4 ms·

They have a good point, but seriously beating iTunes isn't exactly hard. QuickTime has been the most pain in the ass media player on the PC for a long time, it

They have a good point, but seriously beating iTunes isn't exactly hard. QuickTime has been the most pain in the ass media player on the PC for a long time, it was even worse than Real for a long time. I mean Real is full of crap that slows down your computer, but QuickTime used to be outright slow. Apple has certainly improved, but I don't see iTunes as much more than a well written library program with an MP3 player tacked on. If I had the money I could easily build and design a better, sleeker MP3 player than Apple. It's just the fact that all the companies who are coming to compete in the MP3 player market don't have a history in it. I used to own a Sony MP3 player, and fuck did it butcher the iPod Shuffle in usability and play time, I mean it had 50 hours of playback! It was, and still is, the only MP3 player on the market that can actually play all the music on it before its battery dies. If I ever needed a small MP3 player again I'd either dig up the old Sony one or buy the newer model. The iPod Classic sits in the multimedia market, not in the solely MP3 market. This is where the problem comes in. iPod's competition doesn't know how to make something that looks worthy of the money. Zune was a piece of plastic crap, plastic was flashy when the original Walkman came out, but if anyone from Microsoft cared to look out of their window on a highway they might see that plastic is trash. I have a cheap motorola phone, no bells or whistles. My girlfriend has a more expensive phone with a camera and mp3 player and what not. It's the same phone, it even takes the identical battery, yet hers has a metal back plate and everything else and weighs 3 times as much. This, in peoples minds, equals value. I could easily use the iPod's example and build a better MP3 player. It's quite simple; use a slightly wider LCD screen and display in widescreen, which should all blend together in a deep black so that you can't see the difference between the LCD and plain black when it's off (the mp3 player I had from Sony did this and people liked and commented on how cool it looked, because it was cool). The front plate should be a single piece of unbroken electrically conductive glass so that you can operate the controls (similar to how the iPod works) but without it ever, ever being able to get dirt stuck between the cracks. The back plate should obviously be scratch resistant aluminum. All of the above design is off the shelf or, in the case of the LCD, easily designable. However, the cost of such an MP3 player would be too high that you can't guarantee people will buy it, which is exactly why Microsoft or Sony hasn't made something like this. Apple has a keen following, it's risks aren't going to bankrupt it or a division, so it's free to experiment; other companies can't experiment in the market, that's reserved for the lab only because if they fuck up slightly then no one will pay the money.

silencio 18y ago
I couldn't help but notice that almost your entire second to last paragraph sounds nearly identical to the current iPhones and iPod touches. Anyway, the only reason why I keep coming back to the iPod rather than any other player in the market is because of its usability, not because of the hardware and generally not because of the design. It may not have all the bells and whistles, but it is drop dead simple to figure out how to use, partially since it doesn't have a dozen buttons just to control playback. I feel that maybe the rest of the competitors (after all, there is also iriver, cowon etc. that are willing to spend the R&D money on new designs since they are in a market (south korea) where iPods and Apple do not dominate as much) just overthink things, and underestimate the now fairly significant tie-in most people encounter if they purchased significant amounts of DRM'd media from the iTunes store. Hopefully the latter will decrease as there's growing demand for unlocked music, but the former...I have a neighbor who insisted on buying a portable CD player, and you have no idea how complicated it can get. I about wanted to give up after staring at a recent Sony one that had, like I said, a dozen buttons just for playback. She eventually caved in and got an iPod nano, which she was able to figure out without reading any manual.
DarkShikari 18y ago
Quicktime is worse than slow--its not even standards compliant, and most ordinary H.264 video will not play back on it properly (and that subset seems to change on every release). From an actually-working standpoint, its even worse. I had to install Quicktime a while back on Windows to convert some weird-format Quicktime YUV files to something usable--it instacrashed upon trying to convert it. After reinstalling a few times it worked, but it took over 2 hours to start the conversion. This was a conversion from raw YUV to raw BMP. Oh, and then it took about 2 days to do the conversion for a single film. Seriously, folks. I've constantly heard its much better under OS X; but at least my experience on Windows says its not merely bad, but the single worst media player I have ever used (yes, worse than Real.)
- electromagnetic 18y ago
  My brother switched to Mac a while ago, and pretty much the first thing he commented on as the major difference was that he could actually use quicktime.

silencio 18y ago

I couldn't help but notice that almost your entire second to last paragraph sounds nearly identical to the current iPhones and iPod touches. Anyway, the only reason why I keep coming back to the iPod rather than any other player in the market is because of its usability, not because of the hardware and generally not because of the design. It may not have all the bells and whistles, but it is drop dead simple to figure out how to use, partially since it doesn't have a dozen buttons just to control playback. I feel that maybe the rest of the competitors (after all, there is also iriver, cowon etc. that are willing to spend the R&D money on new designs since they are in a market (south korea) where iPods and Apple do not dominate as much) just overthink things, and underestimate the now fairly significant tie-in most people encounter if they purchased significant amounts of DRM'd media from the iTunes store. Hopefully the latter will decrease as there's growing demand for unlocked music, but the former...I have a neighbor who insisted on buying a portable CD player, and you have no idea how complicated it can get. I about wanted to give up after staring at a recent Sony one that had, like I said, a dozen buttons just for playback. She eventually caved in and got an iPod nano, which she was able to figure out without reading any manual.

DarkShikari 18y ago

Quicktime is worse than slow--its not even standards compliant, and most ordinary H.264 video will not play back on it properly (and that subset seems to change on every release). From an actually-working standpoint, its even worse. I had to install Quicktime a while back on Windows to convert some weird-format Quicktime YUV files to something usable--it instacrashed upon trying to convert it. After reinstalling a few times it worked, but it took over 2 hours to start the conversion. This was a conversion from raw YUV to raw BMP. Oh, and then it took about 2 days to do the conversion for a single film. Seriously, folks. I've constantly heard its much better under OS X; but at least my experience on Windows says its not merely bad, but the single worst media player I have ever used (yes, worse than Real.)

electromagnetic 18y ago
My brother switched to Mac a while ago, and pretty much the first thing he commented on as the major difference was that he could actually use quicktime.