Apple's iPod: Now you can "think different" like everyone else.

[originalpckelly]

I love music, but I've come to hate my iPod and the iPods of other people. First, let's talk about the fact that you have to dim the screen to get a decent battery life, and it just looks shitty.

The device looks really nice, until you touch it. Any fingerprints are instantly noticeable. So, like everyone else's, mine hides in a case most of the time. It's a nice case, but I think it was a little overpriced at about $29. It's overpriced, just like most iPod accessories.

The sound quality isn't really all that great. On the iPod Classic or Nano (the main model people buy), it's hard to search for songs as one can in iTunes on a computer. 1,000+ songs in your pocket aren't easily navigated without effective search or a mouse and large screen to click a visible list.

Everyone who buys from the iTunes Store and wants to pay the lowest price for their music (aka normal people), is stuck with a library of music that can only be played on an iPod. We are told by Mr. Jobs himself that this is not by Apple's design, but the record companies. Who knew the record companies wanted to lock people into Apple's proprietary hardware?

And let's talk about the societal consequences of people zoned out on music, instead of making basic conversation. People are fucking rude when they have an iPod on. If you say hi, they have to see you say it, and then you have to go through the obligatory, "Could you say that again, I had my iPod on?"

I suspect the latter phenomenon has been around for a while, after all there have been Walkmans for decades now, but you could only carry so many CDs or tapes at a time. Eventually you'd get tired of listening to the same damn thing and take the headphones off. And the headphones, yes, let's talk about those for a second. The iPod uses earbuds, which reduce the amount of audio which can be heard by the wearer versus old fashioned on the ear designs.

Now everyone has an iPod. Now you can "think different" like everyone else.

[Pierre.Suave]

1. Hey you Damn Kids

GET OFF MY LAWN...

:rofl:



ok, you KNEW someone was going to say it right?

for the record, I carry an iPhone, in a case, and LOVE it.

[originalpckelly]

4. I'm sorry to go all Andy Rooney on you folks...

but someone needs to open a can of whoop ass on them.

[Pierre.Suave]

5. No

no one needs to do that.

Perhaps no one wants to talk to you, so they plug in their iPods when they see you coming...

I think it is an absolute necessity when riding the bus around here, I can drown out all the "stupid" around me and listen to some great music instead, or a podcast, or even surf DU while doing those things...


Why the grouchiness today towards iPods and their users?

[originalpckelly]

There is no real competition for the various "i" products from apple...

they've become the Microsoft of digital music, and unlike Microsoft's windows, the monopoly is not remotely useful or necessary from the perspective of a user. Music is a document in a way, and there's no reason a document can't be cross platform. Why doesn't Apple license Fairplay to other manufacturers? That's the real way to open up competition for them.

Sony may have locked up the market for tape/CD players, but they were not the sole source for tapes or CDs.

[Pierre.Suave]

14. nor is Apple iTunes the only place to buy music...

Seriously?

I have barely ANY music purchased from iTunes on my ipods, most of them are either ripped CDs or digitized vinyl records.

Your attempt at a logical argument failed epically...

[originalpckelly]

18. Apple's music store has the highest market share in America...

you may not buy music from them, but many people are. Partly because it's integrated into iTunes. It's not like there is a precedent for being concerned that product integrates two functions so completely. It's not like Microsoft Windows and IE, now is it?

[Pierre.Suave]

20. So?

Apple is not forcing anyone to buy their music from iTunes.

I am a freakin regular at my local record stores, are you going to get mad that they get all my business?

[originalpckelly]

25. Microsoft didn't make anyone use internet explorer, they just made it easier.

Instead of having to download Netscape Navigator, people could just use the built-in browser.

No one is forced to use the iTunes Store, it's just easier to use because it's built into iTunes. And just because the vast majority of the music it sells is DRMed to play on on iPods doesn't mean that they did it intentionally to make people keep buying iPods, which they make lots more money off of than selling music.

[Pierre.Suave]

27. You should have quit this argument a long time ago...

shame on all those millions of people that cant all be as awezome as you and shun iTunes and iPods and instead talk to you...

:eyes:

infact, I am going to try to initiate the first ever, "Talk to originalpckelly Day" where everyone with an iPod will turn it off and instead, strike up a conversation with you...

[originalpckelly]

29. God forbid people actually talk to one another!

Well, aside from texting one another.

"r u on d train"
"yeah"
"me 2"
"iz dat you"
"yeah"
"itz cold 0uts1de"
"yeah"
"got d ipod"
"yeah"
"coldplay"
"yeah"

[Pierre.Suave]

30. I talk to lots of people everyday

Whats your point?

[originalpckelly]

31. You do? On your iPhone?

"Yeah, I know you're right next to me, but somehow talking on the iPhone makes this boring ass conversation more interesting."

[Pierre.Suave]

32. nope

Face to face sans any electronic intervention or assistance...

Again, what's your point?

[originalpckelly]

33. I'm done having a point, as you repeatedly refused to even consider I was right...

and instead treated me like a total idiot. So now, I'm just fucking with you for the fun of it. :P

[Pierre.Suave]

34. you are not right

I was hoping you would make a reasonable point at some, uhmmm, point. But I guess you realized your wrongness and have decided to backpedal.

[originalpckelly]

35. So it's not an anti-competitive tactic to lock people into proprietary hardware?

OK!

[Pierre.Suave]

36. no

it isnt.

As Hypnotoad unwittingly pointed out below, we are all free to choose other platforms and means of acquiring the music.

Secondly, Steve Jobs himself has come out against DRM and there is actually some DRM free music on iTunes. The DRM is there because of the record companies, not because of Apple.

[originalpckelly]

37. People can lie you know.

You are free to choose other platforms, but if a user has purchased a whole library of music from the iTunes Music Store, as many of the younger customers have done since they didn't have a pre-existing library of CDs, they cannot legally use that music on another platform. Legally, they would have to buy all that music again on the new platform and use it.

The fact that 5 billion songs have been purchased from iTunes, the vast majority of which have Fairplay DRM on them, cannot be played on other players legally, is an almost impossible barrier for other companies trying to compete to overcome. The vast majority of 5 billion songs would have to be re-purchased.

That's 70% of the digital music download market.

It's like saying you can buy a CD from us, but you can't play it on any players but ours. And then people go out and buy the majority of their CDs from that company, leading them to be stuck with all those CDs that have to be re-purchased.

No one had to use the iTunes Store to be sure, I'm not saying that, nor have I said that. I'm saying that it was built-in and had a leg up on any potential competitors. Why use Amazon music if at the time you buy your music you have an iPod? The music is not materially better, it doesn't present any advantage to an iPod user, and they have to open up another application, download songs and then add them manually to iTunes. Sounds silly, but it is a tad bit of work, and most people are lazy so they avoid the extra work. So they use the iTunes Music Store and get locked into Apple's DRM, and must continue to buy Apple's players to keep their library working.

The public statements by Jobs are a rouse. The amount of DRM free music on iTunes is limited.

[Pierre.Suave]

39. Or they can use one of the many

DRM hacking programs out there and unDRM their music.

the amount of DRM free music on iTunes is limited by the record companies willing to sell their music via iTunes without it...


Additionally, Steve Jobs has himself admitted that CDs are still the Number 1 music sales format...

Also, why do you care what other people spend their money on, and who they choose to talk to, or not to talk to, or what they choose to listen to and how they choose to listen to it?

Just worry about yourself and let the rest of us make our music and talking decisions for ourselves.

[originalpckelly]

41. DRM hacking is illegal.

Why should someone have to break the law in order to be treated the way they should?

Stores that sell CDs are going the way of the dinosaur, just look at Tower Records. The iTunes music store is the No. 1 retailer of music, and that will only expand. Ideally, record companies would either change into direct sellers of music, or go out of business. Once it's no longer necessary to use lossy compression on a music file to download it, then CDs will be completely obsolete. Those bandwidths are coming within a decade, direct to house fiber-optic is already there, it's just a matter of time before its bandwidth increases enough to eliminate the need to compress music and reduce quality or at the very least use high bitrate files that are virtually indistinguishable from non-lossy waves.

Why should someone be forced to sell something which can be ripped off? How do you expect people to spend lots of time on making music without earning a living from it? There are no free lunches, and people have got to eat.*

I'm in the music business, in a way I guess. I've found in my own limited experience that there is really no viable alternative to iTunes, for all the reasons I've given.

I'm not the sole person in this world talking about this, consumer interest groups around the world have been saying the same damn things:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Store#The_Consumer_Council_of_Norway_EULA_challenge

*I'd like to add that while CDs don't come with DRM, they are a physical storage medium, and so have some dimension of cost per unit produced. An unlimited number of copies of a mp3 can be made, with no real cost.

[Heidi]

7. Same here. I love my iPhone, just as I loved my Nano (which I still use

thanks to the JBL Onstage speaker system CMW got for my studio). Nobody's forced to buy Apple products, and dissatisfied buyers aren't forced to continue using them. I think judging other people for relatively harmless consumer choices like owning what-ever-brand PDA is going a bit too far. :)

P.S. My iPhone rarely has a fingerprint on it. I got a beautiful leather case for it, and I use the cleaning cloth provided with the device.

[Pierre.Suave]

9. I love my cleaning cloth...

:rofl:

I hate the fingerprints that get on the screen, so I clean it almost everyday.

[Shell Beau]

2. My aunt bought everyone in the fam the new iPod touch for Christmas!

Now we can all be different too!

[originalpckelly]

3. "But mom, why can't I have an iPod so I can be different like all the other kids?"

[Rabrrrrrr]

6. How DARE you criticize the Most Holy Religion of Apple "We're all Individuals Because We're Alike"?

Like those goth kids - "Look how individual we are. You can tell, because we're all dressed the same. Not like you, you stupid conformists."

[originalpckelly]

10. Precisely!

You know what they say about great minds! :P

[bbernardini]

8. "I want to be different, like everybody else I want to be like."

From King Missile's "It's Saturday". (For the record, I've got an iPod, and couldn't live without it. Well, I could, but life would suck just a little bit more.)

I want to be different, like everybody else I want to be like
I want to be just like all the different people
I have no further interest in being the same,
because I have seen difference all around,
and now I know that that's what I want
I don't want to blend in and be indistinguishable,
I want to be a part of the different crowd,
and assert my individuality along with the others
who are different like me
I don't want to be identical to anyone or anything
I don't even want to be identical to myself
I want to look in the mirror and wonder,
"who is that person? I've never seen that person before;
I've never seen anyone like that before."
I want to call into question the very idea that
identity can be attached
I want a floating, shifting, ever changing persona:
Invisibility and obscurity,
detachment from the ego and all of it's pursuits.
Unity is useless
Comformity is competitive and divisive and leads only to
stagnation and death.
If what I'm saying doesn't make any sense,
that's because sense can not be made
It's something that must be sensed
And I, for one, am incensed by all this complacency
Why oppose war only when there's a war?
Why defend the clinics only when they're attacked?
Why are we always reactive?
Let's activate something
Let's fuck shit up
Whatever happened to revolution for the hell of it?
Whatever happened to protesting nothing in particular, just
protesting cause it's Saturday and there's nothing else to do?

[gmoney]

11. I hope you're not one of those morans who think iPods only play music bought thru iTunes...

Randi Rhodes, among other people, bitches that you can't buy the Beatles music on iTunes, like that means you can't listen to the Beatles on your iPod.

JUST RIP THE MUSIC FROM YOUR CDS... if you're such a big Beatles fan, you already have the CDs. If not, you can buy them and if you shop around, pay about the same price as at the iTunes store, plus you'll have the CDs to play elsewhere or even sell. (Shh...)

AND if you simply MUST listen to your iTunes purchases on other MP3 players, just burn the songs to an audio CD, then re-rip them as MP3. Might take a few minutes, but it's not the sort of onerous rights-robbing restriction that people make it out to be.

Fingerprints? If you don't like 'em, but a $5 case on eBay. Or just LIVE WITH THEM. It's a product to be used, not some art object to be kept pristine. I don't know why Apple goes to the trouble and expense of making the mirror-surface backs on these things, when some sort of textured finish would hide fingerprints and make it easier to handle. But I'm not losing any sleep over it.

And at least people listening to iPods aren't yakking and annoying the world like people on cell phones. And who the fuck are you kidding to think that if there were no iPods, people in restaurants or on subways or whatever would actually converse with one another? If people are in the mood to talk to strangers, they'll put the iPod away. If not, then don't waste your time trying to strike up a conversation. Move on to the little old lady at the next table who may be craving a nice conversation.

[originalpckelly]

15. No, I'm not an idiot. I do understand the iPod can play non-DRM music...

from other stores.

That's not my point. The iTunes music store is the premier music store in America. It's the no. 1 source of music. You don't seem to get that. People are buying tons of music from that store. Music, which will always be tied to Apple's players so long as they do not open up Fairplay, their digital rights management software, to other vendors. Even if they did it in a blackbox non-source license, it would seal the deal and open up a market in which their company would have to compete.

It is illegal to burn then re-rip the music, and if it were to be made legal it creates the unnecesary hassle of re-entering all that metadata for every song, as well as reducing the quality of the audio.

As for the fingerprints, I've had PDAs which I never put in a case, save for when I wasn't using them. They stayed in great condition and they never had any of the fingerprints problems that I've had with my iPod.

[Pierre.Suave]

19. Who cares where people choose to buy their music

Right now, apple has the best solution, or at least the easiest. Nothing Apple is doing is stopping someone else from coming up with a better solution or source.

That is the nature of competition, someone comes out with a dominant "widget" and everyone uses that "widget" until someone else designs a better "widget" and then we all switch to that...

I dont get your point at all other than you decided to bitch about Apple/iPods/iTunes today...

[PVnRT]

12. Gee, I guess I'm "defective" since I don't always want to blab with strangers all the time

I guess I'll never be a functioning member of society until I take the earphones out and make stupid fucking conversation about the weather or the new right-wing meme that's "not racist, honestly."

Tell me, is it OK if I go to a restaurant by myself with a book to read and relax? I just want to make sure that's acceptable behavior.

[Rob H.]

13. There's always Amazon.com

if you don't want to buy from the iTunes Store--they sell unprotected MP3s that can be played on a multitude of devices and as far as I know there's no limit on the number of devices onto which they can be copied. I've bought individual tracks and entire CDs as MP3s from them with no problems. :)

And I'd rather be surrounded by people listening to their iPods than people who absolutely have to be on their cell phones no matter where they are. Most of the time if I get cut off in traffic or stuck behind someone driving markedly slower than the speed limit it's because they can't hang up their goddamned cell phones and drive as if they're actually paying attention to the world around them.

On edit: I did buy a case for my iPod from http://www.ifrogz.com">ifrogz.com; it's a two-piece silicone case that comes with a screen protector and click-wheel decal, too. Pretty much everything about the case is customizable and once everything is in place, everything but the headphone port is covered. It's probably easier to visit their site to see what I'm talking about rather than have me try to describe it--I love mine!

[Lex]

16. I like my iPod.

Don't much care whether other people have them, or like them, or not.

[Shakespeare]

17. You are in serious need of some iPod pointers.

1. As someone else noted, you're not limited to music you download from iTunes. I have a 400-some-odd CD library, all of which have been imported to iTunes.

2. It's NOT hard to search for songs or navigate on the iPod screen if you take the time to build good playlists. It's time-consuming on the front end, but after they're all set up, you can find any song you want in seconds. Easy-peasy.

3. If you spend $30 on a case, you may be in need of mental health intervention. You can pick up the same thing on eBay for about $5.

4. What you do NOT want to skimp on are the earbuds. Fuck the ones that come with it; save some money and get the Bose earbuds ($99). Your ears will thank you.

I don't give a damn if I'm unique or not with my iPod; that's not why I bought it. I bought it because I LOVE being able to carry around my entire music library on my teeny little iPod. I'd have the thing surgically implanted if such a thing were possible.

And for anybody who hasn't discovered it yet, the best "accessory" you can buy when you get an iPod is a book called the iPod Missing Manual. It'll show you how to do things you never knew were possible with the iPod, and it troubleshoots just about any problem you might ever encounter. It's about $15 on Amazon, and a good investment if you plan to use your iPod with any frequency.

[jobycom]

22. Damn.

Always impresses me when serious, useful posts follow rant threads. :rofl:

[Shakespeare]

23. I'm here to serve.

:7


:hi:

[jobycom]

21. Standardized individuality.

I have a Zune, a Sansa Clip, and a Nokia phone that plays MP3s and my Audible files. The only one I carry is my phone, which also functions as a GPS system, a calculator, a 5 Meg camera, and even a decent video recorder. So some of your rant hits me where it hurts, and some of it is about all them IPod losers. :)

[Deja Q]

24. I simply thought; bought a MP3 player software and 8GB card for my existing PDA

Never needed an ipod, still don't, doubt I will ever want it.

Herd mentality. Steve loves ya - until you go broke.

[Pierre.Suave]

28. Good for you

the beauty of the "free market" allowed you to buy exactly what you wanted...

You just disproved the point the OP is trying to make...

:rofl:

[meegbear]

26. Yes! We're all individuals! Yes! We're all different!

I'm not

[Initech]

38. Let's dispell some of the things you said here:

First off, NOBODY is holding a gun to your head saying that you must download songs from ITUNES in order for it to work. You do know that you can rip your existing CDs to IPOD without copyright protection, right? Also you dont have to have the setting on "random" - you can listen to the album exactly as it was intended to be listened to, which is the way I have mine set up.

Second the IPOD earphones - the IPOD has a headphone connection so you can connect any pair of headphones you want, not the standard Apple ones.

Third is the sound quality - you can control the sound quality - anywhere from 128K MP3 files all the way to "Lossless" which is basically a flat copy of the CD.

All that aside, the one thing that does piss me off is the fact that nobody is making albums any more. And when I say albums, I'm talking like the kind Zeppelin, Floyd, the Beatles, and so on used to make. It seems these days mainstream "artists" are making songs to put on a disposable playlist and not making quality albums anymore.

[originalpckelly]

42. Let's dispell some of the things you said here:

First off, I NEVER said that a person had to buy music from the iTunes music store in order for it to work. I do know that I can rip my existing CDs to iPod without copyright protection. (I don't believe I said anything pertaining to random play.)

I'm quite well aware of that fact, I don't use my iPod with the stock headphones. I much prefer my Sennheisers. However, most people want to look cool and the included headphones are a tie sign that one is listening to an iPod, in most cases. People want to be cool.

I'm not referring to the lossy encoding of the files, but the D/A inside the iPod.

As a musificator myself, and I find it annoying too. I think that if anyone wants to sell albums now they have to put out great albums like the groups you mentioned.

At least you're friendly! :P

[deucemagnet]

40. Sansa is making some great mp3 players these days.

I just bought 3 refurb Sandisk Clips off of Woot! for $15.99 a pop and they are better than the iPod Shuffle I bought for $80 in every way except one: the Shuffle is a tad smaller.