ZUNE- The I-Pod killer???

[PAUL250268]

Originally Posted by JEZ

Useless ipod... Seems like it just died. It wont turn off, or play or anything...
Apple crap!

Sorry but this is so annoying.................

Would you like to hire a very reliable Sony Walkman mp3 player?
No, just kidding.....................
You are more than welcome to borrow it. Let me know. I can drop it round if needed.
The software is crap but the machine itself is very good. Never had any problems.
Jez, do you like Peter Sellers? I have 2 Pink Panther films I could download onto an HD for you.
Paul

[mofi]

Originally Posted by tommy

One of the Guys I worked with this week bought a ZUNE...I played around with it for a few but simply found it lacking in the Bently style and function that the I-Pod has...I thought that the wheel was a wheel but it is not... As far as the unit goes I didnt like it any better than My Zen Vision M by Creative.. I also played around with the Zune Market Place but found it wonky to say the least...Too busy and not the clean look of the ITunes Store.. I still think that Apple has the design and style and for along time will reign supreme.. I still like the Zen Vision M because I like to use the music subscription service...I am currently using URGE by MTV/Microsoft...which still has some bugs to be worked out or maybe I need a faster processor in my Puter???? Sync times are still much slower than the I-Pod and take some managing but once you get the hang of it it is a little better...So far the main reason I dont have an I-Pod is because I dont want to purchase each individual song...I dont know maybe I am cheap or something...I can say this it is much nicer to not have to deal with DRM at all and own the Rights outright....aas for video my Zen is great....A little bigger screen than the Pod but I feel a change coming in the near future....to bad that I-Tunes doesnt have a subscription service...Im sure it would Blow them all away as usual!!! Until then I will keep my syncs at a record slow pace!!!

You don't have to purchase each individual song...at current i think i have around 200 songs on my ipod....really only use it on airplanes, and everyone of those songs has come off of limewire.

[JEZ]

Not so crap Apple! Reloaded the software and its back playing as before.

Still thinking about a change though...

[ryberg]

Interesting thread. Hadn't heard about the Zune whatever.

Of course I make no secret that I'm an Apple fan, but even if I weren't, I don't see much probability of another product being an iPod killer. For one thing, as many have noted, it's just too late to do much iPod killing. That horse is already out of the barn and has been running obviously very well for a long time already. Then as others mentioned, there's the design issue, which combines with the marketing.

So while Zune or something else out there or something else that comes along may work better or more freely or be more reliable in some ways, that doesn't mean it will kill the iPod. If that were all it took, then Macs might well have been PC killers in the late 80s and in the most famous example, Beta would have killed VHS before that. Instead in both cases, the format that took appropriate steps to spread to dominance in the marketplace continues to rule, apart from questions of superiority or inferiority (or in the case of VHS, continued to until a wholly different superior medium came along in the form of DVD).

Now something like that might be an iPod killer, someday. And I like my iPod (a 40GB one that's now 2.5 years old, what was top of the line before the Photo model, preceding the video and Nano models), but maybe I'm just lucky as I also have never had any problem with it. I think in all that time I've had to restart it maybe 3 times, and the battery's been fine, too.

Dunno much about PC-style DRM, as I only just recently and for the first time heard copmlaints from PC-using friends about having trouble transferring their music files ripped straight from CDs to other (newer) computers. Couldn't believe there was such a problem! Nothing like that in Mac-land. (Indeed I have never had the problem of ripping from newer, protected CDs on my Macs, either.) If you want to transfer music files ripped from CD and don't want to deal with iTunes' one-way system, you just copy them onto the iPod directly, as you would onto any external device. That won't help you with stuff you downloaded from the iTunes store, but then that doesn't have anything to do with your iPod or its design, that's just the restriction on the protected file you downloaded. If you don't like it, you can go with some other music service, I guess, and whatever their restrictions are.

Steve

[roni]

Holiday shopping survey reported on CNBC this morning said 20% of USA already owned one or more iPods and an additional 8% planned to buy one in the next few months.

That would be a lot of iPods, by my arithmetic

But, competition is good. Let a thousand flowers bloom!!

surveyu results here. iPod question on page 15.

[ryberg]

What will come next in music? I mean taking the broad view, you had the advent of the LP from shorter vinyl formats, and of course stereo recordings (but quad not catching on), cassettes (and of course dead dead dead 8-track), the CD (along with its ill-fated cousin, DAT), MD, which might have had more success if it weren't for the quick follow-on development of mp3, of course, and the whole file approach, along with its attendant online download systems...

Except for degree-type improvements -- adding graphic and video, improving the quality of the sound in compressed files, downsizing the players (although you can't get much smaller than that new Shuffle!), enhancing the programming to interface with the music, etc -- what else can be done?

I can only think of implants.

Seriously, I was thinking implants are an inevitable step when seeing yet another person with one of those Borg-like Bluetooth earpieces for cell phones the other day (or just the ubiquitous nature of cell phones and Blackberry-type things and all that). Maybe Star Trek was again prophetic:



Of course a lot of people won't want to consider such a thing, but some will, and will do it -- they'll pierce all sorts of parts of their body and get all sorts of plastic surgery for all sorts of reasons, and this seems not so different -- and once some do, more will, of course... And of course it will be designed to be innocuous and unthreatening, the opposite of the Borg...

Steve