“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’ve had my FIRST-GENERATION iPod since March 2002, and I recently measured its straight-play time (from fully charged, disconnected from the charger to the “battery depleted” message) to be just over 8.5 hours.
Not bad for a battery rated for 10 hours almost 4 years ago.
I’ll grant that I’m not a heavy user anymore, but it makes me wonder what the heck people are doing wrong when they kill the battery after only a year or two.
This guy is worse than an idiot. The PDA market is dead for good. How can the greatest iPods, only released a little over a month ago, be not clearly the best? What is he smoking?
If they could buy the Palm OS, it might be worth it precisely because of the probable convergence of Ipods, smartphones, etc.
And in my experience, the Palm OS is the best one out there for handhelds, and Apple could improve it.
But if they can’t buy the OS , then it does not make much sense.
The Best Buy guys are a hoot. They go out of their way to knock iPods or Apple because they want you to buy a crappy PC. They make more of a % on a PC basically.
They also want you to buy Applecare so they scare you with the Battery life stories. Then if you do have a problem they tell you to go to an Apple store and leave them alone.
Frankly from what i seen of them they are terrible even in the most basic of sales.
I agree that buying Palm (at current share prices) doesn’t make too much sense. I’ve had a Palm for years and have grown to pretty much hate them. Apple could pretty easily make a handheld better than the Palm or Newton ever was.
If Apple could buy Palm CHEAP, it could make sense because they’d get the IP for a rather popular PDA phone. PalmOS is dead (the WinCE Treo ought to make that clear!) but there’s no obligation to use PalmOS or WinCE on the phone. I don’t think Palm has anything else worth Apple’s time.
If someone had read just the MacDaily digest of the original story, I can see how they would feel that Mr. Arends got it wrong. The problem is, the digest on the web page didn’t focus on Mr. Arends really thrust of the article.
He is tired of carrying several different electronic devices and wants one to do his phone, PDA, and music. With Palms technology married with the legendary Apple ease of use, and the low share price for Palm, he was suggesting this would be a good marriage to take on the M$ juggernaut.
It’s still a plan with some problems, but it’s not as idiotic as the report digest would have you believe. As we have seen, you must continue to evolve because standing still is the way you die.
I liked Palm OS on handheld, but had no huge problems with Windows CE, except that it did crash more often for me.
But I really think that, as mobile as I am, that there has to be a big market for phone/pda or handheld computers. Maybe there are not as many of us as I think, but even a 12 inch Ibook is too big for me.
A cell phone, and a handheld, and a laptop are just too much to manage.
“I will say this – after you’ve had your ipod for 12 – 16 months, the battery is prettymuch shot.”
Perhaps you just got a bad one. ive got several ipods, some 3+ years old and they get better battery life than that.
“…no longer clearly the best digital music player. They’re heavy and the battery life isn’t that great…”
Heavy?
If I drop my Nano (as I have done far too many times), the headphone connection will catch it before it hits the floor. It’s so light I have to frisk myself to remember what pocket it’s in.
Incidentally, I love the feature that pauses the song when the headphones are removed.
Silly article.
“after you’ve had your ipod for 12 – 16 months, the battery is prettymuch shot”
Lithium batteries will last somewhere around 300 charge cycles. If you run your iPod down every day and charge it overnite, you can expect about a year out of it. That’s how it works. You use it more, it wears out faster. Duh.
Drunken clod. And people wonder why journalists aer loathed.
My nephew got given an iRiver for his birthday yesterday. It wouldn’t run on a Mac so I used Virtual PC to set it up. What a disaster! The first intruction was to run Windows Explorer and make it safe to disconnect…… not possible in VPC. Then had to install the iRiver software twice, a visit to the iRiver and HMV @ MSN site got us infected with a spyware program that’s still plauging the bloody thing. Had to update the software and firmware….. no help menu…. then took two hours to put 4 tracks from 2 CDs only to find they wouldn’t show up in the players playlist. Finally mounted it as an external drive and dragged mp3s onto the disc image. This worked but the iRiver has no playlist folder structure. In short a total piece of crap, crap software, and ugly to boot and it needs batteries! His mom thought it had to be better than a Shuffle for the same price because it had a screen, which is tiny and a mess to navigate. It’s as if an Apple engineer was hired to program their interface and given a lobotomy before starting.
The best bit is we can now read the 200 page software, 150 page “quick” start quide and 150 page Troubleshooting manuals at our leasure having given up in frustration.
i would rather receive meatloaf for christmas than an iRiver.
put the giver of the iRiver on your “lousy gifts” list.