
Why an 'iPod killer' will never kill the iPod - terpua
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1397-why-an-ipod-killer-will-never-kill-the-ipod
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electromagnetic
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.

~~~
DarkShikari
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
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.

~~~
unalone
I'm on a Mac right now, and this is absolutely correct. QuickTime handles
nearly everything once you have Perian installed. It means that suddenly you
have a capable mini-player for watching nearly anything. And it's very smooth,
too: it has a bunch of nifty little features that I'm sure the Windows version
doesn't have.

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helveticaman
>If you’re going to be an iPod killer — and not just a great new music player
— you have to first out-Apple Apple at all the things that makes the iPod
special. That means superior industrial design, an iTMS-beating catalogue of
content, and a better desktop experience than iTunes.

My understanding is Apple makes $100 dollars' margin on every Ipod. You could
gain some market share in the mp3-player space by undercutting Apple.

Just make the design work (this might mean hiring a renowned UI designer from
outside, or hell, poach Jon Ive for 30M), make it cost half as much as an
iPod, but avoid _making it out of plastic._ Make a case out of exotic metals
or hardwoods or marble, or acquire 1000 songs for Microsoft's catalogue to add
to every ipod so it is useful from the get-go.[1]

[1] I have no idea how feasible this stuff would be, but I think it is
appealing.

~~~
unalone
But if you try to undercut Apple, and they're making a ridiculous margin, then
if you've actually got a good player worth buying they can just drop prices.
Look at the iPhone situation. They killed nearly all their competition with
the price drop. Nobody can touch it right now.

~~~
helveticaman
I'd like to split a hair: if you make them drop their prices, you'll hurt
their margins and possibly their revenue, depending on the elasticity of the
product. I'm not sure you'd win out in the end, but strictly speaking, you
would be undercutting Apple.

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vizard
Weird .. people actually LIKE using iTunes? I mean its pretty decent .. but
nothing special.

~~~
unalone
I love it, mainly because it has the two things I really like.

First off, I can quickly make playlists that work well together, thanks to
Genius.

Second, I can use a keyboard shortcut to get to the search bar, to quickly
find music.

iTunes has the fastest search of any music player I've ever used. I love it
for that alone. And what else should a music player do? I've used Amarok. It
has too _many_ features. It's a beast. iTunes is a background application,
absolutely, but it's easy to use. And if you really need it, they've got the
best visualizer I've ever seen.

------
MaysonL
It seems to me that the company most well-positioned to create a successor to
the iPod (other than Apple), is Amazon. A mini-Kindle with audio and video -
and downloads everywhere 3G reaches could be a smash hit.

~~~
unalone
You know, you've got a good point! The Kindle is an excellent product:
Amazon's proven that they have a good design team. The only problem is that
its screen can't support video, ever. (It already has an MP3 player built in.)

It would be lower on the market, but Amazon is actually in a prime position to
be making hardware. Don't know how much they'd make by entering competitive
territory, though. I don't know if it would be worth it for them.

~~~
MaysonL
Actually, e-ink is now up to at least some video. See:
[http://earthfirst.com/a-look-at-the-paperless-newspapers-
of-...](http://earthfirst.com/a-look-at-the-paperless-newspapers-of-the-
future/)

------
thomasmallen
I'd love an equally usable audio player with better sound quality. I encode
everything at 224, which should yield pretty good sound, but today I threw in
a CD (left the iPod in my car) and there is a very noticeable difference in
sound quality. I'm only going to play my CDs when I'm home now.

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maryrosecook
The article headline is correct, but the explanation given in the article is
incorrect. Our frame of reference for the successor to the iPod won't be the
iPod itself because, like the Walkman, it will be completely different from
its predecessor.

~~~
unalone
Exactly. And I think that's what the article is saying: nobody IS making
anything new.

I wonder, though: what else is there to do? After you can fit your entire
music library onto an iPod, and navigate it incredibly easy, what's left to
add on? Beyond new features, like the iPhone's doing, and - eventually, once
there's enough space - lossless audio formats.

