention how many CD’s or whatever formatted music you can get for this money.
Consider Rio (www.rioaudio.com). They make same quality music players with equal nice design, much cheaper. Sure, it is not so “special” as Ipod – but who cares? I don’t, at least.
Rio had an .ogg capable player some time ago, too. I wonder why they don’t have it any more
November 14th, 2005 at 8:58 pm
Did you actually compare the recent line of players to the 5th gen. iPod (aka iPod Video)?
iPod simply delivers more hardware for the buck!
I don’t know how they do it, but $20 less the price of an iAudio X5 delivering 160×120 video at 15fps, the iPod can deliver 320×240 video at 30fps. Apple probably gets lower prices for components they purchase in bulks.
November 15th, 2005 at 4:00 am
Outside of the white cords coming from ears, dancing shadows and “being” my playlist, the iPod really isn’t that much hype. Having seen people who cannot work a computer for the life of them pick up an iPod and within 2 minutes have all the working knowledge of the interface they will ever need, the iPod is the only mp3 player I’ve ever seen that “Just Works”. The argument for a cheaper player that is harder to use is the same as the argument for switching from a Windows 98 to a Gnome 1.4 desktop. Sure, it’s cheaper, but will the average user get enough out of it to warrant the difference?
November 15th, 2005 at 4:11 am
I’m quite happy with a psp and a pair of headphones /earclip…
iPod is overrated
November 15th, 2005 at 5:34 pm
Kerrick, sure he will. The Rio Carbon, for instance, is not harder to use than any Ipod. I would even say, the Carbon is easier to use, because it has not an overload of (IMHO) useless features like “photo playback” or organizer.
But it has a 5 band equalizer (with useful default settings for various music genres) to adjust the sound, and I have missed this for a long time in other music playback devices. Does the Ipod have it?
November 15th, 2005 at 7:02 pm
Neo just pointed it out…anyone seen an iPod with direct writing / encoding capabilities? No?
Well, that renders them almost useless for the whole bunch of musicians out there…
December 4th, 2005 at 2:52 pm
I’m happy that i have Creative and no iPod
December 15th, 2005 at 11:22 am
IGrizzli, i don’t think that Creative is much more better than iPod… I have iPod and it serves me well.
December 27th, 2005 at 11:53 pm
Why are people just talking about the ipods music capibilities? People, who probably don’t own one, are failing to see that we, iPod owners, are also holding a portable hard drive/ “PDA” in the palm of our hand. You can pretty much back up all your files onto your iPod, get your address book up-to-date, add entries into your calander, etc . . . I am a designer and being able to back-up and download clients artwork to various computers has done wonders for me.
But we should probably continue talking about how great, or terrible, the mp3 player is, right?
Ohh how can you, neo, say that this isn’t a revolutionary device? This product has revolutionary device all over it.
March 15th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
Of course, the flip side to all this is that if you need to judge a person on the music player they choose, then there could be something wrong too; only not wrong with me.
March 15th, 2006 at 7:47 pm
i think you just never really used it, it may be a general problem of you, youre not really into usability, just a thought thou, dont know you personaly
March 15th, 2006 at 7:51 pm
I think that the iPod is mostly overpriced hype. There are cheaper and more capable portable digital audio players out there, one of them even runs on Free Software (the Neuros). None of them do as well as the iPod because Apple advertises heavily (just another pointer to how a superior set of features won’t make a product sell itself). As a result, many other portable digital audio players are discontinued.
Can the iPods play all the Apple-sanctioned file formats yet? I seem to remember that the original iPods couldn’t do this, and that strikes me as counterproductive, even if we only consider the narrow argument Apple makes that you ought to surround yourself with the media files Apple’s software can play (in other words, doing what Apple tells you to do). Will the iPod be able to play media in free and unencumbered formats like FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, and Speex? I doubt it, not because it would be silly to add such features (other players can do this for Ogg Vorbis and FLAC in particular), but because Apple is trying to do what Microsoft is trying to do–railroad users into using their encumbered formats exclusively. But because Apple is somehow seen as better than Microsoft, it’s impolitic to criticize Apple (when it comes to how DRM shafts you no matter where you get it from, I highly suggest reading EFF’s “The Customer is Always Wrong” essay by Fred Von Lohmann).
After so many revisions of the iPod, the iPod ought to be able to do more that would address ordinary people’s use of the device: Record audio, listen to the radio (and identify songs on the radio), let users easily share data without a desktop or laptop computer attached (including awareness of other portable digital devices via wireless and Zeroconf/Bonjour), and broadcast a signal over low-power FM so people can use the device in their car or with their home stereo. These are all features that would make the iPod significantly better than it is and begin to justify its high price tag. But no iPod can do these things out of the box; all require additional parts. Most of these parts are not even available from Apple. So there goes the convenience of one-stop shopping from Apple. Twenty years ago I could use similarly sized portable devices to listen to the radio (AM and FM), record, and trade tapes with friends. And MP3s don’t sound much better than what I could record with cassette tapes, not to mention their the MP3 patent encumberance, something that never adversely affected my cassette tape use.
Can the iPod work as a USB mass storage device so I don’t need a special protocol or special software to change what’s on an iPod? I don’t recall anyone ever using their iPod in such a fashion, so I’m mildly curious. If it can’t, this is another thing about the iPod that needs to be fixed. There’s no good reason one should require use of a particular program to copy, rename, delete, and edit things stored on a portable storage device. We wouldn’t tolerate that for other portable digital audio players or USB keys (sometimes called “thumbnail drives”). The only reasons would accept otherwise is because they’re placing business priorities above user’s priorities, and that’s inexcusable.
Finally, some of these reasons are why I don’t like the term “podcasting”. That term is a combination of iPod and broadcasting; I don’t want to litter my language with advertisements for a device that is more expensive and less capable than it ought to be.
March 15th, 2006 at 8:20 pm
At some time, I didn’t buy one because it doesn’t play Vorbis (would it kill Apple…?). While this is still a reason, there is another one now. I don’t want to be an iPod owner anymore. Everyone is.
March 16th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
I think you guys are missing something here. The iPod is popular and popular isn’t cool. So all you iPod fans are totally uncool. iPods suck. Yeah.
July 15th, 2006 at 5:14 am
i’m looking for a good music player with a video display, line-in, OGG capability, that has more than let’s say…20GB …..any ideas? or am i asking too much? i’ve read tons of reviews for different players and im still not sure whether the video ipod is the best way to go….if anyone has any advice for me i’d appreciate it….:)