Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions High end for iPod

Although BrenR sounds disturbingly close to a contraction of bren gunner.

Ken - not intended to be a flamewar... just my pet peeve (well, one of many) when one company steps up to make their trade name a household word for an entire industry.

iPod, iTunes, iCar... whatever it is, Apple has a history of jumping on a lot of bandwagons, putting out a highly marketable, product-placement ready piece of equipment that is (IMHO) usually overpriced or underfeatured, but it's sleek, cool, etc and it sells (PowerBooks, iBooks, iPods) and glutting the market and hailing themselves as a pioneer. Best Buy/Future Shop this season here both had huge iPod displays... an entire rack for everything Steve Jobs thought of in the shower one day... knit iPod cozys, holders to fit on your dog's collar, docks for your boat, car, plane, bicycle.

So other manufacturers who put out a good solid product without dancing silhouette commercials get buried under the hype.

Lisa's got a Creative MuVo I think it is. Excellent little thing... it's easy to use, it's about the size of a pack of gum... thick enough not to crack in half, and if you want a USB drive, you disconnect the drive from the player and can use it separately. Good product... (surprising coming from Creative!) but they won't get news reports hailing them as the Jesus Christ of the portable music set.

Just that mindset that Jobs can say one day "Intel sucks" and 300 Mac owners all agree... then the next day "Intel is the future" and all 300 Mac owners agree again - is infuriating.

Bren R.

But since you wish you had that same power yourself, isn't this a case of the pot calling the kettle black?

In reply to:

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On the football forums half of the people mis-spell their own handles.

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lmfao

I'm not diputing the overpriced part. And not disputing that there are other perhaps superior players out there. But really Apple pretty much created the bandwagon. Sure Rio was there first, and Creative and others not far behind. IRiver makes some cool players. But all of these companies are benefitting from the iPod phenomenon. The market was stagnant until the 1G 'pods came on the scene. Heck one of the real problems is that none of the pretenders can do all of the 3 parts well: 1)Must-have design 2)Cool features and 3)MARKETING! Ever see an add for an iRiver or a MuVo? How much of the general populace has ever heard of these companies much less their products? Sure there is a bit of the Evil Genius to Jobs but ya know that's the way it is. I've had 5 or 6 players and the only one I really liked had a fatal design flaw. So I finally buy an iPod and it works fine for me. And please don't tell me you buy into the "it's success makes it suck" crap. I personally couldn't give a rat's tuckus how many other people in the world own something. If it fits my needs I'll buy it. I'm a professional computer geek which means by definition I have no sense of style and further could care less what the world thinks of me. If I was an add-on manufacturer I would turn 100% of my capacity to iPod merch and completely ignore the rest. I would nod sympathetically when competitors tell me about their warehouses full of add-ons for the now-defunct Rio products and iRiver parts never sold to an unknowing, uncaring public. It's freaking business and they are out there to make money. I'll tell you what: If my 'pod breaks I will give serious consideration to whichever player you think is superior.

As far as computers go some people make the mistake of assuming I am a militant towards or against one platform of another. Nope. Like 'em all, as far as what they can do for me. Maybe you have had bad luck with Apple. But hell I can point out flaws inherent in countless computers from Dell, IBM, HP and others. Think the iBooks are the only ones with power supply problems? Dell probably replaced more PS's for its Inspiron 8XXX series laptops in the last quarter than Apple has in the entire life of the iBook line. Their Latitude D600's had nearly 35% hard drive failure rates for while on machines less than a year old. And believe you me there is no such thing as a perfect OS. Any of them. OS X could be. Stability of Unix, Mac GUI and ease of use. All it needs are the ba-jillions of periphs you can get on the PC plus all the high-end games and power apps. Maybe OS-X86 will be the one true OS that brings balance to the galaxy.

I love how you talk about glutting the market and 300 Mac users in the same post. 5% of the total market ain't half bad for one company...

And ya know what? They do innovate. They got critiqued for "Not-Invented -here" syndrome for the longest time, then they start using tech that wasn't invented there, and they get critiqued. They get critiqued for being so small, and so big! And you do both in one post! Incredible!

Sorry, I have a problem when someone critiques something simply because they are popular. Or high quality.

Here's an article on part of the reason for the iPod's dominance. Hint: it's not just because of good marketing.

Indeed. Remember the "beige box" Apple of the late 80's through to the late 90's? The Gil Amelio years? Ugh. Descending into junk bond status, getting a $150 million investment from Microsoft of all things. Bad juju. Jobs turned things around in very short order. The eMac was just the beginning. If the Mac just had all the app support I need I would never look back.

'Tis impossible to forget. Yet, it was the iMac. The eMac is a hideous, gigantic piece of white plastic, wrapped around the world's largest 17" CRT.

Now I'm gonna go play games on my Athlon64...

My bad. Got Battlefield Desert Combat or Battlefield 2?

Oh, I've got both types of machines. My primary job is as a tech/sysadmin for Macs.

But no, I don't have either of those. I've been replaying Far Cry recently... I'm a little behind.