Subtitled, “Apple’s beloved music player plaqued [sic] by poor quality and a damaged brand,” an anonymous piece by silicon.com states, “The first signs have started to emerge this week that Apple’s super-cool must-have iPod music players are, well, how can we put it – actually not that great. For Apple’s legions of diehard fans we’re sure we’ve just committed some unimaginable sin by uttering those words but let us look at the evidence.”
For their supposed “evidence,” silicon.com really shows how far they need to reach to find examples for their hit piece. Silicon.com uses Duke University’s results in experimenting with iPods in a education setting and one journalist’s experience with three (yes, just 3) iPod mini units.
This massive wealth of “evidence” has led the geniuses at silicon.com “to look elsewhere for [their] next music players.” In fact, one brilliant silicon.com staffer “plans to pick up a 20GB Creative Zen Touch” instead of replacing his iPod mini — ostensibly before Creative goes out of business. He’d better hurry.
Silicon.com, part of CNET Networks, wants to know, “So is this the first wave of an iPod ‘backlash’? Is the iPod love affair over?” We guess if poorly-written, ham-fisted B.S. from a site plastered with Microsoft ads counts, it would be. We’ll leave it for you to decide.
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Fortune: Apple iPod a true cultural and social phenomenon – June 13, 2005
Apple shares slide on reports of iPod sales of over 5 million for quarter – June 03, 2005
Hewlett-Packard adds ‘Apple iPod mini from HP’ to iPod digital music player lineup – June 02, 2005
Goldman Sachs expects ‘little sequential growth’ in Apple iPod shipments this quarter – June 02, 2005
Piper raises Apple estimates on Mac sales strength; estimates 5.5 million iPods shipped this quarter – May 26, 2005
iRiver spokeman: iPod’s 92 percent market share due to competitors’ neglect of niche – May 26, 2005
Prudential: Apple iPod market expanding, iPod now holds 76% share of all U.S. portable music players – May 23, 2005
Piper Jaffray notes strong demand for Apple Mac and iPod models – May 10, 2005
Apple’s iPod shuffle takes nearly 60 percent of US flash-player market in March – May 04, 2005
>Oh… and non-Apple players NEVER have problems
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” />
Mine doesn’t.
…..
….
…
..
.
Too bad I’m lying… and it does. 🙁
“Apple’s beloved music player plaqued [sic] by poor quality and a damaged brand,”…
Well, this is certainly an applicable subtitle if those iPod owners were constantly gnawing on them with teeth that hadn’t seen the inside of a dentist’s office in a few years… of COURSE the silly thing’s gonna get damaged and result in a poor quality listening experience! (Maybe they were really using iPod shuffles and truly DID mistake them for sticks of gum…?)
Should’ve read:
>Oh… and non-Apple players NEVER have problems smile
(My iPod) doesn’t.
…..
….
…
..
.
Too bad I’m lying… and it does. 🙁
Should’ve read:
>Oh… and non-Apple players NEVER have problems smile
(My iPod) doesn’t.
…..
….
…
..
.
Too bad I’m lying… and it does. 🙁
Should’ve read:
>Oh… and non-Apple players NEVER have problems smile
(My iPod) doesn’t.
…..
….
…
..
.
Too bad I’m lying… and it does. 🙁
ipod shuffle is a nightmare.
Tying it to one PC is a disaster.
I was expecting similar functionality to a “proper” ipod, just memory rather than disk based.
I purchased shuffle for my wife (as she wanted ultra small, lightweight device – “proper” ipod too big for her liking).
As part of the surprise, I took some of her CDs into work and background added them to the shuffle via my work PC – all well & good (could not use home PC or she would have noticed).
Disaster came when she wanted to slightly amend what was on the shuffle, delete a few tracks, add some different from her PC .
With the shuffle “tied” to my work PC it meant she could not do this, she had to wipe out what was on there and add new tracks from scratch – which meant re-encoding her CDs as obviously all the encoding was done on a none home PC.
So my “extra” present of encoding tracks and burning to her ipod was a wasted effort as all the hard work had to be repeated.
After the fact, some keen web searching revealed this, I do however think this should be flagged up massively as its different from “proper” ipod and a pain in a mobile music player. The whole point of something so small is that it should be able to have tracks added / deleted wherever you are, this is a mobile age where people may well have music on their home PC, work PC and laptop, being forced to use only one PC for managing your ipod is ridiculous.
I really regret not buying one of the many competitors that just act as pure USB memory devices and just recognise MP3s if you store them (don’t even get me started on the pain of having to configure shuffle each time you want to alter usb storage availability – why it cant just act as a usb memory device like just about any other “stick” player is another pain).
I made the mistake, with having liked a “real” ipod, going for the shuffle as I trusted the brand – I was very disappointed – made worse when I expressed these concerns to apple and did not even get a reply.
Lets for a minute assume that the article is correct. Apple is now plagued by quality issues and the brand is being damaged. Since when has that affected the average consumer?? After all VHS beat out BetaMax and MS and Windows went on to be the dominate OS. The race for market dominance is inherently a race to the bottom where cheap and good-enough beat out quality every time.
Dave Challender ,
I frankly can understand your frustration. Unfortunately, synchronizing anything between multiple computers is a pain and fraught with problems. Try it with a Palm PDA and you’ll see what I mean. It doesn’t, however, make your complaint any less meaningful.