6 ms·

Since then, competitors caught up, and Apple's quality of both software and hardware has started a steady decline.

coldtea 10y ago
Then again, people have said that since the first iPod. I need more 10 more hands to count all the "iPod killers" and "iPhone killers" that were stomped.
- zitterbewegung 10y ago
  The real iPod killer was the iPhone . They disrupted themselves and usually companies don't want to do that .
  - TillE 10y ago
    I just wish they'd still make a decent iPod. All I want is a really light music player with physical buttons, like the first few generations of the iPod Nano. I'm aware this is probably a fairly small market, but it's gotta be bigger than whoever's buying the current pricey Nano with its crappy faux-iOS touch interface.
    - forgettableuser 10y ago
      I still use my classic iPod. I'm amazed the thing still works. I expected the hard disk to fail long ago. I had to replace the battery twice, but that's only a few dollars nowadays.
      - godzulu 10y ago
        I still use my classic 5th gen with Wolfson DAC daily - it's plugged into my car. My hard drive did fail and I found a guy on eBay that took out my hard drive and replaced with 500gb ssd card. All lossless, all the time. It's awesome and extremely light too.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      I don't think many people still use anything other than their phones for portable music players. Doesn't make sense to carry another device. Heck, lots of people given up on compact cameras, where phones are still (and will be for the foreseeable future) subpar in quality, and they will carry another device just for music that doesn't really add anything?
      - majewsky 10y ago
        I'm actually considering from time to time to get a separate portable music player, so that I can go to work without the phone and not get distracted by it all the time.
  - hulahoof 10y ago
    Considering what we ended up with, Apple would probably be in serious financial trouble if they didn't disrupt themselves.
- paulmd 10y ago
  There have been worthy competitors but none with the finish quality and marketing budget of Apple. The iRiver MP3 players were fantastic throughout most of the 2000s (unfortunate choice of name, they existed pre-iPod). They were the player of choice for the technical crowd because they supported line-in recording, optical outputs, and OGG playback (which mattered a lot more when capacities were smaller). They had an average-quality interface, usable but not amazing. They were also one of the main bastions for the open-source Rockbox firmware, which supported a huge variety of codecs and WAV recording. Rockbox's appearance was utilitarian but it actually featured many great usability tweaks (exponential scrolling/FF/rewind, "car mode" that paused playback when power was lost, bookmarks, etc). They were an amazing player for someone who could do hardware mods. I kept mine going for a decade by swapping parts. I eventually used an adapter to plug in a CompactFlash card for a primitive SSD, and installed a high-capacity battery, which boosted the battery life to something absurd like 20 hours IIRC. On that note I still don't actually know anything that can touch the battery life of the early iRiver flash players (iFP series). We're talking 24 hours on a single AA. I've actually been looking for a replacement with those same characteristics (extreme battery life on a single disposable AA or AAA battery cell) and coming up empty. You would really think there'd be a successor using modern electronics but everyone has gone to integrated batteries. Anyone know of one? The Creative Zen Vision M was another really solid attempt. The scroll-strip was a worthy competitor for the (patented) Apple scrollwheel. Nice fit and finish, just couldn't make any waves in the market.
  - forgettableuser 10y ago
    I don't have anything against the Creative Zen, but it just looked like another weird/silly looking MP3 box that wasn't an iPod to my undiscerning eyes. I remember an awful product placement for the Zen on Smallville. There was some woman with a Zen. The Zen was supposed to be so alluring, it captured the eyes of the rich and powerful Lex Luthor and compelled him to approach the woman. For a series about an alien from another planet who is faster than a speeding bullet and so forth, I found it funny that this is the scene that broke the suspension of disbelief for me.
  - madeofpalk 10y ago
    To think the continuing success of Apple comes purely down to make I think is extremely condescending to a very wide range of consumers. Marketing can only get you in the door for you to buy the first product. You have to actually make something good in order to get customers to come back.
- xanderstrike 10y ago
  I hate the term "iPod/iPhone killer," especially these days. Did the smartphone "kill" the iPod? Maybe kinda but people still use them. Did Android "kill" the iPhone because it's market share is 85%? Well, no, people still use iPhones and Apple is doing quite well. There's no one device that's going to kill any other, and there doesn't need to be. Multiple devices can exist in the same space.
gumby 10y ago
I think you mean Apple's quality of execution has gone up and down. There was no prelapsarian apple-of-perfection: they released amazing things and also released utter turds. I've been pretty much exclusively Apple for 20 years (laptops) and phones (since they shipped them), and the watch (vs other fitness trackers I've used). In the aggregate they haven't sucked as much as the alternatives. In other places (servers, wifi base stations, office software, music software) I've switched back and forth and currently don't think Apple is worth it. It doesn't have to be a religious issue. Oh and the original iPod? It was amazing!
- mastazi 10y ago
  > (servers, wifi base stations, office software, music software) And how about workstations, high quality monitors, video and photo editing software? The thing is, while Apple's main focus was never spreadsheets or enterprise SW, it once produced the go-to computers for creative professionals (musicians, photographers, video makers, designers). I believe that Apple is losing its edge in that field, because they are exclusively focusing on consumer devices and software. The Mac Pro hasn't been updated in years; Aperture has been killed, Final Cut went from being a professional product to a "prosumer" one, Logic still seems to be doing OK but latest updates of Mac OS broke compatibility with many pieces of SW used by musicians (e.g. Ableton, NI Maschine etc), the list could go on...
  - bluedino 10y ago
    >> The Mac Pro hasn't been updated in years It's not like they were up to date before. Old video cards, USB 2.0... And it wasn't that great before those. The G5's were watercooled and would leak all over, not to mention slow, the G3 and G4 towers were upgraded so fast they obsoleted each other as soon as they came out, and didn't have support for all their features in OS 9.
  - fuzzywalrus 10y ago
    As unsexy as the Mac Pro line was, all they needed to do was keep the latest round of I/O (SATA 3, followed by USB 3, then USB 3.1, ThunderBolt) and just updated CPUs and GPUs without bothering to change the form factor. I'm still rolling a 2008 Mac Pro heavily updated. As someone who contracted for 3 Hollywood shows, I can tell you everyone jumped Final Cut Pro X for Avid or Premier Pro. It was sad. When they touted the Mac Pro 2013 as a computer you could carry to a set to do editing, a friend of my quipped "Clearly no one at Apple has any fucking idea how movies or TV show are made." That said, as long time digital musician 10.9+ hasn't been a problem for Maschine, Ableton, Cubase or Logic. I still have soft synths that are nearly 10 years old from the first Intel mac days working just fine...

Then again, people have said that since the first iPod. I need more 10 more hands to count all the "iPod killers" and "iPhone killers" that were stomped.

zitterbewegung 10y ago
The real iPod killer was the iPhone . They disrupted themselves and usually companies don't want to do that .
- TillE 10y ago
  I just wish they'd still make a decent iPod. All I want is a really light music player with physical buttons, like the first few generations of the iPod Nano. I'm aware this is probably a fairly small market, but it's gotta be bigger than whoever's buying the current pricey Nano with its crappy faux-iOS touch interface.
  - forgettableuser 10y ago
    I still use my classic iPod. I'm amazed the thing still works. I expected the hard disk to fail long ago. I had to replace the battery twice, but that's only a few dollars nowadays.
    - godzulu 10y ago
      I still use my classic 5th gen with Wolfson DAC daily - it's plugged into my car. My hard drive did fail and I found a guy on eBay that took out my hard drive and replaced with 500gb ssd card. All lossless, all the time. It's awesome and extremely light too.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    I don't think many people still use anything other than their phones for portable music players. Doesn't make sense to carry another device. Heck, lots of people given up on compact cameras, where phones are still (and will be for the foreseeable future) subpar in quality, and they will carry another device just for music that doesn't really add anything?
    - majewsky 10y ago
      I'm actually considering from time to time to get a separate portable music player, so that I can go to work without the phone and not get distracted by it all the time.
- hulahoof 10y ago
  Considering what we ended up with, Apple would probably be in serious financial trouble if they didn't disrupt themselves.
paulmd 10y ago
There have been worthy competitors but none with the finish quality and marketing budget of Apple. The iRiver MP3 players were fantastic throughout most of the 2000s (unfortunate choice of name, they existed pre-iPod). They were the player of choice for the technical crowd because they supported line-in recording, optical outputs, and OGG playback (which mattered a lot more when capacities were smaller). They had an average-quality interface, usable but not amazing. They were also one of the main bastions for the open-source Rockbox firmware, which supported a huge variety of codecs and WAV recording. Rockbox's appearance was utilitarian but it actually featured many great usability tweaks (exponential scrolling/FF/rewind, "car mode" that paused playback when power was lost, bookmarks, etc). They were an amazing player for someone who could do hardware mods. I kept mine going for a decade by swapping parts. I eventually used an adapter to plug in a CompactFlash card for a primitive SSD, and installed a high-capacity battery, which boosted the battery life to something absurd like 20 hours IIRC. On that note I still don't actually know anything that can touch the battery life of the early iRiver flash players (iFP series). We're talking 24 hours on a single AA. I've actually been looking for a replacement with those same characteristics (extreme battery life on a single disposable AA or AAA battery cell) and coming up empty. You would really think there'd be a successor using modern electronics but everyone has gone to integrated batteries. Anyone know of one? The Creative Zen Vision M was another really solid attempt. The scroll-strip was a worthy competitor for the (patented) Apple scrollwheel. Nice fit and finish, just couldn't make any waves in the market.
- forgettableuser 10y ago
  I don't have anything against the Creative Zen, but it just looked like another weird/silly looking MP3 box that wasn't an iPod to my undiscerning eyes. I remember an awful product placement for the Zen on Smallville. There was some woman with a Zen. The Zen was supposed to be so alluring, it captured the eyes of the rich and powerful Lex Luthor and compelled him to approach the woman. For a series about an alien from another planet who is faster than a speeding bullet and so forth, I found it funny that this is the scene that broke the suspension of disbelief for me.
- madeofpalk 10y ago
  To think the continuing success of Apple comes purely down to make I think is extremely condescending to a very wide range of consumers. Marketing can only get you in the door for you to buy the first product. You have to actually make something good in order to get customers to come back.
xanderstrike 10y ago
I hate the term "iPod/iPhone killer," especially these days. Did the smartphone "kill" the iPod? Maybe kinda but people still use them. Did Android "kill" the iPhone because it's market share is 85%? Well, no, people still use iPhones and Apple is doing quite well. There's no one device that's going to kill any other, and there doesn't need to be. Multiple devices can exist in the same space.

gumby 10y ago

I think you mean Apple's quality of execution has gone up and down. There was no prelapsarian apple-of-perfection: they released amazing things and also released utter turds. I've been pretty much exclusively Apple for 20 years (laptops) and phones (since they shipped them), and the watch (vs other fitness trackers I've used). In the aggregate they haven't sucked as much as the alternatives. In other places (servers, wifi base stations, office software, music software) I've switched back and forth and currently don't think Apple is worth it. It doesn't have to be a religious issue. Oh and the original iPod? It was amazing!

mastazi 10y ago
> (servers, wifi base stations, office software, music software) And how about workstations, high quality monitors, video and photo editing software? The thing is, while Apple's main focus was never spreadsheets or enterprise SW, it once produced the go-to computers for creative professionals (musicians, photographers, video makers, designers). I believe that Apple is losing its edge in that field, because they are exclusively focusing on consumer devices and software. The Mac Pro hasn't been updated in years; Aperture has been killed, Final Cut went from being a professional product to a "prosumer" one, Logic still seems to be doing OK but latest updates of Mac OS broke compatibility with many pieces of SW used by musicians (e.g. Ableton, NI Maschine etc), the list could go on...
- bluedino 10y ago
  >> The Mac Pro hasn't been updated in years It's not like they were up to date before. Old video cards, USB 2.0... And it wasn't that great before those. The G5's were watercooled and would leak all over, not to mention slow, the G3 and G4 towers were upgraded so fast they obsoleted each other as soon as they came out, and didn't have support for all their features in OS 9.
- fuzzywalrus 10y ago
  As unsexy as the Mac Pro line was, all they needed to do was keep the latest round of I/O (SATA 3, followed by USB 3, then USB 3.1, ThunderBolt) and just updated CPUs and GPUs without bothering to change the form factor. I'm still rolling a 2008 Mac Pro heavily updated. As someone who contracted for 3 Hollywood shows, I can tell you everyone jumped Final Cut Pro X for Avid or Premier Pro. It was sad. When they touted the Mac Pro 2013 as a computer you could carry to a set to do editing, a friend of my quipped "Clearly no one at Apple has any fucking idea how movies or TV show are made." That said, as long time digital musician 10.9+ hasn't been a problem for Maschine, Ableton, Cubase or Logic. I still have soft synths that are nearly 10 years old from the first Intel mac days working just fine...