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Comment by minsight | Hacker News Reader

Apple has a long history of releasing products that look like losers when one compares a bullet list of features with the competition. I bought a Sansa with twice the storage of the current ipod and grew to hate the device, despite the fact that it won on paper. Apple's products have design and usability features that the competition has never even considered. (one example - the dozens of times that the magsafe connector on my MacBook has saved the day).

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Agreed. In my head, I call this the "blender" comparison that many technophiles seem to use.

Want to compare two meals? Put them in the blender and analyze the nutritional content of the resulting goop.

What? You don't compare food by spec sheets? (Calories, vitamins, carbs, proteins). What are these subjective "texture, taste, style, temperature, presentation" variables you care about? They offer little or no nutritional difference!

Very good point, and quite illustrative. Same thing with cars; normal people rarely buy cars based on pure performance metrics.

Much like when my Dad bought a Dell jukebox despite me insisting he get an iPod. It didn't take him long to really regret the decision. More companies could stand to learn from Apple's ability to look at the whole story of the product.

I think there is a huge market for a company who does everything like Apple, except with a different look and style. An iPod with un-rounded corners so to speak.

I've had a Sansa for two years and have had no problems with it. It was cheap, it's easy to use, it has good storage, it doubles as a cheap voice recorder, it's easy to add and remove music (I use Rhythmbox on Linux or drag-and-drop on Windows), the battery lasts a long time. I'm curious to know why you hate yours.

Mine required manually switching from one mode to another (which ended up being about a 3-5 minute reboot, as it had to then detect all of the music on the device) when I wanted to add new music. I'd plug it into my mac and it would sometimes show up and sometimes not. There were times when I'd be attaching and detaching it over and over again for about 15 minutes. I change my music daily (I have a long commute), so this became quite onerous and hated.

Drag-and-drop to add music means that the device has to tediously index itself or have terrible metadata support, usually both.

It's a hell of a misfeature, one that nearly all of Apple's non-Zune competitors are drawn to, since they have no hope of competing with iTunes as a music organizer and they have a very vocal clique of customers that demand it (like support for OGG and FM Radio).

A bit out of topic... but I really hate the magsafe connector, it always falls off of the computer, restrict me in which positions I can use my laptop and all that for the unlikely possibility of it saving the day if I trip on the wire

But, yes apart from this, I love apple's attention to details.

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