iPod Casualties Offer New-In-Box Bargains 324
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."
It's all marketing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's all marketing... (Score:5, Insightful)
So what you're saying is... (Score:5, Insightful)
hype (Score:4, Insightful)
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:So what you're saying is... (Score:1, Insightful)
The iPod isn't a product. iPod/iTunes/iTMS is the product and if people still can't get that basic concept right they will never be able to come up with something competitive.
On Windows you have the remnants of the plays for sure fiasco still around and you have Zune.
On Linux it is even worse, you have garbage like Amarok and a million other halfassed sub-1.0 competitors.
Please, for anyone still trying to claim Apple is winning because of 'teh hype' let's hear what you think we should all be buying that is a competitive package to the iPod/iTunes/iTMS.
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.
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.
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?
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
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: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.
Rockbox gives some of them new life (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So what you're saying is... (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 drive in the smaller ones) with a battery, PCB with firmware and LCD. Apple could farm them out cheaper if they so desired but since they've cornered the market they have no real need to, plus the iPod sells itself nowadays (so there is an element of hype in it).
Re:Meh... (Score:2, Insightful)
As for ipod killers, I have my Creative Zen since before the ipod even existed. It works great and does what I want. If/when it breaks, I'll go back to Creative. I have no need for an ipod, nor its zillion accessories. I have my mp3 player with a case and headphones. I don't want, or need, to plug it into another fifty devices or have interchangable covers or any of the other things you can attach to it. I also don't care what it looks like. I care about how it works and if it gets the job done. I want to listen to music on a reliable player. My Zen does that.
Some people have just grown so accustomed to being constantly connected that they just can't understand that there are other people out there that don't need/want what's the latest gadget, nor do they want to be connected to the world 24/7.
Re:Stealth DRM Sux (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless, of course, you install Rockbox. http://www.rockbox.org/ [rockbox.org]
Re:Stealth DRM Sux (Score:2, Insightful)
"Harmony" is most certainly not the "regular mp3's" the GP was talking about. Regular mp3's are just that - either ripped fresh from a CD, p2p network, or any other source of non-DRM'd mp3 audio files. In case you didn't know - most media player software anymore tends to at least have some kind of plugin allowing for basic writing to iPod's, and if you don't prefer that method, you can always load Rockbox or iPod Linux (unless your model isn't compatible with iPod Linux) allowing for drag and drop transfer of music and playlists with "/" as the root directory (using Rockbox).
So not only is your point not valid, it doesnt even seem to be on topic - so just how the hell is it insightful? I mean, where the damned hell did "Harmony" get brought up anyway? Again, just in case you didn't catch it, the gp wasn't talking about removing Apple's DRM at all, he's talking about music files of which neither Apple's nor any other DRM exists at all...
Re:Stealth DRM Sux (Score:1, Insightful)
You can't put an MP3 onto an (unmodified) iPod in a manner that it will both play, and be capable of being copied back off onto a computer that isn't "authorised" for that iPod. If you copy it with iTunes you can play it, but you can't freely copy it off again. If you copy it in "data mode" you can freely copy it off again, but you can't play it. This is not a bug; this is a design "feature" to make the sharing of free music awkward at best thus making the iTMS seem less cumbersome.
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.
Re:DRM??? (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean shit. They sold hundreds of millions (if not billions) of tracks.
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?
Re:Could be (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure about the sound quality of the originals - I only got a 3G one - but I seem to recall reading some pretty good reviews. The real killer was the form factor, however. Last time I looked, Creative's players were around 20% bigger by volume. They may cram more features into that space, but if I'm carrying the machine around with me I want it to be as small as possible.
I'm just waiting for a 16GB iPod Nano before I upgrade. You can buy a 16GB USB flash drive for under £100; why are 8GB Nanos still the biggest you can get (and £170)? Maybe Apple don't get the same discounts on Flash they used to...
Re:It's all marketing... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:It's all marketing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stealth DRM Sux (Score:1, Insightful)
"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: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.
Re:Reminds Me Of Linux Vs OS X Desktops (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.
Re:Reminds Me Of Linux Vs OS X Desktops (Score:1, Insightful)
Cowon iAudio X5 (Score:1, Insightful)
These are also about the most "hackable" devices on the market too, as there are a lot of both hardware and software mods you can do to them. Go read the "iAudiophile" forums ( [iaudiophile.net]http://iaudiophile.net/forums [iaudiophile.net] for the user community comments and stuff. This brand of portable media players probably has the second largest following behind the Apple iPods. And for the true Slashdot geek, the iAudio model A2 does run a custom Linux as it's kernel (source available), and it's GUI is written with GTK+.
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 used to be even worse... (Score:2, Insightful)
The Archos was the easiest for file management because we could treat it like an external HD for loading content. The problem was it was a complete disaster for the user. After a month of intensive use I could not get to the same track twice in a row or easily find a track. Our need was for effective use of over 40000 sound files between 20 seconds and 20 minutes long. A key requirement was ease of repeated listening (language education). It simply could not be done on the Archos. It also has significant reliability issues, a strange power adapter and horiable form factor (sharp edges). On the positive side it had great battery life and a built in mike.
The Dell was the cheapest and almost as easy for file management as the Archos. The user interface was so bad it was the first eliminated. The thumb wheel method of navigation caused pain after less than 5 minutes of what we needed to do. As long as you just turned it on, hit play and listened, it was great. But we needed to be able to go tract to track, back up, move forward, etc. It was so bad, we never got to battery life. Despite being the cheapest and the number one choice of the IT folks (Dell fan boys!), it was never seriously considered.
The iPod was the most expensive, required a separate, semi fragile external mike (Tune Talk) and the hardest for file management. iTunes is monogamous. I needed to manage on a 10-1 ratio of students to iTunes enabled computers. With help from Apple and a lot of tricks we got it to work. Most importantly, all the pain was on me and my staff, not my students. Students learned in minutes how to use their iPods. It was 180 degrees from the Archos. Archos made an engineer gadget. Apple made something useful to the user. We went though a lot of pain with the 3G iPods but when the iPod video came out, we got a HUGE payoff. We had everything in place to exploit it giving us interactive video lessons. Over 4000 iPods are in use at this institution today. We made use of the other test models as external HDs. Hype didnt kill them, crappy design did.
Re:It's all marketing... (Score:3, Insightful)