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iPod Casualties Offer New-In-Box Bargains
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue May 29, 2007 01:38 AM
from the new-old-stock-market dept.
from the new-old-stock-market dept.
An anonymous reader writes "For the last few years makers from Creative to Virgin have proclaimed their latest digital audio player to be an iPod Killer, only to watch those portables flame-out in the marketplace. This doesn't mean there was anything wrong with them, in fact some were pretty decent. They just couldn't compete under all the iPod hype. It turns out that this pattern has created a huge sub-market of new-in-the-box stock, sold for pennies on the dollar to overstock vendors who then pawn them off cheap to the public. For the price of a basic iPod Shuffle you can now acquire some well-equipped units from a few years back. Examples include the 40GB Toshiba Gigabeat F40 and AlienWare's CE-IV with external speaker system."
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It's all marketing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's all marketing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:It's all marketing... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It's all marketing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every company that is competing with Apple is staffed managers, engineers, and other people who have spent their entire lives working with Windows and ugly ass beige x86 machines at home and work.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's all marketing... (Score:5, Funny)
That's why I call my Toshiba Gigabeat the "t-Bag".
Parent
Re:It's all marketing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is the proposition that a product or book or movie is exceptionally good less credible than the proposition that a marketing campaign is particularly good?
If it were so easy to manufacture an 'iPod' success or a 'Harry Potter' success through hype, why do attempts to duplicate these successes fail, since hype can be easily bought? Are they just not paying enough money?
This notion,I believe, comes from two things: not "getting" the thing in question (e.g. "but they iPod has less storage than X, and X is cheaper" or "the Wii doesn't have cutting edge graphics"), and a misunderstanding about what marketing is. Marketing is communication, and effective communiation starts with understanding. Yes, it is possible to create some horrible dog of a product and sell quite a bit through hype, but this is not the only way to use marketing.
Marketing and engineering should be complementary disciplines. Engineering is about trade offs, and marketing is about understanding value. Unfortunatley, both engineering and marketing often are consulted too late in the game, and shoddy work is common in both fields.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Engineering is about trade offs, and marketing is about understanding value.
Your points are well-made, and I agree that there is something of a knee-jerk reaction that if something is popular, it must be somehow crap or hyped. That a product might genuinely succeed on its own merits doesn't seem to occur to some people. However, I think perhaps you have a slightly rosy view of marketing. While marketing is certainly an avenue of information dissemination for a new or improved product (in accordance with your "understanding value" idea), I think a very large portion of marketing
Re:It's all marketing... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It's all marketing... (Score:5, Funny)
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video on a 2" screen? Hahahaha... (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, I just want music and iTunes is NOT a positive feature. With these vendors I can get all the function I want, and avoid the Apple Tax!
Re:It's all marketing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, I have been paring down on the material possessions and avoiding buying new ones, no matter how tempting. I'm happily using my 2nd Gen iPod (I recently replaced the battery with a $5 one from OWC), even though I desire one of the spiffy new video iPods. I just really don't need a new one. Please don't think I'm saying that you shouldn't own a music player or that I am criticizing you for owning one.
I'm coming at this de-emphasis on material possessions from two angles: The most basic is personal. As I said, I'm a pack rat, and it's stunting my psychological growth. There comes a point when you don't own consumer goods, they own you. I'm consciously moving away from that. If you don't have this problem, good for you. Just be cautious and self aware so that it doesn't develop. A second reason is global. There is a hidden cost to all the junk we consume in resources. This cost is not sustainable long term. I'm not just referring to the resources needed for the physical components, but the environmental resources that are affected by the production.
I've made a conscious decision to earn less in order to have more free time. It turns out that I'm earning about the same, but my free time is filled up with activities that generally don't involve a lot of consumption. I don't own a a game console and I cancelled my cable a couple of years ago. I've gotten back to some hobbies that involve actually making things. I'm picking up a new hobby (welding).
As you seem like an intelligent person, I don't doubt that you also have a non-consumer life, and that you engage in creative activities outside of consumer culture. Perhaps you play a musical instrument, perhaps you're into DIY home improvement, perhaps you are an artist of some sort.
Anyway, I'm in no position to judge you personally. I am a hypocrite and I don't feel especially bad about being one. None of us are perfect. I just wanted to describe to you how I am trying to improve myself. That's all. If you can take something away from my little story, great. If not, no harm done I hope.
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So what you're saying is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So for me, as a possibly occasional iPod user, I disagree that iPods are "affordable". It's not worth
It used to be even worse... (Score:5, Insightful)
Thing is, before Apple being the #1 player with all the accessories and brand name and all, it was just another player. Everyone could make a HDD based player... and fucked up.
E.g., I remember going to a few shops in '99 to get an MP3 player. (Yeah, one of those "back in my day" tales;) There was the iPod or there were some things that qualified as one or more of:
A) As big as a fucking brick. (E.g., I remember the Archos brand name just because it was the biggest one on display. It looked like two 3" HDDs stacked.)
B) Overpriced to hell and back. (Oh, they had some extra feature ahead of their time, but not worth paying that kinda premium for it. E.g., there were those offering video playback... except they cost more than a decent laptop, which could play those videos in higher res.)
C) Encumbered by retarded world-domination attempts. (E.g., no Sony could actually play MP3, even after they had started grudgingly calling them MP3 players. If you read the fine print, they offered to convert your MP3s to their own 64kb/s codecs that sounded like playing the song through a cheap old digital watch. I'm sorry, but MP3 is lossy as it is, converting it to another lossy codec just gives you basically a multiplication of that.)
D) Were an interface nightmare. (Creative, I'm looking at you.)
Etc.
I'm sorry, I may not be the most hip and fashion-aware guy around, but if I end up with something the size and weight of a brick on my belt, then at least it better not cost _more_. I ended up buying a CD-based player at that time, since it was a lot cheaper and actually lighter than some of those.
Years later I got a Creative Zen, because it was one of those clearance bargains the summary mentions. It's still bigger than a same generation iPod, and still encumbered by retarded ideas. E.g., I can't actually just plug the USB cable in and drag-and-drop the music files on it, you actually need Creative's software for that. Why? E.g., even if I wanted to start a company producing accessories for it, it doesn't have a little connector like the iPod has. The only accessory you can make for it, will have to be connected through 3.5mm audio jack. I.e., either it's headphones or it's speakers, and not too smart ones either.
What I'm trying to say is: even just saying "but iPod has accessories" makes it sound like some random twist of fate, and absolves Creative and Sony and everyone of all responsibility. It makes it sound like some other people just happened to make accessories for the iPod and not for the Zen or Walkman, dunno why, it must be hype again. In reality there was a time where that market was up for grabs for everyone, and the likes of Creative and Sony just blew it fair and square. That iPod ended up king of the hill and worth making accessories for, simply because (at the time when it counted) it was indeed the better player.
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Re:It used to be even worse... (Score:5, Informative)
The iPod was released [slashdot.org] in October of 2001. And if I remember correctly it was priced very high. It was also Mac only for the first year.
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Re:Could be (Score:5, Insightful)
Only in terms of its interface? You say this like it is something trivial. Surely, the interface is a critical aspect of a personal music player that one interacts with? And how does the interface not affect functionality? A good interface makes a device more functional than a device with the same features but a poor interface to access them. As for "styling," I don't think that had much to do with the success of the iPod. Unless by "styling" you mean "form factor." The iPod was smaller and thinner than other devices with equivalent storage. That's very important. It's not just "style." It's part of the function. The whole idea of these players is that they're portable. I don't think many (especially early adopters) bought it because it was stylish - but rather than it wasn't like a brick to carry around. Look at how people laugh at old-fashioned mobile phones that are too big to carry comfortably in your pocket.
Got any evidence for that one, or are you just making stuff up?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It used to be even worse... (Score:4, Informative)
And you can just plug in the USB cable for an iPod and drag and drop music files on it without having Apple's software or (under GNU/Linux) miscellaneous third-party software specifically designed to rebuild the proprietary file structures on the iPod installed on your computer? The last Creative music player I had access to, from what I remember, did not require any special software. It plugged into my Gentoo-based laptop and I was able to copy music files to and from it using nothing other than Linux's USB storage driver, as though it were an ordinary USB thumb drive. Can't remember the actual model (the device didn't belong to me, but to a friend whom I don't see all that often), but it was definitely a Creative, and probably 2003-2004 vintage.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For starters the accessories market that exists to cater for the iPod is there because of its popularity, not because the design automatically lends itself better than any other product. If the others had conquered the market to the same extent Apple has there would be the same amount of accessories available for their products.
Secondly, for what it is the iPod(s) could definitely be cheaper. All we're talking about really is a hard drive (or flash
Re:So what you're saying is... (Score:5, Informative)
That it's interface (not the screen the butt connector) is 100% open and interfaces to a huge range of equipment.
I can dock my ipod in the kitchen wall dock and see the LCD readout of what is playing in the garage, basement, living room and bathroom on my whole house audio system's touchscreens. In the car I see the information and can browse the songs and playlists on my car's stereo screen while the ipod is safe in the glovebox out of view when I leave the car. I stop and park the ipod pauses and shuts off, I start the car and the ipod turns on and plays from where I last left off at.
NO OTHER mp3 player on the market has the level of integration. The Zune cant do that so it's already a dead body because microsoft was too short sighted.
That is why many people select the Ipod. I love my iRiver, it actually records in stereo with manual level adjustemnts at full 320Kbps mp3. The ipod cant record anywhere as good as it, but the Ipod has integration that no other mp3 player even bothers to duplicate.
That is where every single other player fails. Have that charging/dock connector be 100% open and documented and allow companies to make crap for your product without paying extortion fees back to you.
THAT is how apple sealed the deal with the ipod.
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hype (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:hype (Score:5, Insightful)
So, people who choose a different product than the one you like are stupid?
"Features" aren't really the main selling point here. Ease of use and form factor are much more important. Most people just want to listen to music. How is the iPod lacking in that respect? It plays music, and works well. Much of the attraction is in the iTunnes software, not the device itself.
Maybe they did. you seem rather arrogant to suggest that if they choose an iPod, they weren't thinking about their purchase. I know plenty of people who took more than 3 months to think about their decision, and still chose an iPod as the best player. I guess they are just inferior to you.
Those things don't matter that much to most people. Of those items, gapless playback would be the most popular, but of course, the iPod offers gapless playback, so it's not a differentiating feature. Just because you want those things, doesn't mean it matters to others. Especially Linux and Ogg Vorbis. That is an insignificant question to 99% (or more) of the market.
The thing about paylists is almost opposite to how most people work. Not very many people want to create playlists on the go - that's when they are listening to music. but they enjoy making playlists on their computer, and iTunes features like "Smart Playlists." But most of all they enjoy that they just plug the thing in, and iTunes does the rest.
Perhaps they are thinking about their needs more than you give them credit for?
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yes they can (Score:3, Insightful)
Reminds Me Of Linux Vs OS X Desktops (Score:5, Insightful)
I get the same feeling when I see the non-iPod players. The problems with the entire package, player, software, and store(s), is so obvious to anyone with an iPod that one has to think that the companies are absolutely delusional in their development.
You would think they would just need to spend the cash to have a room with:
A Mac running iTunes
An iPod
One iPod user
Their player they are developing
A machine running their software
and let that person point out all the glaring problems these companies have coming up with a complete package like Apple has with the iPod/iTunes/iTMS.
Re:Reminds Me Of Linux Vs OS X Desktops (Score:5, Insightful)
Selling style means you've raised the bar beyond simple functionality. Consumers appreciate an attractive package if the basic product is solid, but they resent a flaky product with go-faster stripes. They tend to feel (with justification) that you could have spent the extra money on making the damn thing work.
Apple can meet that challenge for two reasons: First, Apple sells to the high end of the market. Its margins are large enough to support the price of making everything "just work". Second, Apple controls quite a lot of its product stack, so it can make sure all the pieces fit together nicely. PC vendors have trouble selling style for exactly the same reasons. Their margins are much thinner, so the cost of making sure everything's polished will hit them where it hurts. And OEMs don't control a critical part of their product stack: the OS. It doesn't matter how good the components are or how much you've tricked out the box, a high-end Windows PC will have almost all the same issues, glitches and nuisances of a built-in-the-basement POSbox.
Apple has one more advantage, though: It has the institutional discipline to hire expert designers and then listen to what they suggest. That's very hard to do. You can be fairly sure that upper management won't start rewriting your parts specs or re-engineering the motherboard, but everybody thinks they have good taste. And the more self-deluded a company happens to be, the farther it can push patently appalling crap through the production chain before finally having to admit that nobody in their right mind would buy, say, a dog-turd brown MP3 player.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
People who claim that the only difference between things is what you are used to are mostly people who have never used anything with actual good design.
Linux users, for instance.
Still not an iPod (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
While Taco is asleep (Score:2)
Yeah...Well... (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
They brought it on themselves (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously after iPod became a market leader, it's not enough for the same companies that tarnished their image in recent past to come up with a device that has roughly the same features as the iPod for a similar price. Offer one click hardware-accelerated DVD transfer or saving individual songs as MP3s based on info received from over-the-air FM stations and we are off to something. Of course, this product will have to be made in a free country.
Failed for Technical Reasons and DRM Reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. They failed for technical reasons or for DRM reasons or for a combination of technical and DRM reasons and may get an assist from bad or no design. You are defending the 8-track tape. It is pitiful from a technical perspective. The "PC" technology market did not take over the consumer entertainment technology market as planned. Let it go.
iPod hype hit in like 2004-2005 when the iPod was already years old and had already bested all rivals on technical, DRM, and design merits. Something like 90% of iPods ever sold have color screens, that excludes the first 3 generations entirely, they are just a blip on the radar, but those were sales to a much, much geekier crowd.
It may be a treasure trove for Slashdot readers but maybe that's only because we will have the right combination of diminished expectations and technical know-how to not be disappointed in one of these devices.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean shit. They sold hundreds of millions (if not billions) of tracks.
"Hype" ? (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that a sizeable number of Slashdot posters still think the iPod is successful because of "hype" explains why a sizeable number of Slashdot posters will never be as successful as Steve Jobs.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This one [newegg.com] works for me. Tiny, 1GB, $50, plays mp3, mp4, wmv, etc. Charges USB, formats fat. Works with linux. I blogged about this earlier today. There are instructions there for converting DVDs to a format it can use. They have bigger ones, but who needs to load up three days worth of AV?
Note: this is new, not remaindered I don't think.
But does it run linux? (Score:2)
I know, not the question you asked.
Anyway apparently the answer is yes [slashdot.org].
Re: (Score:2)
Simple mathematics dictates that when an MP3 player has 80%+ of the market, it'll get the most attention on any OS - including Linux.
Therefore, iPods have been working pretty well with Linux for some time. Everything else? Well, you've got to check that it appears as a USB mass storage device, that it actually plays music transferred to it in this way (rather than depending on the host PC to update a database or somesuch) OR (assuming it's beyond your abilities),
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Slashdot wants to know (Score:5, Informative)
The iPod does not require you to use DRM'd music. It plays regular old MP3s (or AACs) ripped from your CDs or downloaded from P2P or flown in on floppies by carrier pigeon, whatever source you may choose. It has the ability to purchase songs from the iTunes store, but you don't have to and if you prefer another jukebox app you don't even necessarily have to use iTunes with it.
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Re:Stealth DRM Sux (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, the iPod requires you to use iTunes to put the music on it. How is this different from Sony's godawful players, and so many more? So many require their own proprietary software to allow you to download music from your PC onto the player. If you hate that, then get a player that doesn't deal in that crap. It doesn't change the fact that the iTunes program, which plays normal MP3s, can transfer those normal MP3s, without re-encoding, onto the iPod, still as normal MP3s.
NO DRM, UNLESS YOU'RE STUPID ENOUGH TO BUY IT.
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Re:Stealth DRM Sux (Score:5, Informative)
Completely, 100%, wrong. No DRM is added to non-DRM'd files you put on an iPod using iTunes, gtkpod, or your own favourite iPod syncing tool. The music is stored in a hidden folder, and re-named to a hash value, which was done on the early iPods to make searching the collection fast on their slow processors, and is retained because legacy stuff like that has a habit of staying around.
When you plug the iPod in to any computer, it shows up like a USB or FireWire mass storage device. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from copying the music from the hidden folder to your computer. The tags are preserved, and so you can generate human-readable file names easily using a number of tools, if you wish.
Please stop spreading FUD.
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Re:Stealth DRM Sux (Score:5, Informative)
The folder is hidden in the UNIX sense that it starts with a . (or has the 'hidden attribute set on FAT filesystems) and so is only advisory. Finder won't show it, and neither will Explorer if it's set to hide hidden files, but most file browsers have an option of showing it (and you can always get to it in the terminal). You don't have to guess the hash unless you were using the filename to store metadata (in which case, it won't be displayed on the iPod anyway). If you have tags containing the correct information, then it's trivial to re-import it. In iTunes, you can just say 'Add to Library' (File menu) and point it at the folder and then 'Consolidate Library' and it will copy all of the files from the iPod into your iTunes music directory and construct file names from the tags.
Yes, Apple could have made it easier, i sharing music had been a primary aim of the iPod. It wasn't. The iPod is a device for letting you to listen to your music collection while mobile. It can also act as a mass storage device for transferring files between people.
There was no reason to make sharing music trivial, because 99% of the target audience do not have music collections that are either in the public domain or for which they own the distribution rights. When it came to a choice between adding a feature that would be of no (legal) use to 99% of their users, or extending the battery life by making the searching easier in the first iPods, they chose the second one. Unlike Microsoft, however, they did not add any technical hurdles preventing people who did own the distribution rights to their music collections from copying them off. They do not apply DRM to music that does not come with DRM. There are no technical copy protection mechanisms that prevent you from extracting the music without violating the DMCA. The only thing stopping you copying the music to your friends is the law.
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Re:Stealth DRM Sux (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, it still sucks that you can't just use rsync or unison to synchronise your music. This is a major deficiency and is one of the reasons I won't buy an iPod.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
1) Put the iPod in harddrive mode
2) in iTunes go into the options and choose a temp directory as your "music directory"
3) while your in the options dialog, make sure "Have iTunes organize my music and copy to music directory" is checked (it will organize it in this temp directory)
4) Import the hidden music directory on the iPods harddrive into iTunes. 5) Voila! iTunes will create every directory and r
Re:Meh... (Score:5, Insightful)
See, now this I don't understand.
I don't have a land line. Why? The cell phone is _cheaper_. If you're going to be pragmatic, ditch the land line.
It's not about new and hip. It's about being fed up with how the old-fashioned phone company rips you off and charges you out the a$$ for features that simply come included with cell plans.
Plus you can take the thing with you. Nobody could ever get in touch with me when I had a land line. Now, they can, plus I get to screen my calls with caller ID and voicemail for free. Woot.
You can take my barebones nokia from my cold dead fingers.
As for the iPod, it simply works with Linux and has a non-annoying interface. Run Amarok or GTKpod and you're good to go. At least I _know_ it
works. It's not about trendy, though a decent design that doesn't look like ass helps.
Cranky Old Man Rant about electronics design and "WTF are they thinking?":
Minimalist design never gets the chance to look like ass. Steve Jobs knows this. Take a brick. Paint it white. You have a White iBrick. Throw a bunch of buttons, weird shapes on it, and you have an Ugly White iBrick. Same goes for laptops. Apple laptops are all striaght clean lines, single color. Tasteful. Doesn't even get the chance to look like ass. Look at a Dell or (horrors) DellAlienware notebook. Looks like ass.
A KitchenAid mixer looks like...a Mixer. It doesn't look like anything else or try to. Yet it's a classic design with clean streamlined lines. If I erased the logo from it, you'd identify it as a KitchenAid anyway.
Sit there and look like a computer, not a ricer box.
Computer fashion victims:
http://img.alibaba.com/img/product/11/32/11/11321
It looks like the grille of a Pontiac Aztec.
http://images.planetamd64.com/phatsob/dainescc/da
I know it's a mod, but that will give a 3 yr old nightmares... DAAADDEEEE!!! IT'S COMING TO TAKE MY BRAIIIN!!
http://www.freecomputer.ca/cases2.gif [freecomputer.ca]
Is that a jet intake? Yes, not only do I want it to sound loud, but I want it to _look_ loud and what's louder than a jet engine?
Another mod, but damn....
http://otakuscience.sharper.nl/images/game_pc%20c
OMFG, it looks like a Partidge Family lunch box (which is trendy now!) Aaaand it's slightly creepy at the same time! Yes! You too can raise eyebrows at your next LAN party!
Get off my lawn, you kids.
--
BMO
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Re:depends on what you need (Score:4, Informative)
I tried out a 2GB Zen Microphoto. The "windows explorer" interface that people such as yourself insist on being so "intuitive" took over 3 hours to find and drag every song from the file system to fill it from a particular playlist. The iPod took 10 seconds to select "Sync Music from Selected Playlist" and then all that was left to do was wait a few seconds for the songs to transfer.
In iTunes one can drag individual songs from the library to the iPod in the exact same manner as you "windows explorer" types, if we so chose to do so. With all the additional things we can do in iTunes that you cannot, there can never be made a serious argument that the file system approach is better, in any way. All you need is big storage to play music cheap? I have 80GB of music that goes everywhere with me and I did it for $349. And sorry, but the interface on that Zen Microphoto was horrible, particularly that ridiculous scrollbutton on it that has three sensitivity settings.
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