Who Designed The iPod? A Genius, That's Who!

[ghostface24]

Well, I'm going to be the odd man out. I'm a previous owner of a deceased H320, returned it to the store, only replacement they could give me, an anti-ipod person, was an ipod . Ironically, now I have this ipod (5g, Black, 60 gig) and it's not quite enjoying. I don't like this ipod that I hold in my hand (actually, to maintain it's neat condition, I have it in its case at all times). It's not durable for one and Itunes is the crappiest form of software I ever dealt with. DRM is the most retarded concept I ever heard of, if you buy something, don't you own it? Why must there be restrictions in place when you bought a song. The only good news I have about my replacement player is that it supports Rockbox which is perfect because I did have experience with rockbox on my H320. It's UMS and is released from the clutches of Itunes. I still don't like the slow USB interface and the scroll wheel, but I didn't have much of a choice when it came to dap replacements.

If anybody body has an ipod, they should really try out Rockbox, it's the best firmware you could have on this player, the default firmware sucks, only pro is that it can play video.

Anyways, cheers .

 

[ghostface24]

Damn right, CDs are the best way (well, DCC and MFSL CDs ) to obtain audio. Buying a crappy transcode of a crappy codec sucks. Some people don't know they are just burning money in products that suck, kind of like spending $300,000 on a Civic. Quality is cheap, price is expensive.

 

[rammedstein]

Lets start with:

My friend, I never start a fight. I´m just tired of kids in these foruns. The first oppinion is calling someone "dumb noob". I just fired back, because I´m "all kinds of apple sh*t" user, and I´m tired of these wars.
I can afford paying for "style and design" (if you can call it that), no 5th grade kid should tell me how to spend my money.
Just that.

Who do you tihnk is the main buyer of PMPs'? 80-yearolds in nursing homes?

In iPods the everything (hardware & software) is pretty bad because:
1 Small - have to conserve space so uses parts not as strong/reliable
2 Small - smaller battery, less play time
3 Small - smaller harddrives require more power to spin up sometimes, the motor has less torque
4 Small - easily damaged because of wear
5 Small - screen size
6 Proprietry - connectors, can't easily buy a new USB cable ey?
7 Proprietry - software, have to use iTunes to access it
8 Proprietry - software, slows down your usb
9 Proprietry - DRM very intrusive
10 Proprietry - DRM is poor quality
11 Proprietry - DRM redundancy - what if your house gets broken into? computer - gone, ipod gone all hope in hell fo getting your music back legally - GONE
12 Proprietry - Firmware, seriously lacks features, cmon, a bunch of normal techy guys can do it for free, why can't apple?
13 Hardware - sealed battery, want to get a new one? lets send it away for a few months! - then have to fork out alot of money


Price - ok, we may not all have a job, so we all want something that doesn't cost us an arm and a leg, I bought my Creative Zen Touch before any of this fandangled crap came out, sure it was a brick, but hey! It was cheaper than an iPod, i had it way before anyone else had a PMP, it only cost me $325 AUD, and i think its the only PMP with a SNR Ratio good enough to plug into a home theater, also, its a brick, yeah, but hey, its only a brick because its probably older than anyone here has know of iPods, and its battery has probably played longer than most of your music collections, it has an astonishing 25 Hour practical battery life! Also, the screen is large, easy to read and has a very logical menu structure. The player has a dedicated "power" button, dedicated Volume buttons, as well and a very easy to use up-down scroll pad, ever feel dizzy?

Oh, and can i say, this product has all of this 4 years ago, and apple still dont have it all!

 

[r0x0r]

3 Small - smaller harddrives require more power to spin up sometimes, the motor has less torque

A DAP requires, for 1441kbps (uncompressed) WAV, a minimum read rate of 10.5MB/min. You don't need a fast hard drive for that but for accessing songs then a quicker hard drive would be benefcial. That's one thing that sucks about Hi-MD's; access takes SECONDS, not milliseconds.

4 Small - easily damaged because of wear

*cough* nano screen *cough*

5 Small - screen size

Hence why the iPod video is so mediocre. Or is that because of the poor colour depth. The pathetic screen resolution could explain the problem. Hmm...

11 Proprietry - DRM redundancy - what if your house gets broken into? computer - gone, ipod gone all hope in hell fo getting your music back legally - GONE

That is a REALLY good point; I wish I'd thought of it sooner. At least CD's can be backed-up (NO, I DO NOT advocate piracy). The only way I can find some of the music I want is on P2P, which is still at higher quality than iTunes; I wil buy the CD as soon as I find the frick'n thing.

Price - ok, we may not all have a job, so we all want something that doesn't cost us an arm and a leg,

In my hometown (Adelaide, Australia), a 2Gb nano casts AU$299. A 20Gb Toshiba Gigabeat costs $329. The 4Gb nano costs $359. iPod = poor value for money.

I bought my Creative Zen Touch before any of this fandangled crap came out, sure it was a brick, but hey! It was cheaper than an iPod, i had it way before anyone else had a PMP, it only cost me $325 AUD, and i think its the only PMP with a SNR Ratio good enough to plug into a home theater, also, its a brick, yeah, but hey, its only a brick because its probably older than anyone here has know of iPods, and its battery has probably played longer than most of your music collections, it has an astonishing 25 Hour practical battery life! Also, the screen is large, easy to read and has a very logical menu structure. The player has a dedicated "power" button, dedicated Volume buttons, as well and a very easy to use up-down scroll pad, ever feel dizzy?

My friend has one and it has never let him down, even though he's dropped onto a tile floor about 10 times. The worst that's happened is he (and me, and everyone else I know who has a Creative HD-DAP), has had to force reset because of the Creative HD-DAP's self-preservation mode. Sure beats having to take it back to the dealer for expensive repairs though.

 

[rammedstein]

I live in sydney, so im with you on the prices bit, Zens are awesome because since they are bricks, they can also take the beatings of bricks, since mine is 4 years old it has probably been dropped on tile floors atleast 100 times, battery hasn't descreased in lifespan either, iPod batteries seem to be very bad at holding charge after the 6month mark. The most amazing feat of my Zen is that it survived the washing machine....TWICE!

And another thing about the iTunes store, ever tried getting good Power Metal, Symphonic Metal, Heavy Metal and Indie. Also, with iPods, the large capacity ones cost a fortne more than the small ones, the only difference is the harddrive, and maybe the case a lille, but the Zen, there is a rather proportinate price rise between capacities, and the fact that it is easy to upgrade a 20GB Creative Zen Touch to a 60GB model, so if you buy a 20GB for now, if you want more storage you just whack a new harddrive in it, instead of buying a whole new iPod

 

[MtB]

I don't see your logic in saying that an iPod is a barrier to using iTunes. Most people I know use iTunes and none of them have an iPod. My brother, in particular, buys songs and videos off of the iTMS quite frequently, and simply uses his laptop to listen to the songs, or burns them to a CD. iTunes is the door to the iPod in many cases, and not the other way around. 99 cents is a lot smaller investment than 69-399 dollars.

That said, quite in contrast to what the article purports, Apple makes most of its money off the iPod, not iTunes. iTunes is designed to practically break even so as to sell more iPods. If they opened up iTunes more, they'd lose all their profits off selling those little pretty boxes.

iTunes is designed to entice people into wanting an iPod and originally, an iMac (although they eventually saw the wisdom of making a Windows version). I believe iTunes is a great idea and a great service that is poorly delivered (it should be a standard web service until I click "buy" or "preview" which can then go to iTunes for playback / purchase).

 

[andronin]

One word PodCasts
iTunes just does them better than others when it comes to integration. Okay I'll admit there are some things missing like bittorrent support but at least it works
my 2c

As far as music on iTunes is concerned they can't come to South Africa 'cause our legal system won't allow online purchasing of music, or so I gather

 

[nilepez]

One word PodCasts
iTunes just does them better than others when it comes to integration. Okay I'll admit there are some things missing like bittorrent support but at least it works
my 2c

As far as music on iTunes is concerned they can't come to South Africa 'cause our legal system won't allow online purchasing of music, or so I gather

Hmm...aren't podcasts just MP3 files? The one's i've seen are. And if they're just streaming audio, then virtually any player out there that handles MP3 can play them just fine.

Regardless, I wouldn't install iTunes just to play them. First thing I do hafter I install quicktime is uninstall itunes....then again, since I discovered VLC, I no longer use quicktime.

 

[andronin]

Hmm...aren't podcasts just MP3 files? The one's i've seen are. And if they're just streaming audio, then virtually any player out there that handles MP3 can play them just fine.

:roll:
Not necessarily, quite a few are enhanced with content you can't put on an mp3, but those also play on VLC (???)

Regardless, I wouldn't install iTunes just to play them. First thing I do hafter I install quicktime is uninstall itunes....then again, since I discovered VLC, I no longer use quicktime.

My point wasn't the iTunes is great, it just does PodCasts great, and the sync thereof, better than any other proggie that I have found (I am also happy with the way it manages my music, as it does a better job than I would. Using VLC as a music player is awquid at best, video is fine (imho)

If you have an iPod (I do) , you don't really have a choice though do you

Yes VLC is great but it is only a player, you cannot pull rss feeds with it and this is the reason I got an iPod (the topic being the device, not iTunes)

 

[nilepez]

Hmm...aren't podcasts just MP3 files? The one's i've seen are. And if they're just streaming audio, then virtually any player out there that handles MP3 can play them just fine.

:roll:
Not necessarily, quite a few are enhanced with content you can't put on an mp3, but those also play on VLC (???)

Regardless, I wouldn't install iTunes just to play them. First thing I do hafter I install quicktime is uninstall itunes....then again, since I discovered VLC, I no longer use quicktime.

My point wasn't the iTunes is great, it just does PodCasts great, and the sync thereof, better than any other proggie that I have found (I am also happy with the way it manages my music, as it does a better job than I would. Using VLC as a music player is awquid at best, video is fine (imho)

If you have an iPod (I do) , you don't really have a choice though do you

Yes VLC is great but it is only a player, you cannot pull rss feeds with it and this is the reason I got an iPod (the topic being the device, not iTunes)

No, I was referring to quicktime, which forces itunes on you whenever you install it.

Like I said, I don't really worry about podcasts. I guess if I did listen to them regularly, I might consider installing itunes, if it does, in fact, work better than everything else, but I haven't had much interest, so it won't happen. I found the traditional uses for iTunes lacking (though it's probably great if you own an iPod).

 

[twile]

Adults mostly use Windows at work, that's what they're used to. They're not children of the modern computer age (people with computers in their house since childhood)

Now, wait a second. I fall into your generalization (being a 34 yeard old software developer), except for one thing. I AM a child of the modern computer age. I grew up with the Tandy CoCo / Commodore Vic-20/64/128 and moved onto an Amiga which I used until 1997.

You might have taken an interest in non-graphical computers as a kid, but most kids probably didn't care so much for text commands and whatnot. I was 8 when Windows 95 was launched, for example, on which I was more easily able to play games. I used computers with color displays and increasing levels of graphical detail and interaction in every grade of Elementary school from 1st onwards. Before I could write an idea as long as this paragraph I was playing games and messing around with computers at school and home, and lots of other kids did as well. That's sorta what I mean by being children of the "modern" computer age. I don't doubt that you were growing up during an important phase of computing as well

 

[twile]

No, I was referring to quicktime, which forces itunes on you whenever you install it.

Actually you don't have to install iTunes with Quicktime, it's a common misconception. Go to http/www.apple.com/quicktime/download and search for the following text: QuickTime Standalone Installer. That should highlight the link to the iTunes-free version.

 

[twile]

One thing that just occured to me about DRM... consider some of the older forms of media, before everything went digital. Magazines, books, newspapers... magazines primarily, though. Here's magazine DRM: You can only read it if you're sitting in a particular type of chair. The pages are impossible to cut and highlight, so you can't edit the pages in any way, be it to focus on a particular section or make a collage or let your kid put a picture on his/her school poster. Silly restrictions.

But that's just what DRM does to music. You can't modify a song, like re-encode or apply filters for whatever reason. Can't put them in a music video if they can only be played by one program or device.

People need to step back and take a look at the overall picture. It's MUSIC. Sure, it's in a different format, but it's still just music, and if you pay for it, you should be able to listen to it however you want. Most people probably won't even share a song with more than 1 person, so the whole "safeguarding sales" argument doesn't even hold up... people and places claiming how many MP3s are being swapped illegally won't say that the majority of those are by a minority of people who might each download hundreds or thousands of MP3s in a sitting, just because they're free. If you make it impossible to trade them for free, people won't pay for all those songs, they just won't share them, because the people doing the file sharing are cheap college students who aren't about to throw $10k at iTunes to get their music--they simply don't have it, or that much interest in getting the music if they have to pay for it.

But let's ignore the reasons DRM is supposed to exist. Let's see what it does. Locks you into software and hardware, just to help the company peddling it to pull a profit? I mean, how much worse does DRM stuff have to get before people say "This whole concept is a load of shit"? "System error. You may not play this MOV file because Quicktime has detected that you are currently running Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer." or how about "Sorry, this content is reserved for computers running the newest version of OS X" or "This computer is running Windows XP. Please trade it in for a Mac to enjoy this media file." Sure, it sounds absurd, but it all falls in line with the effective of DRM: For the company distributing things to ensure you use their hardware and their software.

This stuff is absurd and it's got to stop. Everybody buying songs from iTunes (and other similar stores) are giving the companies their money and vote of confidence. They're saying they don't have a problem with it, and they're quite comfortable shelling out more money in the future for similar things. People need to start considering the implications of their buying decisions, and what the company is really trying to do. Are they just selling a product that has to remain open, competitive, and high-quality, or are they trying to strip away your choices in compatable hardware and software?

 

[r0x0r]

One thing that just occured to me about DRM... consider some of the older forms of media, before everything went digital. Magazines, books, newspapers... magazines primarily, though. Here's magazine DRM: You can only read it if you're sitting in a particular type of chair. The pages are impossible to cut and highlight, so you can't edit the pages in any way, be it to focus on a particular section or make a collage or let your kid put a picture on his/her school poster. Silly restrictions.

Ha ha ha :lol: What a great analogy. At least you get a physical product that is YOURS, FOREVER.

This stuff is absurd and it's got to stop. Everybody buying songs from iTunes (and other similar stores) are giving the companies their money and vote of confidence. They're saying they don't have a problem with it, and they're quite comfortable shelling out more money in the future for similar things. People need to start considering the implications of their buying decisions, and what the company is really trying to do. Are they just selling a product that has to remain open, competitive, and high-quality, or are they trying to strip away your choices in compatable hardware and software?

Yes, hypocrites shit me off too. "DRM sucks, but I use iTunes because I'm too stupid to realise that I'm getting screwed. My petty brain is unable to comprehend the difference between 1441kbps audio which has been available for 22 years and heavily compressed audio."


A joke for you all:

George Bush walks into a doctor's office with a frog on his head. The doctor looks up and says "Can I help you?" and the frog replies "Yeah doc, I need you to get this wart off my arse".

 

[tj_the_first]

I don't know why everyone always wants to knock the big guy all the time. It's the done thing to bash MS but we almost all use Windows because
we can play games
Linux is too complicated (as a sysadmin it rocks but not for general use)
we can download almost any program and not have to look for our version
we can buy a computer for a reasonable price to run it

I used WMP9 for ages until a friend with an iPod showed me iTunes and after that I never went back. I've never bought music because like many people say - a CD is better quality and is physical. There are shortcomings in iTunes (I've yet to see a complicated program without them) but I've used MP3 music since WMP7 and ID3 tag handling in it, 8, & 9 was appalling whereas iTunes was excellent. Don't mention WinAmp, I know heaps of people loved it but I just didn't like it. Also, where in most people's dismissal of iTunes is the acknowledgement of PodCasts? I don't subscribe to any and never have but I know a lot of people do and I think kudos go to Apple for helping it get going.

As for the price of iPods I agree that you'd have to be a naff to buy a Nano. 4GB Nano for AU$369 or 30GB iPod for AU$449? Hardly a decision I thought - that's why I bought the 30GB from Apple Education and paid AU$404 (wanted the 60GB but money is money). I waited about a year (before buying) for someone to make an obviously better player for obviously less but noone stepped up to the plate. I don't care about video (but if it was there = bonus), radio or voice recording. If they're features you're after I'll tell you right now - they aren't there without paying lots more money. But they're things you can get on your phone nowadays.

Conclusion:
For all the knocking the iPod gets I reckon it's a good product. Maybe not the very best value for money but it's certainly up there and when you polish it it really does look nice.

 

[twile]

I used WMP9 for ages until a friend with an iPod showed me iTunes and after that I never went back.

Also, where in most people's dismissal of iTunes is the acknowledgement of PodCasts? I don't subscribe to any and never have but I know a lot of people do and I think kudos go to Apple for helping it get going.

Firstly I'd at least TRY WMP11, it's a pretty nice product and it's still in Beta, so it can only get better. If you don't use podcasting or get music through iTunes then those two arguments don't much matter to you. Try it

As far as PodCasts in general go... am I missing something, or are they just audio files your computer gets for you when they're posted? That sounds a lot like a mailing list for files or something. An interesting idea I suppose, and in the future more media and website updates will be sent to you rather than you browsing until you find them, but Apple makes it sound like nobody had ever made a web-based radio station or downloadable audio shows available. And suing anybody that uses a word that contains "pod" is just silly, but they do that...

 

[krfiii]

I first off wanted to throw my 2 cents in.... iPOD is crap. my g/f had to have one (she has a nano), so when i said i wouldnt buy her one (she never listens to me) her mom got her one fro x-mas last year. now she is dropping big time cash to load it up. Not only that, but earphones are crap, no way to recharge the battery outta the box besides usb?

Now what did i get....Creative zen micro photo...all i can say is wow....140 off ebay, yea earphones suck, but i am gonna get some in canal sony's which still put me under the 200 tag of the nano. and this is where i dont think the review went far enough into the competion over the iTunes....


The Rhaposdy To Go(there are are few others too...) services....you pay a monthly fee, and you can load your device till your happy. To my knowledge there is no limit on amount. best of all it works with many other PMP's out there. not all, so buy carefull, but many do. I would love to see a comparison between the 2. I think it would put shame to iTunes, and therefore to the iPod!!!

 

[vindaloopie]

nice article lol