I fess up front that I’m a Mac user. While I enjoy and use Mac products, I don’t drink the Kool-Aid…if the boys in Cupertino make a stinker, I calls it a stinker.
Well Steve, you’re cordially invited to blow me. You and your minions have been hyping a “new” digital device that was going to knock our socks off.
Ahem. Your fricken iPod doesn’t exactly have me sportin’ wood in the hinterlands.
Oh boy…an mp3 player (with iTunes…whoopee).
Yeah it holds 1000 tunes…but it ain’t like there aren’t plenty of competing products out there.
And for $400 bucks? You’re shittin’ me!!!
What genius decided to “build” on Apple’s recent success with this turkey? And what marketing cretin came up with that name?
Christ…it’s enough to make me want Windows XP.
OK, I retract that last statement…but get back on course…leave the crap building to someone else.
Anyhoo, I know what you mean about those shitty MP3 digital players. I went to buy one last year for my birthday (which is coming right up, for you last minute shoppers), and nearly shit myself when I saw the prices and performance. What a gyp. I saved my cash and got something else, figuring in a year or two they will be in the stores for $50 (which they likely will be)
I also agree with the ipod name. Ipod? It sounds like some sort of pseudo Star Wars attempt at naming. Bizzare.
Don’t know…this was not a broadside attack against the entire company or OS. I like Macs in general…and really don’t want this to be a Wintel-Mac-Linux flamefest…there have already been enough of those.
Making a $400 mp3 player (admittedly with perhaps a few more features and storage than less expensive players) seems ridiculous. It’s a luxury item looking for a limited market. <cough> G4 cube </cough>
Five bucks says Chas.E will be in here before the day’s over to explain to you why you’re wrong, and the iPod is the greatest thing since sliced foot fungus.
While I am not a mac user…It seems to me that this is peripheral that will allow Apple[sup]TM[/sup] to show off firewire. I believe MS is backing away from it and staying with USB. Of course someone will come along soon and straighten me out.
I agree that this is part of Job’s “digital hub” vision for using firewire to connect Macs with other devices…
That being said, i have a hard time believing there is much market for such a device. It’s an “elite” device for a device category that is trending down in price. I just don’t see scads of people paying $400 for faster speed and bigger storage on a music player.
Apple’s recent retail efforts (which I think WILL prove wise,depending on the overall post Sept 11 economy) were designed to reach “the other 95%” of the market. iPod doesn’t do that.
Ten bucks says Tejola will follow him with why Apple and Linux can’t do anything right, and Microsoft is the only hope of salvation for the world.
As for the iPod… not bad, but a bit too expensive for this non-audiophile person (I’d buy it for $200, though, just to have a small portable Firewire hard drive). I’ll give Apple props for the long battery life and small size, which are its biggest advantages over its competition. It doesn’t have as much “general appeal” as I had hoped it would, but them’s the breaks.
It performs several functions, as Apple says: Mp3 player, portable hard drive, and file backup (well, that’s about the same as portable hard drive). Let’s examine:
-As an Mp3 player, the “1,000 songs” number seems impressive, but most people will realize that they will never listen to that many songs at one go. In fact, I can’t even think of one-tenth that number of songs to put on it. A smarter consumer will go with a smaller sized Mp3 player - to contain a more realistic number of songs - and pay one quarter the cost. Further, if you use up all the space for your Mp3 files, you can’t have it double as a portable hard drive… and vice versa.
-As a portable hard drive: You can go get a 20 gigabyte firewire external drive for the same cost as this 5-gig one. It flops there.
-File backup: CD-RW drive. Also one quarter the cost. And more versatile.
So it seems that Apple’s made a Jack-of-all-trades (master of none) in the form of the iPod. Although I will admit that it’s a nice first step towards high-memory pocketable devices. The largest disk I’ve seen before this was the 1-gig IBM microdrive (about the same cost as the iPod, although a helluva lot smaller). So it may turn out to be like the iMac… they started out REALLY shitty, and eventually Apple pumped them up into really nifty products.
I meant, of course, the largest miniature (i.e.- Compactflash/Smartmedia card sized) disk. I just know that some shmuck (like Fenris :D) would’ve come along and point out the existence of 100-gig drives…
I have 465 mp3s on my iMac at the moment. I don’t have a lot of CDs, and the ones I do have are ripped to my hard drive and thus live in my dresser drawer. My friend Chris has probably three times as many MP3s, and probably fifty CDs, at least. And he’s the kind of music freak who would want them all at his fingertips all the time. Not that it proves anything.
Honestly, though. I think the pod thing is pretty sexy. I’d never buy one (especially since I just spend a little over half the price on a big ole 60gig firewire harddrive, but if a friend had one I’d be envious.
This thing is great. 1000 songs x 3 minutes per song = 3000 minutes = 50 hours of music. That’s 50 hours. I think it’s more of a hard drive than an MP3 player which uses memory chips to store the data, so that may not be perfect. Is it susceptible to skipping is my question.
A lot of people (me!) would like to be able to carry 50 hours of music or books on tape around with us. And it doubles as a 5 gig hard drive. Seems like a pretty fast hard drive too.
10 seconds to download a CD - my MP3 (Intel - a nice one) takes about 2 minutes - no Firewire, just USB.
I would think it over. And please, nobody wants to hear about Windows XP (blech!)
People, people! Y’all are forgetting a few things!
First, $399 is the suggested retail price. I’m sure that MacWarehouse, MacConnection, Mac Zone, and all the other independent retailers will be offering them for a good chunk of change less.
Also, while the price may seem a bit prohibitive, think for a minute: what time of year is it? This is the kind of toy one asks for as a Christmas present, not something you buy for yourself! Hell, I already sent the URL to my folks…
Darn, you posted while I was posting, so I missed this. Anyhoo, they say it has a 20 minute anti-skip buffer. So, odds are you won’t hear any skips, even though it’s hard drive-based. Unless you sit there and jostle it for 20 solid minutes, I guess…
Hell, I probably have over 3,000 mp3’s at my disposal. Doesn’t mean I want to listen to them all the time.
Besides, if I wanted that much music, I’d by a MD player and a bunch of minidiscs - still for less than 400 bucks - and have over a hundred hours of music, easily.
My point is that while the iPod does a lot of things, it doesn’t do any of them well enough to justify the $400 expenditure. In my opinion, of course.
