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."

Who's "we"?

[nurhussein]

In Malaysia, the ipod isn't terribly popular. Sure some folks have them, but it's rare. A lot of people do own an mp3 player, but it's usually of varied brands. The reason is that ipods are just too expensive for the average youth to own, and there is no iTunes service to download music from over in this part of the world.

Battery Life

[cyberkahn]

If I were average Joe who didn't want to take apart my iPod to replace the battery then yes. It's the only thing I hate about iPod. I am sure they designed it this way to. After all, by the time the battery dies, the mindless consumer will just want the latest iPod that is out.

Battery

[sethwm2]

OMFG I get a new ipod first thing I do is buy and extended battery from a 3rd party company works for years. That is what I did with my second generaton iPod. I will never buy a new I pod I will just replace the hard drive. This christmas I am going to get a bigger drive for it and I am going to get a replacement audio jack board for it. The cost of all thoes parts still does not add up to the price of a new one. I think that the iPod will die but Apple will still have the mp3 market with a new and better design that will be names something elce

Re:Forgive the troll..

[Doytch]

Like someone said, all five points are wrong, and especially the battery one, somewhat.

The batteries themselves are great, I'm using an iPod 1G battery in my iRiver HP-120, but the iPod's OS and the continuous transcoding of MP3 -> AAC kills the batteries. My iRiver runs for nearly 30 hours on the 1G batteries.

Not necessarily

[iamacat]

• Will automatic transmission ever die?
  
• Will burger and fries ever die?
  
• Will basic camera shape/controls ever die?
  
• ... Will music ever die?
  

Even though more advanced gadgets/control methods will come, people may still prefer the familiar click wheel interface of the Nano for basic music listening. Perhaps it will not be made by Apple, will have much higher quality/capacity or be a part of a multi-function gadget, but I think the design itself has made a lasting impact.

Re:deletes files without confirmation

[Chucker23N]

Uh, what? I'm going to assume that:
1) you deleted files from your iTunes library
2) you set your iPod to sync automatically
3) you connected your iPod, the sync occurred, and the change (deleted files) was reflected.

How is this not what you expected? You already *got* alerts that you were about to delete something.

Re:Well

[EricBoyd]

You've hinted at the real reason that the iPod is maintaining it's dominance - it's the DRM rules that the labels are imposing on everyone. Because everyone has to lock down their devices and music, nobody can play with an open strategy - and thus nobody can make an offering that is much better than Apple. Unless and until the labels agree to a DRM-less music store, Apple will maintain it's crushing market share.

DRM and Open Markets
http://digitalcrusader.ca/archives/2006/10/drm_and _open_ma.html [digitalcrusader.ca]

Oh come on...

[multimediavt]

The iPod has only been around for five years! Even in technological time (accounting for Moore's Law, etc.) that's not an overly long time for a product to dominate a market. Market forces always swarm early in a new product's life cycle, especially for dominant products that do what the iPod did to the portable digital music player market. The dominance of the product will level off and it will either become a commodity (i.e., a useful or valuable thing, such as water or time) or be toppled by a better product, or replaced by a newer technology and outmoded. Only time will tell. Most of the points in the article about why the iPod *WON'T* die are a bit shallow. "It's cool" Yeah, so was the Sony Walkman....GONE! Basically, everything said about the iPod is almost EXACTLY what people said about the Sony Walkman in the 1980s; well, except for price. Those bitches were WAY more expensive per inflation adjusted dollar. They also raised almost the same copyright stinks as the iPod and music swapping are doing now. I remember the guy in the car stereo shop telling my Dad about not copying music to tape to play in the car because it was "illegal". This was late 1970s, early 1980s.

Re:Stuff from the 80s still works?

[Dynedain]

But there is some truth to it as well. I inherited my great grandparents' microwave (I know they used it daily). It was built in 1972, before I was born. It finally died three years ago. I have gone through 2 microwaves since then, and I did my researcy and intentionally avoided cheap easy-break microwaves. I remember when my parents bought their first microwave in the mid 80's. It lasted a good 15 years. Since it died they have had several replacements. My grandmother is using the same microwave that she bought 20 years ago. I highly doubt any consumer microwave built today will last 20 years.

Re:DRM and iTMS aren't mandatory.

[oakgrove]

Here are some of my legitimate criticisms of the iPod. First of all, the way I like to listen to my music is to put it all on shuffle knowing that eventually it'll get to a song by an artist that just happens to work for me at that particular moment in time then I'll take it off shuffle and let that artist play out. Well, you can forget doing that easily on an iPod. When you finally drill through all the menus to deactivate shuffle mode (this should be a hardware button by the way), and you hit the menu option to take it off shuffle, guess what, it impudently and randomly shuffles to another song. So, let me get this straight, I choose to take my device off shuffle on a particular song and it takes it upon itself to get one last shuffle in totally defeating the point of me taking it off shuffle. This is maddening.

Issue two: I understand that most people don't get the concept of directories and file hierarchies so sorting songs by metadata only makes good sense. But for christ's sake, is it necessary to just dump all of the files into one big directory and then renaming them cryptically so that those of us who prefer organizing our music via directories and such aren't left out in the cold. I don't know about you people but I find it to be much faster and simpler to just dump all of my Snoop Dogg into a folder and play out of that than to have to go file by file editing id3 tags. Or at least give me the option. When I bought my iPod (by the way at the time I didn't know about these problems) and realized this I figured, okay, a new way of doing things, I can deal with that, then I sat for at least six hours editing all that crap only to reload my iPod and still have orphaned files, some songs with the artist's name spelled slightly differently, etc. Ridiculous.

Oh, and another thing about the shuffle deal, if you're listening to a song and it's not on shuffle and you decide to put it on shuffle, better wait until the song is just about over because when you put it on shuffle, it shuffles immediately whether your song is finished or not. Yeah, fucking stupid. Well, that's the end of my rant. To sum it up, I tolerated this crap for about a week until I returned my iPod for a refund.

Re:DRM and iTMS aren't mandatory.

[na641]

I don't feel like there's anything wrong with organizing by "folders". I've got a strong collection of music well over 15k tracks, of which i started way before ipods or itunes existed. I like iTunes as a music player, i really do, but the fact that it refuses to sort by filename/folder makes it useless to me.

My Walkman broke earlier this year

[istartedi]

My Walkman broke earlier this year. Will I get an iPod? No. I use Yahoo Music Unlimited on my laptop now. Listening to local FM on the walk to work was my only reason to have a mobile player of any kind. If I get another mobile player, it'll have to support Yahoo's DRM and it'll have to have recording off FM. I've been looking at some of the Sandisk players. As far as I'm concerned, the iPod never lived. It just doesn't interest me. I like the PC platform and things associated with it, simply because its vast popularity brings in so many network effects (plethora of add-on cards, many different applications and OS choices, etc.). The iPod is a specialized device tied in to the Apple chic. I don't care about Apple chic. In fact, I'm decidedly against it simply because of that. Also, street criminals love them--nice and white in the night, easy to know what you're ripping off as you slug somebody and run away. I'm not saying that I'd let that dictate my choice, but it's something to consider when you're walking around a city with any ammount of crime.