Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
Andrew: With all due respect, the jury seems to be in on your iPod analogy. I'm fairly certain you'll need to choose another. If you doubt it, go to an audiophile site like Head-fi and post your thoughts about early iterations of the iPod there.
|
I don't think that the jury is out on the iPod analogy (although the jury may be out on my explanation of it...). The jury came back long ago with its verdict on the iPod; it has more than 80% of the market. And the remaining part of the market seems to consist mostly of ~$50 players like the sansa clips that are competing with the nano on price and size.
But the main point is that specs like line-in recording or marginally better sound quality do not matter to normal users. They were offered and they failed in the marketplace. Failed may be too weak of a word; they were utterly destroyed. I'm not sure that iRiver even makes mp3 players anymore.
I think the fact that these specs don't matter to the market is even beyond discussion; at least in this case the market has spoken clearly. (Even though what the market wants is maybe not what the tiny audiophile and DJ part of the market wanted).
The interesting issue to me is why these specs did not matter...and what the iPod offered that did matter.
My take on sound quality is that: (1) most people can't tell the difference in quality while using iPods with the provided headphones under usual listening conditions (i.e., while doing something else). And it was always possible to increase the quality of the sound somewhat by ripping at a higher bitrate than the 2003 standard of 128k. As for the people who use $150 headphones or who run their mp3s through their high quality stereo system? They are probably less than 1% of the market.
My take on inline recording is the same, except that's going to be an even smaller group.
Again, my take on these groups is not that they were in any way wrong - it's just that what matters to them does not matter to most people.
Which raises the question of what does matter to most people. My suggestion, mentioned above, is that most people were much happier with iTunes integration than with competing systems, all of which were more "fiddly." With iTunes, you could rip 10 cds at a sitting, come back 3 days later and plug in your iTunes, and they would all be on your iPod - automatically and mostly properly labeled. You could download a song, plug in your iPod, and the song would be there. You could also easily create playlists, even fairly powerful smart playlists. (And of course the most important part about this functionality is that it happened almost automatically - once you installed iTunes, it worked like this).
Competitors to iTunes at the times were afterthoughts - the moral equivalent of, say, the free scanner program (having a name like "EZScanlite") that comes bundled with your printer. These programs, when they worked at all, which was rare, tended to be very buggy and you basically couldn't rely on them at all. Sony's software was particularly bad in this respect, although not as bad as Sony's decision to eschew mp3s in favor of Atrac.
Other programs tended to be "drag and drop" programs. These had the great advantage of actually working. And people who were fanatical about organizing and categorizing their music files preferred this system to the iTunes system (which takes this out of your hands). But doing this was more time consuming, sometimes a lot more time consuming, especially if you wanted to edit the metadata on the mp3 itself.
And so most people seemed to prefer just letting iTunes manage things.
And, again, I'm not really arguing that people who want to manage their own music files are wrong, or that iTunes' way of doing things is better. But it does seem to be what most people want.
And all of this just to make the point that usability often matters more than specs...
