Quote:
Originally Posted by Graham
But Apple's mp3 players are a classic case in point. Why on earth would the average user prefer these products that had poorer battery life, smaller storage capacity and poorer sound quality than well-known and often cheaper competing brands?
Regardless of the extra features, mp3 players from people like Creative and iRiver were just as easy to use, and there were plenty of stylish options so it wasn't pure style.
Apple make elegant products, but I do think that it's more their brilliant marketing that sweeps up the average user, not that the other products are only fit for geeks.
Graham
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I owned an mp3 player in the pre-ipod days (a creative nomad), and it was easy to see why the iPod dominated - iTunes syncing. While I think that iTunes is getting kind of long in the tooth now, at the time it was far better than any alternatives. You didn't have to set up file systems, or drag and drop specific files you wanted; you just plugged your iPod into your computer and it would sync automatically. Plus it would charge your iPod.
It wasn't that the iPod itself was better than an iRiver or whatever; it is that the iPod plus iTunes, taken together, were much better than the iRiver and its system, later Creative products and their systems, Sony and their spectacularly horrible system, plus atrac...pretty much everything. The iPod was easy to use, and much more convenient to use than the competition; that's why the iPod was successful. Not marketing, although obviously Apple is good at that.
There were (and still are), audiophile and geek complaints from people who prefer a system with (slightly) better sound, or who want to manage their libraries manually, or who want other esoteric features. Apple does not cater to these people, presumably deciding that they would rather have the 80% of the market for whom the sound quality is quite good enough.
This is exactly the same reason why e-book readers didn't really take off until the Kindle: Amazon realized that it wasn't enough to have a good e-reader (Sony had that already); what you needed was both a good e-reader and an extremely easy way to put books on the reader. I think that Amazon was probably explicitly following the iPod model here - they gave you both a good e-reader and a seamless way to get content on the reader. B&N followed this plan as well...which is why Sony quickly fell to 3d place in US market.