The iPod, more than any other single product from Apple, has changed the company and the world. Before its introduction MP3 players were the realm of small companies with limited budgets and no content. After the iPod the entire industry has evolved and grown to the point where the largest computer companies in the world have major interests in the digital music industry. Read the history of the iPod at Braeburn.
Bah ! Here’s a far more interesting link about the iPod and iTunes :
http://www.downhillbattle.org/itunes/
“iTunes Music Store : Facelift for a corrupt industry”
oh please. it’s same with every online music store, give me a break. no one is forcing you to buy anything
oh please. it’s same with every online music store
Obviously, you’ve never been to mp3search.ru or allofmp3.com. Digital music files with no DRM. I don’t know if these are actually legal in the US or not (apparently legal to run the sites in Russia and legal to ‘import’ here, so who knows?), but THAT is the way an online music store should be done and would be done if lemmings would stop buying the DRM crap offered by iTunes and its ilk. On allofmp3, you can even choose your encoding format and bitrate for many songs.
Yes, you can even acquire songs encoded with a lossless codec; thus not purchasing a lossy audio file for $1. Burn all of the CDs you want without any quality loss from purchasing the physical CD, while skipping the purchase of tracks you don’t like. Or encode at whatever bitrate you want for any device you want without introducing lossy transcoding degradation.
Basically just a list of product releases, and surely most people know the basics about iPods by now anyway. I would have been interested to read more about Apples attempts to keep control over iPod/iTunes, but that was barely mentioned.
One thing that surprises me in articles about iPods, is that they don’t mention Apples attempts to define their own markets. The iPod shuffle is the ultimate example: Apple are trying to convince people they don’t want to listen to albums, because iTunes is so terrible at selling them…
I love my iPods, but the article and most others overhype their impact. Rio/ Diamond had to take the legal hit to make the iPod possible. Rio expended quite a bit of it’s early capital on fighting off the music cartels. Creative innovated many of the UI paradigms and both companies created the original market.
Apple hasn’t done much great innovation in this arena aside. It has produced numerous refinements, which do make the useability stand heads above the rest, hence my own loyalty to the product. However in the CE space it’s a follower and the strategy is successful. But most people don’t give Creative or Diamond/ Rio the credit they are due for building up the foundations and taking the first-mover hits.
Diamond Multimedia/S3/SONICblue are considered small companies? They weren’t weren’t wealthy as Apple and eventually expended their capital, but they weren’t exactly insignificant manufacturers either. How about RCA? Creative Labs?
Or everyone’s favorite alternative to flash memory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Jukebox
The iPod, more than any other single product from Apple, has changed the company and the world.
Yep… the iPod definitely has had more impact on the world than the Apple II… those personal computer things never really took off.
Fads hardly end up changing the world in any profound fashion. Mostly they are just a brash exuberance of consumption that ultimately ends up in the dump.
The world has been many fads come and go. The Sony Walkman comes to mind when thinking of portable music players.
The fadPod is the shiny object of the moment for the trend lemmings. Tomorrow it will be something else.
Alas, all it will take is one big crash of the economy and Apple, the shiny white front end to the dark mafia of the recording industry, will be on the skids.
And the world will then be able to breathe a sigh of relief that Apple’s 15 minutes is over.
I got a 1g iPod near enough as soon as it came out. I was the only person I knew with one at the time, and trust me it beat everything else available! mp3 cd players indeed 🙂
My iPod still gets me to and from work each and every day (battery actually lasts longer now then when I first got it)
pravda – at least you are consistent and funny. Wrong. But consistent and funny.
Everything eventually goes away. So we consider your body a fad because, I assume, you have friends. So when you have died at a ripe old age and are gone your remaining live friends can say you were a fad.
What happened to the Apple music label?
Apple the music label sued Apple the computer company, which resulted in the verdict that Apple the computer company could not do anything with music.
Now Apple the computer company is selling music, and I haven’t heard anything about Apple the music label being bought out or anything.