6G iPod & Apple's Future 226
belsin_gordon writes "CNET rounds up what we're going to get from the next iPod and where Apple is heading as a company and as a business juggernaut. [They have the] 100GB widescreen video iPods, Wi-Fi-enabled iPods capable of on-the-fly movie downloads over the air, unlimited downloads from iTunes for a flat fee and the UK finally getting its content-hungry hands on movie downloads.
Apple has dropped the 'Computer' from its company name, and is making significant advances into the media-distribution business. It's bringing video to everyone everywhere with iTunes movies and now Apple TV, and the rumours and speculation we've discussed promote the theory that Apple is setting itself up as a major player in the media-distribution industry."
suure (Score:5, Insightful)
Rumors are only that, rumors, and we have been hearing these same rumors for months (if not years now).
ml
Music subscriptions (Score:5, Insightful)
I've always wondered why Apple have been slow to enter that market, but to do so now without opening up their DRM is surely asking for trouble. Real have been trying to get access to the iPod market for years. Apple have tried to stop them at every opportunity. If they now try and copy that distribution method, while refusing to allow anyone else the opportunity leaves them more open than ever to charges of anti competitive behaviour, especially in the EU.
Of course it could also be an indication that Apple are about to open up their DRM? That would be great news for Real and Napster, but could be terminal for the smaller manufacturers of 'mp3' players.
Unlimited? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Portable Video (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, good for you. There are a variety of other players out there, as you point out yourself, and you are welcome to them. Apple seems to be targeting the market segment that does want their music player to organize their music and keep track of things (import date, play counts, skip counts, last played, rating, etc) for them. Based on Apple's market share, compared to the rest of the market combined, it looks like they have a better idea of what will sell than you do. But feel free to vote with your wallet.
Re:Why (Score:1, Insightful)
Is starting iTunes and then dragging and dropping files unto your ipod of choice really all that complex? Most people would say: no.
Yes, every geek wants to control exactly where every file goes. But once you get over yourself and realize that you can make playlists (with drag and drop none-the-less) to simulate your "utlimate directory of ultimate tunes" and still be able to do other things like sort by album,artist,genre etc. without chewing up your battery life you start to appreciate a slightly more modern interface.
Ipods are quite capable, despite what you believe, of surviving without ever purchasing things from iTMS. CD rips, your favorite illegal, quasi-legal, or legal mp3 sources can all be used to feed your ipod.
Re:Why (Score:5, Insightful)
That's something I never quite got, the iPod hate. A friend of mine recently introduced me to his Cowon D2, which is a very slick piece of hardware: 52h battery life on music, 10h on video, smaller than an iPod and has a touch screen to boot. Why wasn't I sold immediately?
Because it meant the endless tedium of synchronizing my music with the god-awful "drag into Explorer" (or in my case, "drag into Finder") interface. The whole explorer drag-drop thing was fine when our music players were
The D2 also promised great things like album covers and even lyrics (which actually is a sweet feature), but both of which required you to maintain your own music library with their proprietary software - a bit of an attempt at cloning iTunes, except the software wasn't nearly slick enough to take over as my primary media player app - which would mean I'd still have to maintain two parallel libraries.
I keep explaining this to people: the secret of iPod's success is not only its marketing, but that it rolls the entire experience together from end to end. You play your music, download your music, play your videos, download your videos all from the same spot. The software provides all the features you need - album covers for example, and it also syncs automatically with your portable player. Slick.
I enjoy the end-to-end experience so much that even a clearly superior piece of hardware like the Cowon D2 has not converted me.
Sixfold *Apple* rumours? (Score:4, Insightful)
Call me a stickler for accuracy, but "sixfold Apple rumour round-up" implies six different rumours (tidbits, what-have-you) about various things related to Apple. If all six were connected to the iPod, as all six do indeed turn out to be, a more meaningful headline would have bee "Apple iPod rumour round-up" or something similar -- the Slashdot summary title improves on it at least.
There are several other reasons to be excited about Apple -- possible super-thin/light MacBooks, a new revision for the iMac, and of course the now-delayed Leopard. Updates on those much-anticipated items would also have been appreciated.
Re:But who buys Apple computers ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ipod wifi... (Score:3, Insightful)
Why haven't they already(ms)? Nobody has WiFi yet, why up the ante 2 full steps when nobody else even uses it at all? I'm sure that WiFi enabled (network/internet connectivity) iPods and Zunes would not only waste batteries in wholesale fashion, but they would also be pretty iffy when talking about security. Granted, movies and music being hacked into aren't a huge ordeal... but having millions of iPods roaming around with WiFi would have to be a pretty decent target for some type of exploitation. There are tons of other wifi-enabled objects floating around, yes.. But, I'm sure the platform they're running on is a bit more complex than a handheld jukebox.
More power to them if they can pull it off... if they can, MS will follow as they always do.
As for iTunes... screw iTunes and everything around it. I own an iPod Video, 20G iPod, nano and a zune. Once I grabbed the zune, I realized how much of a pain the iPods were... resetting, getting it to recognize, having to erase all my music when I installed a new OS or go to a new PC... clearing out all my music in any error, and starting over... every month. And the only thing they had over the zune was the click wheel... and that wasn't even a plus when you didn't lock it and put it in your pocket. Again, Apple is innovative and I dig 'em for throwing out great products... but, there are too many other products that have more features and have better and more reliable interfaces to work with than the iPod and iTunes nowadays. Now, it's just people buying a name as a status symbol. The ipod is now cliche.
Re:But who buys Apple computers ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people don't know how or don't feel secure swapping their own cpu or graphics card. Even for those who do, it is hard to justify taking out and throwing away a perfectly functional cpu just because it is too old. It doesn't make economic sense. Just like people who buy a new car every other year.
The current Macs all have room to expand the RAM, and they can be bought with hard drives that are large enough for any normal consumer. As for the optical drives, the burners in Macs can write to any format that will be mainstream for the next several years.
To put it simply: for the vast majority of the computer market, the benefits of having a small and quiet computer completely outweigh the downside of not being able to expand it with pcie cards or extra hard drives.
Not understanding the practicality (Score:5, Insightful)
It's nice to want things, but to me, it didn't seem that the author understood why things are the way they are. A lot of the article seems to dispel how difficult changes could be technically or practically.
Yes the media companies would love this, but there are far greater technical barriers to this than the current system. To do this, Apple would have to develop a different way of securing and authenticating the files. Roughlydrafted went into detail how FairPlay works [roughlydrafted.com] and why there is no subscription service. Besides technical reasons, Apple has always argued against it on principle as it was anti-consumer.
The main reasons are purely legal which translate into technical reasons. They don't have permission from the content providers. Groups like MPAA has always tried to maintain strict control of all aspects of release from time and location. DVD, HD-DVD, and BlueRay all have region encoding for a reason. FairPlay would have to match that. Now Apple has to devise a way to separate out all users based on location at the file level so that certain movies do not play for the users until the local release date. That makes things a lot more complicated for FairPlay. So the easiest solution is to limit purchases only to American users.
The iPhone is Apple's first attempt at a widescreen. I would expect newer generations of iPods to do the same as Apple works out the kinks.
I suspect the main reason why no company has done it before MS was that it wasn't practical. They could have released wifi iPod but there would be a drastic difference in transfer rates. You and I might understand that 802.11g takes 10x as long as FireWire or USB2.0, but the average consumer might not and would hate it. "It takes hours to transfer my small collection. This sucks!" 802.11n is on the horizon. When that is in place, you will probably see a wifi iPod.
Th
Re:Portable Video (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably because of several factors.
1) User interface. Until the 604WiFi was out, the UI has steadily deteriorated since the AV300 series (I have an AV420, which was probably the last model before they messed up the UI). These models had simplistic interfaces - you had a 5 way navigator, a back button, and three "soft" keys. And still could do everything. Now they took the same UI, and remapped everything differently - the softkeys now access some sub-menu thingy on the edge of the screen, settings are hidden either along the top bar or the edge buttons, and you still havigate the main icons via the 5 way navigator (+back). Exiting menus and going back doesn't quite seem so easy anymore. The iPod interface hasn't changed much the past 5 years - you use "Menu" for back, center ro select, wheel to choose... with the only things really braeking this are the iPod games you can buy off iTunes.
2) Button placement - The AV300/400 had simple intuitive placement. The new 400/500/600/700 series put all the buttons in rectangular areas along the edge, with left and right doing different things. Not only are they hard to press, but the button layout makes you go WTF as they all feel alike.
3) Size - Even the 404 is still very much bigger than an iPod... The only thing the 704 is missing is well... the DVD drive.
4) Possibly DRM - if you record anything with Macrovision encoded in the signal, the Archos AV400 onwards put DRM on the video so only that unit can play it back. It also regenerates Macrovision on the TV-out. I'm not sure if the current ones store the video in the protection partition these days (since the disk is partitioned for both Windows Media DRM and general disk storage.
Of these, I think #1 and #3 are the reason the Archos haven't really taken off - even after 5 minutes of playing with it I can't confidently say I can easily make my way around it. (I suppose the default wallpapers don't help by making it impossible to read...).
What I would love to see... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just one thing and that is plugin support for extensions and add ons. It means that people could easily write things like cross faders, support for additional codecs, etc. There could be official unoffical community website for getting hold of these plugins, providing users with source code, etc. to minimise the chances of malicious code.
Of course, there are probably some major security risks around stuff like that... But it would still be cool.
Re:Why (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Music subscriptions (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is really stupid. Unlimited downloads that I could keep forever and burn as I see fir for a low monthly fee would likely do it for me, and the many other people who's music buying habit has tapered off. If I could pay ~$20/month for unlimited downloads that would be about $15 more per month than the music industry is currently getting from me. I know I'm not exactly the bellwether for the music indusrty, but maybe their problem is they're asking the wrong question. Namely they ask why the people who buy music aren't buying more, rather than why the people who aren't buying aren't buying, or even why the people who stopped buying stopped buying.
If such a model were to magic its way into existence Apple would be happy because I'd have to buy a bigger iPod.
Re:But who buys Apple computers ? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know if it has so much to do with "conforming". The new iPod Shuffle does just look quite nice, and so does the Nano, and the iPhone. The other music stuff from Apple looks acceptable, but there is a lot of stuff out there that I wouldn't want to be seen with. Just my opinion.
And yes, looks count. Buying an iPod because it says "iPod" on the package is stupid. Buying it because you like the way it works or because you trust the brandname isn't stupid. And buying it because it looks good isn't stupid either.
Re:Music subscriptions (Score:3, Insightful)
Those services barely exist, and have no customers. They are not even on the level of the 8-track tape, they are less than a footnote in the history of recorded audio. Another attempt at subscription radio that failed miserably like all others.
There is this massive hubris in the tech industry in which someone like Bill Gates thinks that because music is digital and PC crapware is digital therefore Bill Gates knows something about music. He does not. People were recording, selling, buying, collecting, mixing music way before Bill Gates started building typewriters.
Nobody has ever made any money selling subscription content except maybe HBO and they have to generate a lot of original content to get this done. They have to have exclusive stuff that is not available anywhere else. People keep re-upping their HBO subscriptions to see the next season of the Sopranos when it is fresh. XM and Sirius have original content but they are trying to merge because the market for subscription audio is so small. And they are streaming dozens of channels to you in real-time by satellite, still people don't want to pay for radio.
Where are you going to find the music artists who want to have all of their music be exclusive downloads at the Zune store? It is to laugh. And Microsoft is not even competent in their core business, where they have almost zero consumer customers, and have demonstrated their incompetence in music and audio at least twice with PlaysForSure and Zune, not to mention Windows Media. With Windows Media they copied MP3 so precisely that they infringed patents and had to pay billions and the irony is that MP3 was 10 years obsolete at that time, they should have licensed AAC like EVERYBODY ELSE IN THE WORLD and they would have had better audio quality, better compatibility, and it would have been much cheaper for their users, and they wouldn't have had to go to court yet again because they copied someone else's technology. So they are not just seen as incompetent in the music industry, but also as bozos. And nobody in music and audio needs them one bit.
Re:What I would love to see... (Score:3, Insightful)
> support for additional codecs, etc.
This exists one level down from iTunes, in OS X.
You can add codecs through QuickTime. Once you add a codec to QuickTime it is available in all of your applications from both Apple and third-parties, both playback and authoring apps.
The plug-in format for audio processing is called "Audio Units"
> Of course, there are probably some major security risks around stuff like that... But it would still be cool.
Not if you build it in the right way, which Apple has obviously done because it's working great for audio and video content creators, these are the reasons why people buy Macs, to get this stuff.