Apple's iPod Problem | Hacker News Reader

Apple's iPod Problem

businessweek.com

11 pointskwamenum8615 comments

This is the reason why the iPod took over in the first place - all the old companies like Sony and so on knew what worked, because it was selling. Changing everything was too much of a risk, so they preferred to stay with the safe stuff. Apple had nothing, so whatever it could come up with could change everything. They did, and became successful.

But now that they have a product that people like, they can't change EVERYTHING again, because it may not work. So they just keep things the same, and at some point, someone will come up with something that is niftier than the iPod, and capture the market.

Apple has already anticipated this problem by releasing the iphone and Apple tv.

Well, at least one of them is selling well.

I get the feeling that people mainly upgraded in the past due to expanding storage capacity. Nobody really uses video, and other than the click wheel (which is now ubiquitous) there haven't been any other major feature changes.

They're now at a point where most of the models have far more storage than necessary for people's collections, so there's no longer any need for a new one. Once they get a 32gb Nano though they might get a bunch of people upgrading from a Classic to that.

"Nobody really uses video"

I don't know about that. I see people using the iPod for video literally everyday.

"most of the models have far more storage than necessary for people's collections"

Again I am not so sure because video can take up a lot of space and some people me) have a lot of songs.

One angle the article left out is the number of clones on the market that match all of the iPod's features and start at 40 bucks. The only thing companies can't touch is the app store but for 40 bucks these clones could be killers.

Certainly some people have large collections. Most people have a few gigabytes though. I'd bet 90% of their users can fit on a nano.

Where do you see people watching video? I've never seen that once, and I've flown a lot. I don't doubt that someone is, but video is a tiny portion of iTunes sales, and you can't really watch any other videos on one without a great deal of effort.

This is purely anecdotal evidence but pretty much everyday in New York I see people watching video on iPods.

Good point about iTunes but I would be reluctant to use iTunes sales figures to determine the distribution of media on the iPod. If you look at the total number of iPods sold and use that figure to calculate the total amount of memory in iPods sold, then you look at iTunes sales, you can reasonably conclude that a lot of the memory on iPods is being filled outside of the iTunes store.

Again, anecdotal evidence, but I have only known 2 people in my life who bought media from the iTunes store regularly. Everyone else I know gets their media elsewhere.

Right. And it's a huge pain to do video on an iPod unless it was purchased through iTunes (in which case it's dead simple but very expensive). Everything you find on BitTorrent or any other P2P source is in DivX or XviD, which it doesn't play. But any music is available in mp3 and does.

Hence I have to think that iTunes sales figures would greatly overrepresent the amount of video being watched, and they still put it at a paltry amount of overall media

Converting video for the iPod is really rather simple:

http://handbrake.fr/

... not just for DVDs anymore.

Its simple to you or me. It's not so simple to my dad, or half of iPod users.

Actually, most of the complaints I've seen about the Touch and the iPhone seem to be about the lack of storage. I have a 16Gig Touch and it is crammed.

Let's see...

8Gigs of audio (including a lot of BBC podcasts) 4 Gigs of video 2 Gigs of photos 200Mb apps 200 megs app data.

I've never bought video through iTunes, but video is extremely useful. When we go away on holiday, I always encode a couple of children's series on to it which comes in very handy as an occassional treat for the two girls when its getting late and we are setting up a tent, or we have a boring hour or two in a aiport terminal or on a very long flight (We're in the UK, my wife's family in Australia). Video also gets used to transport home movies to my parents' house for viewing through the TV.

Is video a 'killer app'? No, but it was definitely a nice-to-have factor in the purchasing decision, as was the excellent Web browsing and e-mail client.

Well, the Touch is the one area where I feel they still have some replacement cycles left based on storage capacity. It's also their newest product line. The Classic and Nano are pretty near stalled.

These aren't really clones... the 'clone' music players were there long before apple brought out their music players.

Nobody is immune from the recession, not even Apple. Look for their sales to take a hit because of high-quality low-priced iPod clones as well.

market saturation is not unique to technology sectors.

apple should stop working on features and start working on reducing manufacturing costs.

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