Quote:
Originally Posted by FanIn80
This is all the kind of stuff people said about iPods.
"What are you talking about, no CD player? Yeah right. Like that will ever work. This iPod thing will fail miserably, and people will keep buying Sony Walkmans."
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Really? Someone may have said that, but I don't believe that was the prevailing opinion at the time. Not that the iPod wasn't criticized, but it wasn't because people were questioning the validity of the portable MP3 player market.
The iPod was introduced in 2001. The MP3 format went public in 1995; the Diamond Rio was introduced in 1998; and Napster was launched in 1999. By the time the iPod came along, anyone with a computer already had every CD they had ever purchased (and many they hadn't) converted to MP3 and was listening to them on their desktops using WinAmp, or other similar program.
From what I recall, the main criticism of the iPod on launch was that it was only compatible with Apple computers, which greatly limited its potential market. Also, it was a higher price than other comparable MP3 players on the market (that were all Windows compatible), which, of course, has been a frequent criticism of Apple's products through the years. At the time, Apple also had a pretty poor track record with consumer electronics that weren't computers.
The iPod succeeded because it looked good, was easy to use, and Apple was a much more well known name than the manufacturers of the other products on the market. Also, very importantly, Apple had a marketing budget that dwarfed all the other competitors.
I wonder how well it would have done had Sony made a stronger push (or any push, really) into the MP3 player market? The thing that has always amazed me about the MP3 player market is how much of a non-entity Sony is. They owned the "Walkman" market in the 80s and most of the 90s, so it should have been a natural progression into the digital realm. They do make MP3 Walkmans but there never seems to be any buzz about them or anything.
Quote:
Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed
The iPod is less of a fundamental need device, and apple has sold far more of those than iPhones.
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People have been buying portable music players of one sort or another since the transistor radio was introduced in the 1950s. It might not be a fundamental need, but portable music has been around for a lot longer than portable phones. When I was a kid in the 80s, almost everyone had a "Walkman" of some sort (Sony or otherwise), but no one had a portable phone. The iPod was much more an evolutionary thing than a revolutionary thing. People were already carrying around their music in a small portable device, the iPod just made it possible to carry every song at once rather than whatever CD or tape you grabbed that morning.
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With regards to the iPad, I haven't seen anything mentioned about its ability to act as a replacement for a good old pen and paper notepad. To me, that would seem like the "killer app" for this thing.
As others have mentioned, it would be great to go into a meeting or a lecture and actually write on the screen (not type with an annoying on-screen keypad), draw diagrams and whatever, and then save everything. Throw in a smart OCR program that can learn to read your handwriting and convert it to a text document, and I think you do have a potential game changer.
Electronic text books could be a huge boon to the iPad market. Imagine being able to read your text book and highlight important text with a swipe of your finger or a stylus, to be able to write notes directly on the page, or on a pop-up note pad, and again save everything in an organized and indexed file. When it comes time to prepare for your final, you open your notes index, find a relevant section, and go directly there with all of your notes right how you left them. The added advantage is the weight reduction of having every text book and note book streamlined into a hand held device weighing a little over a pound. It could be the chiropractor's worst nightmare.
When I picture people using these things, it isn't someone sitting on his couch watching a movie on a 10" screen, or IMing, or sending emails, or posting on a message board using an onscreen keyboard. What I see is a doctor doing rounds in a hospital, with an iPad in one hand and a stylus in the other, pulling up patient information from the hospital's database and writing their notes onto the screen to save for later. I see a student reading a text book on one side of the screen, while scribbling notes on the other.
From what I've seen about the iPad, there has been no mention of the ability to "write" on the thing. To me, it's the most obvious thing that it should have (well, multitasking or Flash might be more obvious). Why would I buy an "electronic notepad" if I can't actually take notes on the thing?
By the third generation, the iPad could be a great "how did I live without this" device, but right now, it's pretty underwhelming.