Apple’s iPod nano “is a beautiful piece of hardware — and a beautiful piece of hardware that also function[s] really well,” Andrew Kantor reports for USA Today. “The iPod’s quality is about form, not just features. For starters, it is better looking than its competition. I wouldn’t call it ‘art,’ but it is certainly something you could spend time admiring as you use it. The competition has caught up, and there are some just-as-slick players out there. But they came after the iPod had become synonymous with good looks, and they now have a steep hill to climb to catch up to Apple.”
“Get a Creative Labs MuVo or Zen, or a Sony Network Walkman and you can do the same things — download, play, pause, shuffle, etc. Some even include FM tuners and voice recorders,” Kantor writes. “And yet Apple has that huge market share. Some of it may be due to good marketing, but much of it is due to the quality of the iPod… The iPod has Play and Pause buttons; so does every player. But — at least until recently — the iPod’s controls felt better that [sic] the competition’s. There was a quality behind them that other players lacked… If I had an iPod nano, I would probably stop now and then to admire it.”
Full article here.
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“At least until recently — the iPod’s controls felt better than the competition’s? Okay, so which competitor’s controls feel/work as well as Apple’s iPod? Kantor doesn’t say. “The competition has caught up?” With whom, each other in bankruptcy court? Certainly, they haven’t caught up with Apple. Kantor fails to note how iPods connect seamlessly with Apple’s iTunes music jukebox and iTunes Music Store. It’s the seamless iPod+iTunes+iTunes Music Store triumvirate that puts Apple head and shoulders above the also-rans, not just the player’s hardware; it’s the combination of all three that makes Apple’s system so much better.
This is the same Andrew Kantor who wrote for USA Today last December 3rd, “I just don’t get the overwhelming appeal of the iPod, Apple’s MP3 player. It’s a beautiful device to be sure, but it does exactly what many, many other similar players do: It plays MP3s. Other brands are better, less expensive, have more capacity, are easier to use, and so on. But the iPod has something more than 85% market share. That’s incredible — that’s like finding that 85% of people in the country drive Toyota Camrys. It just doesn’t make sense… I didn’t go for an iPod when I bought an MP3 player. I wanted something smaller, so I got one that uses flash memory instead of a hard drive — a Creative MuVo TX.”
More than nine months later, Kantor still doesn’t get it. Here’s an original idea: Kantor should download iTunes, get an iPod, actually use them, and then write about his experiences.
You can contact Mr. Kantor here: andrew@kantor.com
(He loves email from Mac users, as you can see from the following examples, but he tends to cherrypick the flames, so level-headed expressions pointing out issues would be best, unless you want to be published on kantor.com: example 1, example 2, and example 3)
[UPDATE: 5:43pm ET: USA Today columnist calls Mac users and Apple fans a ‘cult of blind little lemmings’]
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