4 ms·

Design matters. I remember when the iPod was still crazy expensive and people were abandoning their much cheaper Rios in droves. Btw, I've purchased a few che

Design matters. I remember when the iPod was still crazy expensive and people were abandoning their much cheaper Rios in droves. Btw, I've purchased a few cheap home devices. For example, a few smart light switches. I've ended up switching back because they made my life more complicated and difficult, the opposite of the intended effect.

pessimizer 13y ago
The iPod is an example of a prettily designed product that felt good in your hand, but that clearly made working with music "more complicated and difficult." At the time, it was clearly the worst of breed when it came to listening to music. Still is, in my opinion, but my perception is more than a few generations behind. I think that the lesson from iPod example would be: Marketing matters. Judging the quality of a tool by its price is the reason that Monster can sell $5 cables for $50. edit: I'd be happy to hear of any improvement that iPods made to mp3 players other than making them into expensive status symbols that refuse to play anything but a proprietary vendor format that all music has to be lossily converted to by a buggy, slow, invasive application (at the dawn of iPods, not whatever condition iTunes or iPods are in currently.)
- mikestew 13y ago
  > The iPod is an example of a prettily designed product that felt good in your hand, but that clearly made working with music "more complicated and difficult." Interesting, because the first iPods I bought for my wife and I were specifically to address the fact that everything else on the market that I tried at the time was a pain in the ass to use. I found the first-gen iPod Nanos in conjunction with iTunes to be the opposite of "more complicated and difficult". "Worst of breed"? I can name a half dozen examples that were far worse than anything Apple has ever produced. Obviously YMMV. > I think that the lesson from iPod example would be: Marketing matters. I often read the "it's all marketing" screeds as "a lot of people like this thing, and I don't. I am bothered by this fact. Therefore the only reason the sheep buy them is marketing." Could be that the sheep truly find that it's a way to trim their wool that suits them better.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    Doesn't have anything to do with "sheep." It has to do with availability and expertise. People aren't aware of every product that can fulfill their wants (availability), and sometimes don't even have a want until they have already been exposed to a particular product. They also frequently don't have the expertise to effectively differentiate the products that they are aware of. It works the same whether the product is good or terrible. >I often read the "it's all marketing" screeds as "a lot of people like this thing, and I don't. I am bothered by this fact. Therefore the only reason the sheep buy them is marketing." Could be that the sheep truly find that it's a way to trim their wool that suits them better. This is more a screed than anything I've said. I don't care if you use an iPod. >"Worst of breed"? I can name a half dozen examples that were far worse than anything Apple has ever produced. You're right - it was a bit of an exaggeration. Microsoft's "PlaysForSure" cert was nearly as bad, and all of Sony's lines were garbage (IMO.) What I mean to say is that there was never a point when you couldn't find a $50 player that offered a far better UX than an iPod.
    - mikestew 13y ago
      Thanks for the expansion. I took your comment as another "iPod sucks, blah, blah, all marketing" type. Obviously the problem lies in my knee-jerk reactions. :-) > You're right - it was a bit of an exaggeration. Microsoft's "PlaysForSure" cert was nearly as bad, and all of Sony's lines were garbage (IMO.) Aaaand, you hit on the top two candidates for "Why Did mikestew Buy an iPod?" MSFT's offering was broken from the start, and later yanked (buh-bye, music!), and the company that brought you the original Walkman obviously lost their magic. But of the $50 players, I never found one worth keeping. Maybe I just never learned about them, hence making your point of "marketing matters". :-)
    - Domenic_S 13y ago
      You're either trolling or not old enough to remember what the portable player scene was like in 2001. Burned CDs on portable cd walkmans were the norm. Minidisc was high tech. 2/4GB of onboard memory + expansion slot was typical. "Anti-skip protection" was still a feature worth mentioning. The iPod's storage capacity was massive in comparison to nearly everything else. The firewire connection made uploading huge amounts of music crazy-fast in comparison to the old USB connections other players were using. Look at digital players of the same vintage -- stupid complicated interfaces & displays -- the clickwheel was a revolution in UX. So much so that it remains, largely unchanged, on all but touchscreen ipods.
- Thrymr 13y ago
  > refuse to play anything but a proprietary vendor format iPods have always had the ability to play standard MP3s. I've never converted a file to AAC for actual use.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    I always assumed that the reason that iTunes was a necessity and mp3 file transfers were so slow was that the files were being converted during transit. I may be wrong. If I am wrong, though, that would make the necessity of iTunes purely anti-consumer.
    - Thrymr 13y ago
      Yep, purely anti-consumer. It was always a pain to use other software with an iPod. But MP3 was supported natively from the beginning. e.g. a support document from 2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20020821012854/http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61476 https://web.archive.org/web/20020821012854/http://docs.info....
- kjackson2012 13y ago
  It definitely was NOT the worst of the breed. I had a couple of different pre-ipod mp3 players, including the original 32MB Rio, and the iPod was excellent. The major thing was the cool design, simple use, and their huge storage capability at the time. The thing that sucked was always iTunes, and the price. Everything else about it was fantastic, including the sound quality. Yes, their marketing was brilliant, but it won't cause people to buy things they don't want in perpetuity. Eventually, even the most brilliantly marketed product will fail if customers don't want it.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    >The thing that sucked was always iTunes, and the price. Those things can't be separated from the product though, which required iTunes and was expensive. Replacing the firmware on an iPod makes it perfectly fine. The reasons that the iPod was worse than many of its competitors weren't due to incompetence, they were by design. >Yes, their marketing was brilliant I'm not even saying that their marketing was brilliant, just pervasive. When the iPod came out, a large portion of the population wouldn't have even known and/or experienced that your music could be easily put on a tiny device at all. Their first exposure to the concept would have been an iPod ad, or seeing someone with one.

pessimizer 13y ago

The iPod is an example of a prettily designed product that felt good in your hand, but that clearly made working with music "more complicated and difficult." At the time, it was clearly the worst of breed when it came to listening to music. Still is, in my opinion, but my perception is more than a few generations behind. I think that the lesson from iPod example would be: Marketing matters. Judging the quality of a tool by its price is the reason that Monster can sell $5 cables for $50. edit: I'd be happy to hear of any improvement that iPods made to mp3 players other than making them into expensive status symbols that refuse to play anything but a proprietary vendor format that all music has to be lossily converted to by a buggy, slow, invasive application (at the dawn of iPods, not whatever condition iTunes or iPods are in currently.)

mikestew 13y ago
> The iPod is an example of a prettily designed product that felt good in your hand, but that clearly made working with music "more complicated and difficult." Interesting, because the first iPods I bought for my wife and I were specifically to address the fact that everything else on the market that I tried at the time was a pain in the ass to use. I found the first-gen iPod Nanos in conjunction with iTunes to be the opposite of "more complicated and difficult". "Worst of breed"? I can name a half dozen examples that were far worse than anything Apple has ever produced. Obviously YMMV. > I think that the lesson from iPod example would be: Marketing matters. I often read the "it's all marketing" screeds as "a lot of people like this thing, and I don't. I am bothered by this fact. Therefore the only reason the sheep buy them is marketing." Could be that the sheep truly find that it's a way to trim their wool that suits them better.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  Doesn't have anything to do with "sheep." It has to do with availability and expertise. People aren't aware of every product that can fulfill their wants (availability), and sometimes don't even have a want until they have already been exposed to a particular product. They also frequently don't have the expertise to effectively differentiate the products that they are aware of. It works the same whether the product is good or terrible. >I often read the "it's all marketing" screeds as "a lot of people like this thing, and I don't. I am bothered by this fact. Therefore the only reason the sheep buy them is marketing." Could be that the sheep truly find that it's a way to trim their wool that suits them better. This is more a screed than anything I've said. I don't care if you use an iPod. >"Worst of breed"? I can name a half dozen examples that were far worse than anything Apple has ever produced. You're right - it was a bit of an exaggeration. Microsoft's "PlaysForSure" cert was nearly as bad, and all of Sony's lines were garbage (IMO.) What I mean to say is that there was never a point when you couldn't find a $50 player that offered a far better UX than an iPod.
  - mikestew 13y ago
    Thanks for the expansion. I took your comment as another "iPod sucks, blah, blah, all marketing" type. Obviously the problem lies in my knee-jerk reactions. :-) > You're right - it was a bit of an exaggeration. Microsoft's "PlaysForSure" cert was nearly as bad, and all of Sony's lines were garbage (IMO.) Aaaand, you hit on the top two candidates for "Why Did mikestew Buy an iPod?" MSFT's offering was broken from the start, and later yanked (buh-bye, music!), and the company that brought you the original Walkman obviously lost their magic. But of the $50 players, I never found one worth keeping. Maybe I just never learned about them, hence making your point of "marketing matters". :-)
  - Domenic_S 13y ago
    You're either trolling or not old enough to remember what the portable player scene was like in 2001. Burned CDs on portable cd walkmans were the norm. Minidisc was high tech. 2/4GB of onboard memory + expansion slot was typical. "Anti-skip protection" was still a feature worth mentioning. The iPod's storage capacity was massive in comparison to nearly everything else. The firewire connection made uploading huge amounts of music crazy-fast in comparison to the old USB connections other players were using. Look at digital players of the same vintage -- stupid complicated interfaces & displays -- the clickwheel was a revolution in UX. So much so that it remains, largely unchanged, on all but touchscreen ipods.
Thrymr 13y ago
> refuse to play anything but a proprietary vendor format iPods have always had the ability to play standard MP3s. I've never converted a file to AAC for actual use.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  I always assumed that the reason that iTunes was a necessity and mp3 file transfers were so slow was that the files were being converted during transit. I may be wrong. If I am wrong, though, that would make the necessity of iTunes purely anti-consumer.
  - Thrymr 13y ago
    Yep, purely anti-consumer. It was always a pain to use other software with an iPod. But MP3 was supported natively from the beginning. e.g. a support document from 2002: https://web.archive.org/web/20020821012854/http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61476 https://web.archive.org/web/20020821012854/http://docs.info....
kjackson2012 13y ago
It definitely was NOT the worst of the breed. I had a couple of different pre-ipod mp3 players, including the original 32MB Rio, and the iPod was excellent. The major thing was the cool design, simple use, and their huge storage capability at the time. The thing that sucked was always iTunes, and the price. Everything else about it was fantastic, including the sound quality. Yes, their marketing was brilliant, but it won't cause people to buy things they don't want in perpetuity. Eventually, even the most brilliantly marketed product will fail if customers don't want it.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  >The thing that sucked was always iTunes, and the price. Those things can't be separated from the product though, which required iTunes and was expensive. Replacing the firmware on an iPod makes it perfectly fine. The reasons that the iPod was worse than many of its competitors weren't due to incompetence, they were by design. >Yes, their marketing was brilliant I'm not even saying that their marketing was brilliant, just pervasive. When the iPod came out, a large portion of the population wouldn't have even known and/or experienced that your music could be easily put on a tiny device at all. Their first exposure to the concept would have been an iPod ad, or seeing someone with one.