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Why Apple is superior to Microsoft
- Thread starter smoledman
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I guess you missed the part where they bought the tech off of PortalPlayer and had Pixo develop the UI...
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Maybe impossible was the wrong word, but for whatever reason no one bothered to do a capacitive touch screen before the Prada, so I always just assumed there was a logistical reason for this (thickness maybe?).
It's an MP3 player. Honestly, I'm surprised they even spent that much. There were already dozens of companies making them before Apple entered the fray. They didn't completely reinvent the whole concept using technologies that were unheard of up til that point. Hell, they had to pay Creative at least a million to use their patented UI. The iPod was hardly a brand new thing even when it first showed up.
It was a well designed, excellently marketed, easy to use device. Pretty much the core example of what I was talking about above.
Umm the first iPod was not the first hard drive bases mp3 player. Apple more or less stole iTunes design off of someone else.
Apple menu setup was already in use by other companies at the time. Tell me what was so special about the original iPod.
That may be a little harsh Rodimus. The first iPod was the only mp3 player that allowed you to listen to a hard drive full of music for more than an hour. Before the iPod, all mp3 players either used flash memory and were limited to 16megs (32 if you paid $$$$), or if they did use a hard drive, had god awful battery life.
Plus the jog wheel was incredible for navigating music quickly. Before that you needed to press a button 25 times to get from A to Z.
Where do you think MS gets this money to do university grade research? I highly doubt MS invented a way to grow money on trees, nor do they own a printing press that no one knows about.
I bet that the reason MS spends money on this "university grade research" is that MS is very confident in its profitability and its revenue streams that they are willing to plow some cash into riskier bets. It took "pure greed level research" for Microsoft to get to where they're at today, where they are confident enough in their financial health to make riskier bets.
Just want to point out that Visual Studio is not raking in monster profits. OS / Office yes, developer programs no.
There were other similar products on the market. Apple had marketing excellence.
Mind explaining that a bit more? "Nah don't think so" is hardly an argument. Not saying you're right/wrong, but if you're going to make a bold claim, then back it up.
But as thejadedmonkey put it:
I never bought an iPod before 2010, so I can't speak of personal usage with the original one. But I did own an Intel Pocket Concert from late 2001 which was flash memory based, I think 128MB. One thing I remember was it had up & down arrow keys for navigating the song list. It wasn't a huge issue because I didn't have that much music yet. But the docking station for it was a total POS that wouldn't allow the OS to recognize it 50% of the time.
Nope. Creative released the nomad in 2000 which held 6gigs. That was 1 year before the first iPod.
Only problem with that is there were several hard drive based units with more space and I can't find a single reference to under 1 hour battery life for any.
Sorry, I looked it up. The Nomad 3 had a 4.0 hour battery life using rechargeable batteries, and the Nomad used 8 x Nickel metal hydride AA type Standard battery (no battery life given). Either way, a far cry from the 10 hours of playback in the first iPod.
The UI, clean design, battery life and the integration with iTunes were key points the first iPod, IMO. As much as people want to poo-poo industrial design Apple makes some stylish looking products that many times have better fit and finish than their competitors. I remember when iPod's started showing up in bling-filled music videos and I was like "It's official. MP3 players aren't just for geeks anymore."
Apple also typically aims to do a few things very well as opposed to a lot of things in mediocrity. Nomads, and other players, had more features (AM/FM radio, audio recording, eventually video playback, etc.,) but iPods were what kept flying off the shelves.
Apple also typically aims to do a few things very well as opposed to a lot of things in mediocrity. Nomads, and other players, had more features (AM/FM radio, audio recording, eventually video playback, etc.,) but iPods were what kept flying off the shelves.
100% ********. Everything you just said, its 100% ********.
The first MP3 player with a hard drive predated the iPod by a couple of years was the PJB 100, it came with a 4.8gb HDD, and its battery life was rated around 5 hours, not as good as the iPod, but it was long before the iPod. 1999 it came out, and guess who designed it? Compaq.
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In fact, they were such key points, that were ripped from Creative Labs, Apple ended up paying Creative 100 million dollars for basicly ripping off the Nomad.
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No it wasn't. It was not very much different from the Nomad, which Apple ripped off to the point of losing multiple times in court, and ended up paying creative 100 million dollars.
The iPod was marketing.
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Huh?
No, that was Xerox.
No, Palm did.
No, the first mass marketed tablets came from Microsoft and OEMs in 2002
No, but the Powerbook did have a really good layout that everyone uses now. But apple also ripped their keyboards right from sony.
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I don't mean that Apple spends 0 on R&D, what I mean is, Apple does not really invent anything, they're just a desing house in 1 market. Consumer devices, so thats why their R&D budget is so low compared to companies like Google, Microsoft or Samsung.
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Gotta point out, we had a deep fryer made in the 80s that had a ' magsafe connector '
Looked very much like this, the idea being that if you knock the cord, you dont knock the deep fryer off its perch and burn down your house.
Who knows, Steve Jobs or someone else at Apple might have noticed this and thought " hmmmm, this is a good idea "
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And to preemptively strike at the usual "olol but that things huge. That's too big to carry around in your pocket. No wonder it didn't sell", let me say this...
The Sony Walkman, people. They were huge in the 80's. Everyone and their grandma had one. No one bitched about them being too big. You just buckled them to your belt, and slapped on the day-glo.
...and they were too damn big to fit in your pocket. The whole small enough to hold in the palm of your hand thing has only been around since 2006 or so.
It's also why I think people griping about 4.5"+ screens being "too big" is about damn hilarious.
The iPod was a nice device. It was small, well built, and had a nice UI (which got Apple sued for beaucoup bucks like G5 stated, and is one of the main reasons why they're so sue happy themselves these days. I guess they looked into the abyss...). But guess what else? It wasn't the only one. The iPod won mostly on the strength of the frankly incredible marketing campaign surrounding it (grand mal to a beat) rather than it's unique features or futuristic blah blah blah herp-a-derp.
Right now, Smoledman is over on The Verge forums calling us all haters. CUZ H8AZ GOTTA H8!
What it does prove is that Apple has their finger on the pulse of the consumer who probably doesn't even know how to use DOS.
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Let me fix that.
" Apple Ripped off the creative nomads form factor and UI and ended up losing in court and paying over 100 million to creative labs "
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Indeed, they intend to benefit their company, they aren't doing it out of the good of their hearts. Thats silly.
Now in Microsofts defense, they do donate a very large sum of money to charity research. But thats besides the point.
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High performance?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAQHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Your funny man, I like my iMac, but to call it high performance is funny.
Both my workstation and gaming tower would rape my iMac, flip it over and go in for seconds, 3 times over. Performance wise.
Actually, the whole Creative lawsuit was about as much BS as the whole Samsung trial. As 99% of all patent issues tend to be.
I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was incredibly inane, like sequential alphabetized lists arrayed in a column or something equally stupid.
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Tuck tail and RUN, SON! You've been outargued.
Running away from facts!
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Its been a long time since I've read about it.
But I remember that it mostly boiled down to the UI, if you compare a Nomads UI to an early iPod UI, there are tons of similarities. In fact, they look almost the same.
Not an Apple hater, but thats pretty much a fact.
My Gateway DMP20 had a UI pretty similar to an iPod, as far as I know, the orginal DMPs came out before the iPod as well.
Apple has an incredible Marketing team.
I never got to play with a Nomad, and only barely played with the original iPod back in the day. From what I remembered, the UI was about as basic as you could ask for. It was a text based menu arranged in a logical format. A to Z, 1 to 9, ect. Fairly straightforward. Not something I could imagine someone spending much time on designwise, as there's no real design to it. It's a digital filing cabinet. Nothing more.
The jog dial was pretty nice though, you gotta admit.
As much fun as it is throwing it lawsuits Apple lost in the faces of those "well Apple has every right to protect their hard earned eye-pee" people, it really is just another example of how stupid the patent system currently is.
I played with Both, Alot, it was a little more than that to the UI, but yeah you are right to a point.
One could make the same argument about iOS. There isn't much to it.
Personally, I liked my DMPs scroll wheel more.
Indeed it is
I was thinking more along the lines of the jog wheel and less about how the text was displayed on screen. I'm not an early MP3 player expert, but I don't recall any of the MP3 players of that era having a similar look and form factor to the iPod. For example, the Nomads that spring to mind were clunkly and had more of a Discman shape to them.
Yeah, from what I recall it was basically about the file/folder hierarchy displayed on screen. Something that falls more under common sense than anything else, IMO. I mean, given the tech of the era there is only so many ways to display text and denote a file structure on a tiny little LCD screen.
I can't believe people are even bothering replying to you. If anything, you should stop wasting their time. You're only going to change your mind next week and declare Google or Microsoft king.
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