Say Goodbye to the iPod Classic

That and they need parts from remaining inventory to warranty what is already sold.

 

I'm going to go out on a limb and bet that Apple has a couple of lawyers too. I don't think you're going to scare them with that threat.

 

Listening to my dinosaur Classic right now on my bus commute!

 

There's a famous quote that seems to have started with Mark Twain that talks about
the ability to bolster a weak argument with numbers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics

I was walking around the other day, and an analogy sprang into my head.

Suppose, for some ungodly reason, I ate at the same restaurant every day of the year.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that the same restaurant sells 3 meals per year to
its average diner.

Assume also that this restaurant is profitable and is not in danger of going out of business
any time soon.

For all of the above to be true, it probably also follows that the money I spend per year at this
restaurant is dwarfed by the (total) money collected from (the sum total of all) other patrons.

This would seem to suggest that statistically, my business with this restaurant means nothing.
If I died, the restaurant wouldn't, in theory, fail in the absence of my business.

In theory, there is a common experience that is shared by all of the diners at the restaurant:
- a good menu
- a convenient location
- clean tables, dishes, decor, restrooms, etc
- friendly wait staff
- reasonable pricing
- etc.

If any of the above factors change, the restaurant could quickly change from successful to unsuccessful.

Assume, for the sake of argument, the neighborhood around the restaurant starts to develop a
crime problem and my car is broken into.

Clearly, the restaurant is not liable for the damage to my vehicle, but because it's my favorite
restaurant, I decide that it might be useful to tell them that maybe they need to hire a security
guard to start watching the parking lot.

But my suggestion falls on deaf ears, in part, because my business is a small part of their overall
business.

Then my car is broken into a second time, and I decided to stop coming.

Does the restaurant continue to succeed ??

The answer depends more on the neighborhood and less on me.

Since I was a frequent customer, I was more likely to notice that the neighborhood was becoming unsafe.

But what about the employees ? Are they also feeling the pinch ? Their cars were there every day, just like
mine. Assume that 80 percent of the employees also had a similar problem.

Am I now less relevant ? Or was my one voice worth the weight of 100+ others ?

Was I just one cranky person, or was my suggestion a bellwether ?


I selected the number "100+" because 3 means per year for 100 people - is roughly equal to
the 365 meals per year I was buying.


To bring this back to Apple, I don't see how they are continuing to increase the average amount of
money collected from an average consumer by declaring the small minority of people with
large libraries irrelevant.

Using the same logic, they should have never made the first Ipod - because "the engineering work was
massive, and the number of people who wanted it small."

My suggestion would have been to spend more time thinking about how to make the overall Apple
experience more friendly, not less.

 

The iPod (of which I have three) was not made because there was a clear market demand but because Steve Jobs wanted one.

Steve was a jerk and a martinet, BUT he knew what he wanted and as it happened others did too, once they saw it.

Probably the BEST tech CEO by conventional measures ever was a guy whose claim to fame is he's now caddying for his son in a golf tourney. Scott McNealy and Sun Microsystems was a company who saw a clearly defined need and filled it in a straightforward manner. But Sun is no more. By contrast, Steve Jobs would still be CEO at Apple if he hadn't died. Jobs consistently saw a need no one else recognized because it didn't even exist. That isn't unique, I do that all the time. But what Jobs wanted was stuff others-a lot of others-did too, and once he had one success others kept coming. And he had the ability to persuade other people with money to leverage his ideas. That, I'm not too good at.

Does anyone else even make a portable music player with a hard drive any more? Not that I know of.

It's unfortunate because I like to carry all my stuff with me all the time and when my iPods die I'm no longer going to be able to do that.

 

Making the overall Apple music experience more friendly would involve Apple supporting FLAC and allowing other applications to sync music and manage music on Apple devices. Not going to happen. Apple's idea of a good user experience is "use our stuff and nothing else, and if you decide to switch to something else we're not going to make it easy". I'm not going to limit myself to one companies idea of what my digital music and media experience should be.

 

Speaking as an IT guy that goes back to the 80s, I would say it's more like "You can use our stuff with no earthly idea of how computers work and we will obscure things that might be useful to those with computer knowledge because beautiful is the opposite of nerdy".

 

Apple focuses on the user experience for the vast majority of users - not what a few geeks and freaks want. They don't care if it makes their products unsuitable for certain edge cases.

Now that they have their operational issues under control (thank you Tim Cook), this strategy has been remarkably successful. They won't be changing anytime soon, and that's a smart thing. Let Microsoft continue to attempt to be the jack of all trades and the master of none.

 

I view it more as "We've planned the experience out well for you so that you don't have to sit and tinker with stuff you don't probably don't have time for". Frankly sometimes I just want my stuff to work (and work simply) without having to resort to a bunch of stupid workarounds.

 

You know what is a stupid workaround? Having to use third party software to copy music from my device to my computer.

 

My two year old Mac Mini worked well for about a year. I got it just to use for music and it's becoming unusable even for that. No matter what application I'm in, after a few minutes it freezes. I'm usually just in iTunes and Finder. Except for Vista, my experience is that Windows just works. I've never done any tweets other than uninstalls crapware and installing a start menu in 8. This Mac Mini is acting worse than the 10 year old XP machine it replaced.

 

I feel the same way when I have to use 3rd party software to simply move files around on my "open" droid tablet, or when I have to root it in order to be able to use a controller.

 

I was thinking more in terms of user experience, but I'll be the first to admit weird stuff like that can happen with some Mac hardware. I had an iMac at work that was doing a similar thing when other similar machines were fine. Upgraded it to Yosemite, it hasn't frozen since. I don't know why. Usually when there's freezing it's often a hardware issue (e.g. bad RAM), but this wasn't the case.

Have you taken it into an Apple Store to have them look at it?

 

No but that's a good idea.

 

I was gonna say, take it to the Apple store, because that sounds like a hardware problem.

My Air is the best laptop I've ever used, by an enormous margin. And it's beautiful. Spendy, but worth every penny.

I build my own PCs but have had nothing but trouble with my current system. It's just old enough to consider replacing. I was going to build a new one, but it's such a hassle I considered buying a prebuilt system. Couldn't find anything to buy that I liked that didn't cost a fortune or come with a host of issues. At this point, I'm considering bailing on the PC completely after almost 30 years and just getting a Mac Pro. If nothing else, it'll save a ton of space in my apartment...

 

The Mac made a lot of sense at one time, when MS-DOS/Windows was really lousy, and other competing systems were just not to be taken seriously (i.e., Amiga, Atari), or were out of the price range of an individual (Unix pizza box workstations). But times change. The only way I'd buy new Mac hardware at the prices Apple charges now is if I were in the graphic design or art related fields and needed it for compatibility reasons.

Mac OS is just Unix, and you can get various kinds of Unix-Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris-for free now. Windows 7 is a solid OS, as were Windows XP and 2000, and its look and feel are as good as Mac OS X as far as I can tell. (NeXT was better.....and no, Mac OS X is NOT NeXT.....)

If you put your own system together you get just what you want. But buying a Dell is cheaper. Unless you want specific features, and there are less of those now than years ago. What is it you want that isn't available off the shelf?

 

Not quite. OS X is based on NeXTSTEP/BSD and sports Apples own GUI.

Apple's laptops are worth every penny they charge for them. They're by far the best built and most reliable machines I've ever used. I'm around all manner of Dell and HP laptops and they're all garbage in comparison, even if they're cheaper. They offered Macs to the developers where I work and within a couple of years 90% of them switched over and never looked back. And the iMac is still the best all-in-one computer anybody's ever made.

Also, Apple's machines hold their value on the resale market. A three year old PC is a doorstop, but you can still get good money for a used Mac.

A quiet machine that isn't hideous and isn't beset by a host of inexplicable design decisions. So far the only machines I've found that more-or-less fit the bill are at the high end of the market and so expensive I might as well bite the bullet and just get a Mac.

 

Perfect, I have absolutely no desire to know how computers work. I just want to get in there, do my work (design, photography, marketing, writing, and emails) and then step away from the machine. In 15 years of using macs, the computer has gotten in the way of doing my work maybe 5 or 6 times. That's not a bad record. That works out to a total of 3 iMacs and 2 laptops. Or, about $40 a month for a generally stress free computer work environment.

 

I would like to be able to see all the song file metadata on an Apple mobile device for example. I can't see how that would "get in the way".

 

I was mostly thinking about work; yes, that is an oversight.

 

I agree the Apple laptops are very nice. The big silver ones anyway. But they are expensive. I generally buy off lease refurb Dell or Lenovo business class machines and have had no problems with them. A laptop disaster on a $250 laptop is not a disaster, on a $2000 laptop it is.

When using the Apple desktops at work, I have to attach a M$ mouse to them and if much typing is called for I'll go get my keyboard too. Apple keyboards are miserable.

Mac OS X is based on the "core" Darwin which they open sourced from NeXT but the GUI is wholly different and the NeXTy stuff like Display PostScript is gone. NeXT is now 20 years old and it's awkward to compare NeXT to current systems, but in its day it was really revolutionary and cool, now every system has become more like it. In fairness it has to be said that NeXT licensed tons of stuff from third parties and the royalty structure was what killed them. If they had been able to offer NeXT user and developer to all comers for the $299 academic price in 1996 they'd have steamrollered everyone. I remember buying a NeXT academic package and then buying a $3500 Tatung SPARCstation to run it on and thinking I had the deal of the century.

 

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014...ic-fetching-mega-bucks-as-hot-christmas-gift/

 

It looks like they changed the link:
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2014/12...ic-fetching-mega-bucks-as-hot-christmas-gift/

Ha! And here I was planning on just giving away my 80GB Classic to my brother once I get a PonoPlayer. Hmmm....

 

If you really want one, Gamestop is the place to buy a classic from. I think about $160, but they also have sales. I just this week put a 120gb in my iPod video. Very happy with that successful operation. Phew.

 

Link please