I suspect the European iPod truth is somewhere inbetween Havoc‘s and Benjamin‘s estimates. I live in Europe too, and despite what Benjamin says, I know very few people whose MP3 player of choice isn’t an iPod. And I for one regularly buy from the iTunes Music Store– the selection of music in the Irish store isn’t great, but the ludicrous price of CDs in Ireland still makes it well worthwhile for certain purchases, and it’s scarily easily when, like me, you’re running iTunes at some point pretty much every day anyway. (And it’s trivial to work around the DRM if you want to, not that I ever have any reason to as I’m only ever playing the music on my Mac or my iPod anyway.)
2 thoughts on “All your music?”
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That’s what I would have said – you’re just the first poster from Planet GNOME who has comments on their blog so I can agree with you. Thanks for saying it before I had to think of a way to say it myself. My experience in the UK is that the iPod is many people’s player of choice just because it WORKS. That’s certainly the primary reason I chose it.
Although I do wish it would play Vorbis so I didn’t have to keep two sets of audio files hanging around on my network.
I must confess I find it intriguing to see this discussion raging across Planet Gnome since it is in essence the classic KDE vs. Gnome debate (Simplicity and Focus == Pandering to Stupidity and Lack of Features) that we’ve all had too much of before. It’s interesting to see responses that could almost be written by those defending the KDE model from Gnome folks.
Personally I find it sad that so few Gnomers seem to be well informed about this modern software success story (and it is a primarily a ‘software’ success, as well as ‘user interface’ in its broadest sense) as you’d think that is very close to the heart of the Gnome vision.
Instead you get a feeling that people are just irked by the iPod (and its succcess) for reasons they can’t fully express, so you get weird contradictions e.g.
* It’s intentionally too expensive so it can be exclusive, yet
* Everyones’s got one, so
* You don’t want to follow the (stupid) herd, especially because
* All iPod owners think they’re better than everyone else
Unravel that conundrum if you can.
My two cents: iPods are expensive, but they’re also competitively priced. When the original iPod was introduced you could get two other players using the same hard drive and both were (if my memory serves) more expensive. In fact it cost more to just by the hard-drive on it’s own than it did to buy the iPod wrapped around it. I’m sure several early iPods were disassembled to be sold as parts at a profit on ebay.
Since then bulk buying for mass produciton has only driven the price down and value up, with the flash-based players from Apple (shuffle and nano) being particularly cheap for what you get.
Also from a standards perspective, even considering the minuses of DRM on *some* of the content they provide through iTMS and lack of Vorbis/Flac support, Apple’s unexpected success has basically saved us from a DRM’d WMA nightmare in audio, and the fact that Quicktime is installed along with every copy of iTunes means that MPEG-4 and H.264 have got real legs as video for the web standards.
I’m looking forward to more informed debate on this kind of interface of real people and software/IT, and perhaps less name calling and broad-stroked character assasinations of large sections of the public who also happen to be part of Gnome’s target userbase.