According to Nintendo, they had to do it separately because to get the guts of the GBA SP into that small size, there was no room for a headphone jack.
This was one of the reasons given later for why the original DS was as big as it was when it was first released. Nintendo wanted to include the headphone jack for sure, along with all of the other new tech.
[QUOTE=Belrix]
I’ll nominate Sony.
Just how many “standards” did they try to introduce which have failed miserably?
Memory Stick
MO storage
AM Stereo
Beta
the root-kit debacle
[\QUOTE]
Don’t forget MiniCD. Weren’t they also a part of the SACD consortium or the DVD-Audio thing?
That’s a technical reason why not to include an earphone jack on the device, I meant why not bundle the adaptor with the device.
Beats me. I know I never bought it. If I’m somewhere where I should’t play the sound out of the speakers, I’d just prefer to play with the sound off.
But then, I don’t think that’s typical.
You consider 9 months to be an unreasonably short time for a hardware update? Are you crazy?
The solution is simply never to buy technology ever, because whatever you buy today will be outdated within a year. That’s the price you pay for early adoption. Another price you pay is you’re subject to all the initial bugs and problems until they get ironed out (which happens more in some technologies–like cameras–than others). But the price you pay also includes those 9 months of enjoyment you get until the better version comes out. Is that premium worth it for you as an early adopter? If so, buy early. If not, wait, because either an update or a price drop is around the corner.
And has been shown in this thread, the gap was actually 18 months.
Wow. I didn’t even feel any pity for early iPhone adopters when the price came down $200 within a couple months of its release. That’s just the premium you pay for being the first kid with the newest and shiniest toy on the block. What’s the problem? I bought an early MacBook Pro in April 2006. Within a month or so, my base model (1.83 GHz) was replaced by a 2.0 GHz model for the same price. So what? And if you bought that one in June, in October the base was bumped up to 2.16 GHz model, with an Intel Core 2 Duo chip (which allowed a max of 3GB RAM instead of just 2 GB). I expected that to happen and, you know what, I’m still using that 1.83 GHz model and it works perfectly well.
It is rare that this actually happens. More likely, it takes a few months to get the new and improved version up and in production, and there’s no reason for the company to take a loss on products that they’ve already produced, and for which there are buyers. You do realize that there’s always something better coming down the pipe, right? How long should a company have to wait before putting out an improvement? How much stuff should they sit on or throw away because there’s going to be something better in a few months? What if their competitors create a better product in the meantime that they were waiting on a new release so as not to be unfair to their previous customers?
Easy. Remember the huge lines for iPhones when they first came out, and how people were surprised and pleased that there were no shortages? Drop the price by 1/3, and there would be shortages, and huge prices on eBay, and all that crap. I, personally, am much happier with the price being set at a natural market equilibrium for the supply.
And, as others have said, a new device doesn’t make your old device any worse. It’s still the same thing you were happy to buy earlier. If you were happy paying $600 for it, then you still should be. If you weren’t happy paying $600 for it, but you did anyway, then you’re a chump.
I think it’s terrible to call this kind of iterative improvement “screwing the early adopters”. Real screwing the early adopters is when an actually bad product is released earlier than it should be, not when
I’ll add “just about every movie studio that puts out DVDs.” It’s gotten so bad that there’s an industry term for it: “double dipping”. That’s the re-releasing of an already-released movie with a few new extras that could easily have been on the earlier disc, but were somehow left off.
Examples: Sin City, whose “director’s cut with new footage and cool extras” edition came out just four months after the release of the initial, movie-only edition. Real subtle. Even more egregiously, the three-disc “special edition” of Hellboy hit the shelves a scant three months after the two-disc edition.
Rarely, the public will get notice, like when New Line put the word out that you could either get the two-disc theatrical version of the Lord of the Rings movies, or wait a few months and get the super-deluxe four-disc version of each movie. Most of the time, though, they just churn stuff out, sometimes without any seeming reason at all. There are what, six different versions of Army of Darkness out there now?
It’s gotten so bad that I’m not even paying attention to when movies are being released on DVD anymore. The hell with buying anything on “new release day”.
Honorary Blast From The Past Department: Smith-Corona.
In the 1980s, with the typewriter as we knew it being a machine whose days were numbered, Smith-Corona (like Brother and several others) began producing word processors, little automated typewriters that could store and retrieve documents, cheaper than a computer, cheaper by a yet larger margin than the necessary combo of computer + letter quality printer.
Smith-Corona’s offerings, the “PWP” series, did not suck. Early model had an external green text-based screen, a navigational keypad with up left right down arrows + a “menu” button + a “select” button, if I rcall correctly; a main “CPU-ish” body that contained the storage-and-retrieval and output the video to the screen, and a cable from that to the typewriter which served both as data-entry mechanism and as output-generator.
OK, here’s how they screwed over their early adopters again and again:
a) Version 1 used little cassette tapes for data storage.
b) Version II replaced the little cassette tape drives with 3.5" standard-issue floppy disks formatted to their own unique filing system. No method was provided for reading the old cassette tapes or transferring data from cassette tape to the new floppy system.
c) Version III got rid of the modular typewriter + “CPU” + keypad + monitor and instead came as an integrated typewriter/videoscreen with the standard typewriter keyboard as an external keyboard that would snap up into place across its front. The cursor and other keys formerly relegated to the external keypad were included on this keyboard. Oh, and storage was via a new 2" double-sided proprietary mini-diskette. No method was provided for reading the old 3.5" Smith-Corona diskettes or transferring from those to the new format. And certainly not for the yet-older cassette tapes.
d) Version IV was a lot like Version III, if I recall correctly, but it now came with a 3.5" standard-issue disk drive which could read DOS-formatted data disks as used by PCs. The word processing documents saved to these could not be read on the Version II Smith-Corona machines, which used the same physical disk type but used a proprietary Smith-Corona disk format, and of course vice versa. Nor was there any way to read from the double-sided 2" disks used in Version III, or from the old cassette tapes.
So every time you’d think of getting a new one, either to replace an old & dying one or just because you could find a use for yet another word processor, you had ZERO reason to stick with Smith-Corona instead of a competing system, because there was equal (i.e., 0) compatibility either way.
I agree that it’s silly to complain about the DS Lite. By the time it was released, nobody who had bought a DS within the preceding 6 months could even be said to be an early adopter anymore.
Actually, it was. Recall that the PSX launched in '94 and was being produced until '06. The SNES lasted from '91 to '99. The Genesis lasted from '89 to '98. It’s normal for popular consoles to last about a decade.
I’m not sure Sin City counts. Robert Rodriguez was shouting news about the “complete edition” of Sin City from the rooftops every chance he got. It came out only four months after the regular edition because it was being worked on at the same time as the original. But it needed a little extra time because there was more extras.
Let’s count…
Yup, 6.
Edit:
This is incorrect to a slight degree. While those consoles may have been in production that long, game support dried up long before. For the PSX, the last major game releases were in 2001. The SNES got major games until 97 or 98 while the Genesis stopped getting games in 96.
The PS2 is still getting major games released on it into 2008, it’s ninth calendar year of existence. That is unprecedented.
I think that many people posting to this thread don’t understand how video game consoles work - they’re not like other consumer electronics, where a new version is expected ASAP. They have a life cycle that’s expected, as illustrated.
A good comparison would be cars; each year has a “new model” with expected improvements and redesigns. It would be abnormal and offensive for a car company to suddenly introduce a radically revamped and improved version of its '08 model - “'08 Summer Edition” - just three or four months after you bought a new '08 model.
As others have already pointed out, Nintendo’s handheld life cycle has not followed the traditional “home console” model in a long time. A new DS was always expected and the fact that it was announced more than six months before it was actually released shows a good bit of respect for the consumer.
The only thing you can fault Nintendo for with the DS Lite release was a Nintendo Europe exec saying a DS redesign wasn’t happening the day before Nintendo of America or Nintendo Japan announced it. That was a blunder, but one few people outside of gamer circles know anything about.
Microsoft has a long, long track record of screwing developers. They will develop and release products in reaction to perceived threats from the competition, and dump them as soon as the competition has been destroyed. The only thought in their corporate brain is “is this action profitable or does it advance Microsoft’s strategic interests?”. I once asked them about fixing some severe bugs in one of their language products. They told me that they knew about the bugs and were not interested in fixing them, their programmers had more important, and profitable, things to work on. They really screwed all of the developers that they convinced to write software for Microsoft OS/2. As soon as NT was announced, they did everything in their power to sabotage OS/2. Developers who had paid big bucks for the MS OS/2 2.0 SDK were told to go pound sand. All OS/2 related products were canceled and OS/2 support was ripped out of their development tools. Their tools were even “enhanced” so that they would no longer run under OS/2. OS/2 related documentation disappeared from their web site. You could probably write a book about their efforts to destroy Borland. Ask any developer about their “support” for POSIX, Java, OpenGL, and international standards in general. Buy into MS technology, and they will stab you in the back whenever it suits them.
It’d be odd, but offensive? 