Did Apple Sabotage the ROKR? 502
JPigford writes "The Apple Blog makes claim that Apple sabotaged the success of the ROKR so as to sway public opinion of MP3 cell phones in general...ultimately to drive more sales to the iPod. By mandating a 100 song limit on the ROKR and having the product flop, Apple was able to put a bad taste in the mouths of consumers so that not only do they drive more iPod sales, but they keep competitors from fighting back with their own MP3 phones."
Re:It's probably true (Score:2, Insightful)
Doesn't add up. (Score:4, Insightful)
Their name is still connected to this product, by way of iTunes. So, logically, if people's only experience with iTunes comes by way of the ROKR and that experience is a negative one, logically that's going to lead customers to respond by going elsewhere for music and for a portable music player.
The idea that people might get a ROKR and say "wow, this is cool, I want to buy an iPod now" seems more plausable - as does the idea that more people than you might realize are going to shy away from the all-in-one gadgetization of the phone (with cameras, mps players, video / TV etc.) I am one of those people who would rather have three devices that do their respective functions very well than one that does three different things in a mediocre way.
it's possible (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe, but Motorola helped. (Score:5, Insightful)
What's most puzzling is: It's all the same OS. Their cheapest and most expensive phones have an almost identical menu structure. Making a Java/iTunes app shouldn't have taken as long as it did.
Lastly. A RAZR is free with a 2 year contract. A 512mb shuffle (which holds more songs) is $80. The two of them together in the same pocket is a better solution than the ROKR....and will go longer on a charge!
Unlikely (Score:5, Insightful)
APPL intent doesn't matter - they're both at fault (Score:2, Insightful)
i also heard... (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriosuly, how did this post make is to the front page of slashdot? Its a first attempt, they will get better over time, especially as technology improves. That aside, apple certainly doesn't want its good name attached to things that flop. Its bad PR.
C'mon (Score:5, Insightful)
But "sabotage"?!? Motorola isn't a couple of kids with a lemonade stand, and it's not even a huge corporation operating outside its normal business. Surely they have enough experience with portable consumer electronics to have dealt with Apple with their eyes open.
Re:Doesn't add up. (Score:2, Insightful)
hmm i don't think so, someone who has some songs on their phone would probably not see the need for another device for songs in their pocket..
this does add up my friend, another article like this was available the day after the crappy rokr came out. apple likely plans on releasing a phone that they design themself in the future.
Holy Conspiracy Theory Batman! (Score:1, Insightful)
At the same time, however, I'm sure a lot of uneducated consumers link that phone directly to Apple and then assume if it sucks then the rest of the stuff can't be as good as everyone claims either. It would have been quite a risky move on Apple's part so I'm going to leave this as speculation for now.
To me it seemed more like they just rushed it out the door without really trying too hard, just to get the idea into people's heads and see if it would take off...
How perfect! (Score:3, Insightful)
Any misstep, just start the rumor (or have your zealot minions do it for you) that any mistake was on purpose. Apple really CAN do no wrong.
Re:Doesn't add up. (Score:3, Insightful)
It amazes me how much like MS Apple is in it's tactics. They are easily as manipulative and evil as MS, but they seem to get a free pass from most on
Does everything have to be a conspiracy? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are no alien abductions, there are no chemtrails, we really did go to the Moon and all the big problems in the country- from 9/11 to Katria relief- are the result of chaos, sloppiness and stupidity unguided by secret cabals or ninja assassins or Skull and Bones members.
Re:Doesn't add up. (Score:2, Insightful)
Damn man, how big are your pockets, how many computers do you have, one for each task?
The mobile phone is designed for listening to things, the mobile phone is designed for storing data (address book, text messages), these are the only two things an MP3 player needs.
Retrieving artist/album/genre/song title from a database would simply be an extension of the address book functionality.
An MP3/Phone is not a big leap.
Re:Doesn't add up. (Score:3, Insightful)
If they like some things about it but are frustrated by its lack of capacity, they're likely to upgrade to an ipod. If they hate the device altogether, they're less likely to do so. Doesn't seem a clever strategy to me.
this does add up my friend, another article like this was available the day after the crappy rokr came out.
The number of articles making a claim doesn't add to the logic of the claim.
Re:i also heard... (Score:3, Insightful)
Very simple, for these kinda stories (Score:2, Insightful)
MS has a monopoly. T0o many computers == wintel and to be fair other companies like say Dell and of course Intel are very happy to help MS keep that monopoly.
Because of this monopoly however any decision MS makes will be very closely watched to see if it doesn't have an "evil" angle.
Apple is tiny and controls the desktop in about the same way that say Greenland controls world politics. Not at all.
Nobody would give one shit what Apple does with its desktop because nobody needs them or feels they don't have a choice but to use them. Same way the whole world watches the US and nobody watches greenland. So Apple can get away with charging for service packs. Imagine if MS did that. Apple gets away with some pretty bad customer support, just browse slashdot, all because it is just to small for people to be really affected.
With MP3 players however Apple has achieved if not a monopoly then at least a dominance. Nobody could possibly feel forced to buy Apple for their player because the alternatives are to hard to use or impossible to buy. (the whole linux vs windows argument).
We do however get to see Apple behaving very MS like. Stupid idiotic restrictions seemingly designed for nothing else then just because they can.
If you ignore the fanboys, always a smart move, then most Apple users will agree that Steve Jobs only saving grace is that he has never had the success of Bill Gates. He can get away with decissions that Bill Gates would be roasted alive for. Steve Jobs decides to cripple a product in order to boost sales of another? 99% of posts will point out that this is a sound business decision. Bill Gates gives a couple of million to disease research? 99% of posts will question what his real motives are.
IBM is a current favorite for their support of Linux and general coolness. Can you imagine that not too long ago it was MS that was the new upstart fighting the monopolist IBM?
While I am not saying that all companies are equally evil I am saying that Apple/Steve Jobs is easily just as evil as MS/Bill Gates. He just has more charm.
Phones are for Carriers, not Consumers (Score:3, Insightful)
Motorola does NOT make phones for consumers, it makes them for carriers.
Re:Doesn't add up. (Score:5, Insightful)
My 512MB iPod Shuffle (which I received for free) can hold maybe 150 songs at most. That translates to eight and a half hours of music with the 128kbps AAC compression, and that's more than enough for bus rides or walking to classes and then swapping out songs when I get bored with the mix in a few days.
100 songs is more than it sounds like.
Re:Doesn't add up. (Score:5, Insightful)
this does add up my friend, another article like this was available the day after the crappy rokr came out. apple likely plans on releasing a phone that they design themself in the future.
How does that add up? You claim they intentionally made a crappy product branded with the itunes name and they made it crappy to promote sales of a new phone they plan to release with the itunes name? It's called poisoning the brand and it is not a good thing. People that buy a crappy itunes phone are unlikely to buy another. And will advise others against it, even if all the drawbacks of the first one are solved.
Too many paranoid suggestions (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't add up. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the ROKR is failing, the only reason it's doing so is because the cell phone market is absolutely saturated. Everyone that wants one already has a phone, and phones aren't fashion items anymore. iPod is.
Re:It's probably true (Score:5, Insightful)
Of a small rechargable battery, a good cell phone can give you about a week of stand-by time without recharging. Even if you use it a lot, you should only need to charge it about once every day or two while avoiding it every completely running the charge out.
If you let it run out, you could miss an important call, so this is important.
An MP3 Player's battery's life cycle is measured in hours of playback, and when it runs out, it's no big deal. You just need to hook it up to a charger for 1-4 hours sometime before the next time you want to listen to it.
Make the same device to both functions, and guess what your biggest problem is going to be.
Re:Doesn't add up. (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple and MS just don't remotely equate.
Re:Doesn't add up. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd rather have 1 that did all well with a battery that lasted for more then 2 hours of activity.
Let me know when I can have PDA like flexibility, Wireless internet access, Cellphone communication, and iPod like music playback on a battery/fuelcell that will run for 8 hours of [b]activity[/b] on one device.
-Rick
Re:Doesn't add up. (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, another pet peeve of mine is people who go "Why would anyone need a tiny monitor for their mp3 player?" because they only have 512/256/128/whatever MB of storage on their mp3 player and everyone else must use their mp3 players in the same way.. but that's a different discussion.
/Mikael
Re:Doesn't add up. (Score:5, Insightful)
DING DING DING DING!!!
Look at that! Somebody finally got to the crux of the issue.
I think the ROKR looks like a nifty phone, but there's no way I'm buying one because my current phone (also made by Motorola) required that I subscribe to two years of T-Mobile service in order to get it at a sensible price. That was only a few months ago.
To buy an ROKR, I would have to break that contract (paying an obscene early-exit fee), and sign up for Cingular (another good service provider, but considerably more expensive than my current plan.)
Ultimately, that would mean hundreds of dollars just to make this minor upgrade over my current Motorola phone (which I'm far from 100% happy with, by the way.) I'm far better off waiting another year and a half for my current service contract to expire and see what's out there at that time, or else just attaching a shuffle to my current phone with hot glue if I really need an all-in-one device so damn badly.
I'm sure I'm far from the only person out there in such a position.
Take off the Aqua-coloured glasses (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's probably true (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's probably true (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem isn't that integration is necessarily a bad thing. It's that the companies doing the integrating design for the lowest common denominator. Thus, you get a lousy PDA, a lousy MP3 player, and a lousy camera built into a phone that periodically crashes when you're making a phone call.
Those camera phones? They're fine for people wanting to just send a quick pic to their friends---hey, look, I'm in Rome---but I don't know of anybody who would consider any of them good enough for taking photos that they want to keep. That's why few people complain that all you can generally do with those photos is email them to other people (for a price). They don't use the phone to take pictures for their memories. They use the camera's phone for photos that don't matter. If they're on vacation and want photos to keep, they either take a separate camera or buy a disposable.
Single-purpose devices are consistently, more reliable, offer better functionality, and offer interfaces tailored to a particular function. Integrated devices are consistently less reliable, offer watered-down functionality (usually for political reasons within a company), and consistently have clumsy interfaces.
No, thanks.
Bad "journalism" (Score:4, Insightful)
I call BS.
The Apple Blog isn't doing any original reporting of its own -- it's just riffing off an article from Wired about the business relationship between Apple and Motorola. And it doesn't seem like they read that article very closely, either.
The Apple Blog asserts:
... which makes it sound like Apple pulled the limitation out of thin air. Apple Blog goes on from there to speculate about Apple's motivation for doing so.
But if you read the Wired article [wired.com], the actual claim made is nowhere near as conclusive as Apple Blog indicates it is:
The Wired article makes it sound like the 100-song limit was less an arbitrary business decision and more a decision based on limits inherent in Apple's FairPlay DRM. Apple's never going to allow an iTunes client that does not use FairPlay, so if there's something about FairPlay-for-mobiles that means you're stuck with 100 songs, that could mean that there was no predatory action on the part of Apple to "sabotage" the ROKR. It was just "the cost of doing business" for using FairPlay.
If Wired had conclusive proof that Apple made an arbitrary business decision to limit the ROKR to 100 songs, they would have sourced that allegation -- i.e. run a quote from someone who would be in a position to know. But they didn't. If they had inconclusive evidence that Apple might have done that, they could have sourced the assertion to someone more tangential via the old "A source who asked to remain anonymous told us..." approach. They did not do that either.
What that indicates to me is that either (a) Apple Blog knows something Wired does not, in which case they should source their assertion independently of the Wired article, or (b) Apple Blog's speculations are ungrounded. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide which is the case.
Re:Doesn't add up. (Score:3, Insightful)
Hanlon's Razor? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't add up. (Score:5, Insightful)
that is why I have a treo 600 in my pocket.
I have a mp3 player that works great, interrupts the song with a ring during a call and allows me to answer by pressing a button on my stereo headset nd take the call with the headset. I get the bonus of getting rid of my palm PDA with it and have that legendary stability of palm (the reason why I got the 600 instead of the 650)
plus I can watch tv shows and movies from my replayTV or computer on it as well.
so it doesnt use itunes, big whoop to me and many other people.
this phone is not the first mp3 player/phone to ever exist even though they are trying to market it that way.
Re:Doesn't add up. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm in a contract with Sprint. In order to use a ROKR I would have to break contract, buy a new phone, enter a new contract, etc. Its not even worth the time it would take me to figure out the benefit:loss ratio of switching.
If/when I do switch, it would probably be to verizon simply because I know a lot of people on it and it would be nice not to worry about costs when I talk to them. My network choice is dictated less by phone technology and more by utility of the network/plan.
That said, am I the only one out there who wants a cell phone that acts... like a cell phone?
Calm Down (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing to see here, just another example of
Why the ROKR is really the SUKR (Score:3, Insightful)
OK, so it takes an hour. No problem, I'll just plug it into my computer before I go to bed and I'll wake up with a fully charged phone full of new music, right?
WRONG! The phone does NOT charge while connected to the computer!
What also sucks about the SU^H^HROKR:
When playing music, UI becomes unacceptably unresponsive. Like 2 seconds of lag between pushing a key and anything happening.
Despite the fact that you can play MP3s with it, you cannot set an MP3 to be your ring tone. What if I want my kids voice to be my ringtone? I will NEVER pay for a ring tone.
I couldn't get it to display any jpg I uploaded to it. It only wants to display images that came with it or were taken with it's own camera.
The built in amp wont drive my headphones very well (Etymotic ER4) so I tried plugging in my own headphone amp (Headroom BitHead). However, the ROKR headphone detection circuit has too low of a threshold and it cannot detect that an external amp with high impedence is plugged in: so the music continues to come out of the speakers! I had to wire a 10K resistor in parallel to get it to work. Then I discovered that the ROKR powers the headphones the entire time they are plugged in, not just when it is playing music. If you forget to unplug your headhpones when not listening to music your phone will quickly run out of juice.
The buttons have a weird shape and are hard to push without pushing the wrong buttons. I find it very diffcult to work the five way stick without pushing it in.
When you hold the phone between your shoulder and ear, nobody can understand what you are saying.
The shape of wall wart combine with the folding action of the terminals means that it is difficult to plug it into a standard power strip and if you get it plugged in there is a good chance it will loose connection as the terminals fold.
The UI is awful. There is no consistency. Sometimes it is "Back" sometimes "Exit" sometimes you push the left button to go back, sometimes you push the right button to go back.
Drivers within the phone have "crashed" disabling the BlueTooth. My phone told me I needed to reboot it!!
It's junk, I will never buy another Motorola phone.
Re:Doesn't add up. (Score:3, Insightful)
I can see Darwin, Streaming Server, Compiler tools, Kerberos, Open Directory, OpenPlay, Bonjour, KHTML, X11, BLAST, HeaderDoc, CDSA, CUPS.
Probably not as much OSS as IBM, but probably more than most corporations.
Cutting edge? You mean they hire stylists to hide the defects in their products?
I'd say introducing new tech before anyone else is cutting edge. Look at the PowerBook layout that everyone copied. Trackpads. USB. 3.5" floppies. PowerPC. FireWire. QuickTime. MacPaint. Beige. Not beige. And so on.
Tell me how I can legally run Mac 68K software.
On a Mac. You don't have to do anything at all - OS X will know it's a classic application and MacOS will do all the 68K emulation. Macs haven't used Toolbox ROMS since sometime in the early 90s - the 'New World' Macs, iirc.
Mark this a flamebait--every time I criticize darlin' Apple it happens.
Well, perhaps if you weren't frothing at the mouth people would be kinder.
I'm So Sorry I Bought One (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know what the problem is, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it.
It's a phone that plays MP3's and has half a gig of memory... to use anyway I like.
I can synch my address book and iCal via bluetooth and iSynch...
It takes decent photos and does video capture as well... with audio.
I don't have a lot of time to listen in headphones since I am self employed and
growing a business, so the 100 song limit is fine. In fact, I only put 60 songs on it so I have just under 200 megs left over for file storage.
I never expected this to be an iPod in a phone.
I expected it to be a phone with a JME Version of iTunes.
But every day I go online, it seems I am told I am a fool for buying one.
Every day I am told that this phone is sooooo bad.
So can someone please tell me why I am supposed to no like this phone?
Because I sure as hell don't know why.
But I do apologize for having bought one.
I'm sure you all know far better than I every detail about the ROKR E1.
Testing the waters (Score:3, Insightful)