“There’s one easy step Jobs could take right now that would take advantage of his soaring share price to open up whole new fields of growth. Buy Palm,” Brett Arends writes for The Boston Herald.
“The reason? IPods are not quite as invincible as they look,” Arends writes. “They’re no longer clearly the best digital music player. They’re heavy and the battery life isn’t that great. Rival products the size of your thumb include a radio.”
“Sure, Apple’s iTunes music store is easy to use, and revenues trebled last year to $899 million. But its music range is limited, and free file-sharing won’t go away. Once it was Napster. Now it’s Limewire. Next year, who knows? Apple is trying to build a defensive moat around its business. Only an iPod will play iTunes music and use iPod accessories. But this harkens back to the disastrous closed strategy of the 1980s, when the company refused to license the Mac operating system to other computer manufacturers,” Arends writes.
Full article here.
Apple iPods are clearly the best digital music players. They are not at all “heavy.” In fact, iPods are unbelievably small and light. iPod battery life is exceptional for the small sizes and light weights of the units (Learn how to maximize your iPod battery’s life and lifespan here – a properly maintained iPod battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity after 400 full charge and discharge cycles). FM radio is obviously not important to consumers – just look at iPod sales for proof. Macs and Windows PCs will play iTunes Music Store songs and videos. You don’t even need an iPod to enjoy iTunes and the iTunes Music Store. iPods can play AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), Protected AAC (from iTunes Music Store), MP3 (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 2, 3 and 4), Apple Lossless, WAV, and AIFF formats.
The iPod is not the Mac, so stop trying to compare them. The Macintosh platform required and still requires huge investments by developers to create compatible software. The iPod simply plays music that can be encoded, for very little cost, in any format the “developers” (musicians and labels) desire: AAC, MP3, WMA, etc. The music doesn’t need to be rewritten, recorded, and remastered. It’s like writing Photoshop once and then pressing a button to translate it for use on Mac, Windows, Linux, etc. To draw an analogy between Mac OS licensing and the iPod/iTunes symbiotic relationship simply highlights the writer’s ignorance of the vast differences between the two business situations.
We could go on, but this is tiresome, silly stuff that we and others have already refuted many times over. When did Arends write this article, three years ago – only to see it published today? Yeah, we know, it’s the Boston Herald, so don’t expect much quality reporting. For Apple to buy Palm today would be almost as stupid and outdated as this article.
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Related articles:
Palm goes to the dark side, next Treo to use Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 – September 26, 2005
Apple’s roadkill whine in unison: ‘incompatibility is slowing growth of digital music’ – August 13, 2005
Enjoying Apple’s iTunes and iTunes Music Store without owning an iPod – May 11, 2005
The iPod is not the Mac, so stop trying to compare them – August 13, 2004
The de facto standard for legal digital online music files: Apple’s protected MPEG-4 Audio (.m4p) – December 15, 2004
I do wish WMA, non-iPodders, et al would just go away.
Accept Defeat.
It’s over.
iPod won.
Over time, iPods will increasingly resemble PDAs– there will be little choice as newer features are demanded and added.
Um, this writer clearly is an idiot.
Music sharing sites arent a threat to the iPod, it’s the other way around. Free file sharing had 100% of the ‘market’ for downloading, iTunes came along and took a chunk of that away.
“Only an iPod will play iTunes music and use iPod accessories”
What?!?! um you are an idiot. GO BUY A CD and see how easy it is to play on an iPod. iPod accessories. Um hello McFly, the iPod CREATED the iPod accessory market. Lets see dammit, I can’t put these fuzzy dice on my iPod, the iPod is doomed.
Palms aren’t a threat to the iPod, it’s the other way around. The iPod has slowly added features over time that people will actually use. The handheld market is dead largely because people realized that well, they weren’t that great and they only used a few features like address book.
And yes, it’s amazing to me how many people continue to write about this supposed parallel between the Mac market and the iPod market. It just shows they really don’t understand technology, they just regurgitate old myths.
MW ‘college’, as in, this writer barely has college level skills.
This idiot believes everything Microsoft’s PR department writes.
People want choice my ass. People have chosen. Microsoft and it’s fanboys will just have to live with that choice.
Brett Arends should be fired on the spot.
Your comments would do well to also mention how the bottom has fallen out of Palm’s business recently as a result of Palm’s strategic blunders and the massive takeup of smart phones. They long ago ceased to be the Wunderkind of the new economy. Never mind the fundamentally broken logic noted in the article above, Apple will be able to buy Palm OS itself for $39.95 at the Palm closing down sale in the very near future.
Personally I prefer the “‘Apple should buy Adobe” logic slightly more than the inane argument that Apple should buy some pathetic PDA maker that’s losing sales as fast as Nokia and Samsung and Sony and Motorola can ship smart cell phones.
Arends claims that the iPod is “no longer clearly the best digital music player” and then doesn’t give the names of any other players.
Hmmmm… wonder why?
Nope, sorry, no need to wonder.
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Well Britt hasn’t done his research, so what do you expect.
I will say this – after you’ve had your ipod for 12 – 16 months, the battery is prettymuch shot. It won’t even last an hour on a “full” charge, even with monthly conditioning (running completely dead and completely full). I just replaced my battery, and it’s working fine now, but don’t say that Battery Life is exceptional – an exceptional battery shouldn’t need to be changed every year (two – three years, maybe).
Invest in Palm….no way!
Give that money to software vendors to create biz software for the mac or buy a gaming company but not Palm.
I’ve had my iPod for 12 months and it still takes a good 6-8 hours to die. Your battery dies within an hour because you don’t know how to take care of it.
Many wirters without any knowledge of history seem to think the Mac dominated in the 80’s but fell behind because it wasn’t licensed to others. Licensing may or may not have been a good idea, but to compare the dominant iPod to the Mac of the 80’s is silly. The Appe II did dominate, but that’s another issue. That line lost its dominance because the Apple III didn’t work.
Apple should buy Palm? Palm is all but dead!
Maybe this turkey has stock in Palm and he’s trying to boost the price so that he can unload!
Palm is dead. and I need radio on my iPod about as much as I need a tape player with auto-reverse and “extra bass”.
iPods are not heavy and still are the number one player on the market. This guy is talking through his you know what. And who the heck wants a radio?
I bought an MP3 player to listen to my music, not the same 10 songs over and over again from the radio. Not to mention all the commercial breaks.
I’ve had my iPod for 2.5 years and still get 5+ hours on a charge. I’ve never done anything special to it. In fact, “conditioning” your battery may not actually be as good as you think for a lithium-ion battery. I tried that trick with one of my past computer batteries (also Lithium-ion) and checked the capacity using myBattery () and found that the total charge it could hold actually went down each time I completely depleted it and recharged it. Lithium-ion batteries have a logic board that keeps track of it’s state and it is actually not good to completely deplete them since the logic board runs out of energy and it can get confused. Batteries these days really don’t require you to do much with them. Basically, just don’t half charge it (if you star tot charge it, finish the job) and you should be fine.
“I will say this – after you’ve had your ipod for 12 – 16 months, the battery is prettymuch shot. It won’t even last an hour on a “full” charge, even with monthly conditioning (running completely dead and completely full). I just replaced my battery, and it’s working fine now, but don’t say that Battery Life is exceptional – an exceptional battery shouldn’t need to be changed every year (two – three years, maybe).”
I’ve had my ipod for over a year and the battery is still fine. Better than fine. Why? Because I take care of it. You sound like one of those half-wits at Best Buy who tried to tell my friend that iPod batteries were crap and WOULD fail in less than year.
the writer has got cought with wads of Palm stocks – and he’s not happy that someone tipped him Apple at $12…
…and he’s an idiot too.
The only thing I can think of of value at Palm is that I think they still own all of the BeOS patents. The price would have to drop a lot still to make that worth wile.
Palm is dead.
I actually replaced my PDA with an iPod. Has anyone else ever wondered why, after all these years, hard drives are just now being added to PDAs? I thought a pocket computer was a no brainer years ago.
I believe Apple’s iPod is eventually going to morph into a handheld computer. The Mac mini is only 6″x6″. How small can it go? The next evelutionary leap is to make the iPod a fully functional computer. The iPod will have a limited interface when operating away from the doc, but once attached to a KVM it will be a complete computer. I seem to recall talk of something like this awhile ago on the rumor mill. It may take a couple years, but the iPod will keep evolving at an incremental rate and every new feature will bring it closer and closer to being a complete computer. It can already hold a disk image and act as a bootable hard drive. Chips will get faster, hard drives bigger, wireless, Quicktime, high definition; it’s just a matter of time.
A true pocket computer.
Palm is not dead.
However Palm don’t own PalmOS these days – they just license it. The OS division, PalmSource was bought out by a Japanese company a few months back.
Buying Palm wouldn’t be a great idea on the basis that Apple wouldn’t get the whole widget.
Besides, Apple already own a stack of PDA IP that’s mostly superior to Palm’s offerings in the form of the Newton. They ran away from the PDA business before just when the Newton division was becoming profitable. I don’t see them running back to the PDA business any time soon.
“after you’ve had your ipod for 12 – 16 months, the battery is prettymuch shot”
Weird, I’ve had my iPod for 2 .5 years and the battery still works great.
Buying Palm is like the idea last week of buying Adobe.
These are yesterday’s markets. Apple is flanking Microsoft by developing new markets.
Don’t expect His Steveness to fall into the military trap of preparing to win the last war. I’ll give him that. He’s going after movies next, not old software or handheld organizers.
so, pinhead, exactly which player is “better” than an iPod? exactly which player has the same feature set and capacity; and has the iTunes one stop shopping / syncing solution? who care about having a radio; that’s exactly the one “feature” that i specifically don’t want. if i want to listen to the radio, i have lots of them available. i have a 3G and an iPod photo; the 3G is still going strong after two years. what a moron; it is still amazing how the uninformed and plain stupid continue to get space in which to spout their simply incorrect drivel. then, little johnny and his mommy go down to the mental giants at best buy and get sold some crap from “creative” because it has a radio! give me a break!
“after you’ve had your ipod for 12 – 16 months, the battery is prettymuch shot”
My 3G iPod will be 3 years old this week. I tested the battery life a couple of months ago to see if it qualified for the class action suit. It lasted 5 hrs 50 min.
You are either full of crap, you got a bad unit or both.