Will the iPod Ever Die?

Azhar writes "Will we always prefer the iPod's glossy slim design over all the others? Or at one point of time will the iPod revolution actually fade? Lets have a look at what could happen and why."

Article Text

[celardore]

Seeing as the article was still in my browser, and is now slashdotted I copied the text here.

The iPod has dominated the MP3 player (and portable video player) market so far. It began the ultimate revolution in how we listen to our music. Competitors have come and gone, while the iPod stood strong, but really, will the iPod ever die? Well there are a few points that say NO and some that say YES.

NO! It will not die! (at the bottom of the article we look at the possibility of it actually dying, but for now the NO points outweigh the YES)


1. Its just too cool

The iPod has become so much of a cool factor today that teens prefer it over any other MP3 player. They don't care much about functionality, but how cool it looks. That's where Apple's ingenious design wins them over, and as long as the whole social group has iPods, it's going to stay that way. People just don't consider the Rio players or Zune cool looking: as the Apple sleek white design is just so much simpler. And Apple is getting better every day, with the recent introduction of colors (which we all love) and at even tinier (way cooler) iPod shuffle. So the driving force behind the iPod's success is it is the coolest thing to have, to use, to show off, to carry around; and it will stay that way at the pace that Apple is making it cooler every season.

2. Its known
When we think of MP3 players we think Pod. That was not true a few years ago, MP3 player could mean Sony or Philips or any other brand, but today the word that first pops into our head is iPod. The iPod is now global, even here in India we see the white ear buds walking the streets. You can get an iPod probably anywhere in the world.

3. Price
Apple always has very competitive pricing for iPods, especially with the iPod shuffle. That's one of the main factors teens look at, and combine that with the fact it's just so cool, hey, how can we resist?

4. Competitors aren't getting it.
Competitors like Creative and recently Microsoft (although the Zune does have a lot of potential) don't know what the current generation is and what they want. We want simply stuff, which looks good and works. While competitors focus more on functionality which not many will use, Apple focuses on pushing the limits of creative design: which many people appreciate more. Would you rather have a tiny glossy iPod which plays MP3s only or a bigger bulkier competitor's product which plays all known formats? Exactly. Apple made sense of it all giving us only what we will need, and sometimes more.

5. Accessories in all directions
We all love to personalize our stuff. Apple lets you do that with the countless number of accessories. It's like pimping your car with rims: iSkins for iPods, headphones with glowing wires, lanyards, stick ons and what not. No company in the near future can create so much personalization to match up with what the iPod already has in its large accessory market.

6. We don't like to change.
Once an iPod user, probably always an iPod user. If the iPod was your first MP3 player, you will probably never change if it's worked well for you. When you plan to upgrade you will go for the newest iPod, not the Zune.

7. Getting better.
The iPod is getting better every season. With smaller sizes, bigger drives, better functions etc. So far no company has been able to match with the pace that Apple has set in introducing new iPods which keep us anticipated to what they will do next.

8. Personal Touch
Mentally we are fixed that Microsoft is a big company with no taste and no 'coolness'. We see Apple as a bunch of fun loving guys which brings them closer to you than Microsoft or Creative. Their fun Ads on TV or their quiet sense of humor sometimes allows us to connect with the brand easier.

9. Killing the PC
As Apple converts even more people to Macs (and businesses) and as Macs get cheaper and more compatible with Windows, the iPod parade follows. More Macs, more iP

Battery Replacement Service

[jdbartlett]

Fortunately, Apple offers a battery replacement service [apple.com] for out of warranty iPods.

Out of curiosity, which other brands offer a similar service? I have a feeling the brand I stick with will be the one to offer the best post-purchase support. For one thing, it shows confidence in their product.

Re:plenty of DRM in iPod

[ncc74656]

DRM probably has driven some key aspects of the design of iPod. For example, the fact that the iPod doesn't present its contents as a file system, like many other MP3 players do, is probably due to DRM.

FUD. The iPod shows up as a mass-storage device. All of the files on it can be read out of it with normal file-manipulation tools. The names of music files are obfuscated, but if they were tagged with the appropriate type of metadata before they were put there, it's not much work to throw together some scripts to give the files more sensible names. (You might find this utility I threw together [alfter.us] useful...it's a command-line tagger that handles MP3 and AAC files (FLAC and Ogg Vorbis, too).)

The fact that it's hard to get music off the device is also driven by DRM concerns.

More FUD...see above, or look up any of the dozens of programs that automate the process. gtkpod [gtkpod.org] is one example, and it even works under Linux. I used it just a few days ago to pull everything out of my iPod for a backup.

Likewise, the fact that the iPod does not support syncing to multiple machines well is probably influenced by DRM.

Still more FUD. I have no trouble manipulating the contents of my iPod from multiple machines. If you do, I suspect PEBKAC.

Re:TFA

[nessus42]

I want my music player to do playback and recording in a format unencumbered by any DRM so I can create and share as I see fit. Apple doesn't give me that,

This is patently false. iPods and iTunes will both play unencumbered mp3s, and iTunes is perfectly happy to rip CDs to unencumbered mp3s.

I have many gigabytes of music on my computer that I ripped from my own CDs. There's not a single DRM-encumbered track on my computer, and I play them all with iTunes, iPods, and mp3 CD-ROMs made with single click burning from iTunes. (My car stereo plays mp3 CD-ROMs.)

Furthermore, iTunes' restriction that it won't copy mp3s off of an iPod and onto a computer is merely proforma to mollify the recording industry. There is nothing built into the iPod to prevent you from copying mp3s off of it and onto your computer. In fact, there are a number of free programs out there that let you do precisely this.

|>oug

Re:plenty of DRM in iPod

[2nd Post!]

Actually, no. If you know anything about Computer Science, you will recognize the iPod's file storage mechanism is a hash table in which all the songs are evenly distributed amongst a file tree; it reduces file seeks/searches. Then there is the other aspect, that the entire filesystem is stored in an index file to make searches and browsing of content instantaneous; instead of looking through the harddrive, the iPod merely looks through a file loaded into memory and when it needs to access the song uses the afore mentioned hash table to access the song.

Also if you didn't know, Apple just added in the latest revision of iTunes the ability to synch to multiple machines, and iTunes has existed for longer than the iPod. The very first versions of iTunes has (and still may, I don't see why they wouldn't) supported Rio, Diamond, and Creative MP3 players.

So in that respect all your assertions are off base.