Apple Prepares For the Coming iPod Slump 340
Hugh Pickens writes "Companies like AOL have stagnated along with the products that made them successful as a mature market and downward pressure on prices led to a nasty death spiral, but Saul Hansell writes in the NY Times that Apple has used its amazing six-year run with the iPod to nurture other business lines. Even though the number of iPods sold this quarter grew only 1 percent from the same quarter a year ago, Apple should be able to sustain itself with three business lines that will help it withstand a collapse in the MP3-player market: a continuing revenue stream from the iPods that have already been sold because of the iTunes Store, product upgrades to the iPhone and iPod Touch that are so different that they may well appeal to a significant number of iPod users, and perhaps most significantly, sales of the Macintosh which showed an increase of 51 percent by units and 54 percent by dollars."
Re:batteries (Score:5, Informative)
No, because that one is user-replaceable...
Re:iPod choices are going downhill (Score:4, Informative)
Re:batteries (Score:5, Informative)
Re:batteries (Score:4, Informative)
Re:batteries (Score:5, Informative)
Apple now has two highly successful platforms (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is this the iPod slump from three years ago? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:History repeats itself (Score:4, Informative)
Re:cant wait for those 64gb iPod Touch's... (Score:5, Informative)
(FD: I bought a 16 gig, but gave it to my wife so I had an excuse to buy a 32gig - it's enough for the essentials. I'll have to find someone else that needs a gift when the 64gig comes out)
Re:batteries (Score:4, Informative)
Re:batteries (Score:4, Informative)
Most of those are not spot welded in place. After working in a repair shop for many years, I noticed it was common for many of the coin cells to have spot welded terminals which are then simply soldered onto the PCB. A soldering iron replaces these with ease if you have any soldering skill. Often a standard coin cell socket will go in it's place. Leaving out the socket is a cost cutting move an is seen only on the lowest quality boards made. The battery is replaceable, but not by breaking off it's terminals. Congratulations on getting one of these cheap motherboards. Many of these expect a battery life of about 5 years which is past warranty.
Re:Here's one way they can prepare (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Here's one way they can prepare (Score:3, Informative)
With the Macbook/Pro, Apple effectively closed the gap between its 'Pro' and 'Consumer' grade laptop products, and immediately faced a barrage of criticism for not offering a "Pro" 12/13" laptop.
The iBook was a fairly significant step down from the PowerBook. The MacBook is a fairly small step down from the MacBook Pro. Even back during the PowerBook days, the 12" model was often speced lower than the larger models.
That all said, I still use a 12" PowerBook as my main machine, and do wish that Apple would offer a slightly "nicer" machine at the Black MacBook's $1500 price-point (which, as it currently stands, is a very poor value for the money)
Re:History repeats itself (Score:3, Informative)
Re:A slump? (Score:3, Informative)
You can't, but that doesn't imply that iTunes is the only way to load music onto an iPod. There are 3rd-party apps (for Windows and Linux, at least...probably for Mac OS X as well, but iTunes works well enough for me there) that'll manage what's on your iPod.
(Now that I've thought about it a little more, if you use something like the iPod kioslave [sourceforge.net], you can get drag-and-drop management (somewhat) of your iPod through Konqueror. Last time I checked, though, it didn't support album covers on the newer iPods that support them.)
Re:TV-typewriter cookbook (Score:3, Informative)
this had the side effect of hitting every (lower byte) address every 60th of a second. That in turn solved the great problem of how to refresh dynamic memory without wait states for the cpu. This allowed the apple to avoid using static ram.
this in turn let them have a smaller power supply, one of the first to use a switching power supply that were the new thing in electrical engineering.
As for the cards, woz was clever again. By pre-decoding the address space for the cards on the motherboard he saved having to have circuitry on every card to recognize it's own address. Thus the cards were half the size of the s-100 cards and used less power.
all that was pretty freakin innovative. Not that they invented it but they made it all work.