The Times: Love your iPod - but beware the hype (Comment)
By David Rowan
Beautifully designed, easy-to-use technological innovations have a nasty habit of being superseded by inferior competitors - especially when the innovator is Apple. Why else would virus-prone, unintuitive beige Windows PCs account for 95 per cent of the market when you could be using Macs instead?
Apple may tend to get there first, but it rarely takes long for the big guys to catch up. For all the iPod's kudos as a fashion accessory, it faces growing competition from hardware giants such as Dell and Sony that will ratchet down their MP3 players' prices until Apple's pips are squeezed. The iTunes Music Store, too, is up against determined rivals such as Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart and Napster, with Microsoft and Yahoo! not too far behind. With the download services using incompatible music formats - iTunes, for instance, does not support Microsoft's Windows Media Audio - there is bound to be a brutal fight to the death. And how often can you remember Bill Gates conceding defeat to little Apple?
The phone companies, too, are hoping to supplant the iPod's role as the only pocket music library you will need. By Christmas, you will be able to choose from an impressive array of third-generation handsets that double as MP3 players.
Nokia's new 3300 Music Phone, for instance, makes it easy for you to transfer music tracks from your computer (and to record tracks from the built-in FM radio); you can even store a few hours' music on the company's N-Gage game deck. So if your monthly phone contract gets you a handset that stores music, takes high-resolution photos, shows video clips and makes the occasional phone call, would you really want to spend another few hundred pounds on a separate pocket music player?
Besides, iPods still haven't cracked video. RCA's compact new Lyra audio-video jukebox, meanwhile, can hold 600 hours of music as well as around 40 movies. Come on, Apple, why all this dawdling?
This is not to deny Steve Jobs's remarkable achievement in reinventing Apple as a music business. His download service, which analysts suggest is a loss-leader to promote iPod sales, managed to shift 730,000 of them in the three months to Christmas, at the sort of profit mark-up businesses dream of. Apple claims to be selling three-quarters of the three million tunes being legally downloaded each week - educating us, as much as anything else, to see digital music as something to pay for.
He is clearly ruffling feathers: you can sense how much iTunes' success is infuriating Microsoft by a recent comment from the general manager of its Windows digital media division. The music service's emerging dominance, the Microsoft man suggested, would be bad for consumers as it would limit them to the iPod. As opposed, presumably, to limiting them to Microsoft products ...
By all means succumb to the hype and buy an iPod mini. But do not be surprised when, in a few months' time, some rather impressive rivals go on sale at £50-£100 less, the phone companies offer tempting alternatives, and the iTunes Music Store decides to impose new conditions or prices that you can do little about. If Apple really had the British consumer's interests at heart, wouldn't it be pricing its song downloads closer to the 53p (99 cents) demanded from US consumers, instead of what's expected here to be almost double?
(The Times, March 4 2004)
Beautifully designed, easy-to-use technological innovations have a nasty habit of being superseded by inferior competitors - especially when the innovator is Apple. Why else would virus-prone, unintuitive beige Windows PCs account for 95 per cent of the market when you could be using Macs instead?
Apple may tend to get there first, but it rarely takes long for the big guys to catch up. For all the iPod's kudos as a fashion accessory, it faces growing competition from hardware giants such as Dell and Sony that will ratchet down their MP3 players' prices until Apple's pips are squeezed. The iTunes Music Store, too, is up against determined rivals such as Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart and Napster, with Microsoft and Yahoo! not too far behind. With the download services using incompatible music formats - iTunes, for instance, does not support Microsoft's Windows Media Audio - there is bound to be a brutal fight to the death. And how often can you remember Bill Gates conceding defeat to little Apple?
The phone companies, too, are hoping to supplant the iPod's role as the only pocket music library you will need. By Christmas, you will be able to choose from an impressive array of third-generation handsets that double as MP3 players.
Nokia's new 3300 Music Phone, for instance, makes it easy for you to transfer music tracks from your computer (and to record tracks from the built-in FM radio); you can even store a few hours' music on the company's N-Gage game deck. So if your monthly phone contract gets you a handset that stores music, takes high-resolution photos, shows video clips and makes the occasional phone call, would you really want to spend another few hundred pounds on a separate pocket music player?
Besides, iPods still haven't cracked video. RCA's compact new Lyra audio-video jukebox, meanwhile, can hold 600 hours of music as well as around 40 movies. Come on, Apple, why all this dawdling?
This is not to deny Steve Jobs's remarkable achievement in reinventing Apple as a music business. His download service, which analysts suggest is a loss-leader to promote iPod sales, managed to shift 730,000 of them in the three months to Christmas, at the sort of profit mark-up businesses dream of. Apple claims to be selling three-quarters of the three million tunes being legally downloaded each week - educating us, as much as anything else, to see digital music as something to pay for.
He is clearly ruffling feathers: you can sense how much iTunes' success is infuriating Microsoft by a recent comment from the general manager of its Windows digital media division. The music service's emerging dominance, the Microsoft man suggested, would be bad for consumers as it would limit them to the iPod. As opposed, presumably, to limiting them to Microsoft products ...
By all means succumb to the hype and buy an iPod mini. But do not be surprised when, in a few months' time, some rather impressive rivals go on sale at £50-£100 less, the phone companies offer tempting alternatives, and the iTunes Music Store decides to impose new conditions or prices that you can do little about. If Apple really had the British consumer's interests at heart, wouldn't it be pricing its song downloads closer to the 53p (99 cents) demanded from US consumers, instead of what's expected here to be almost double?
(The Times, March 4 2004)
posted by David Rowan at Thursday, March 04, 2004
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