…and for all others not willing to be chained to AT&T in order to use the Apple iPhone.
On the downside, why does the iPod touch not include Mail.app or Google Maps, as the iPhone does? It would also be great to see the 16GB of flash memory boosted to 32GB soon.
Oh, and the other small thing that is missing from the “Vermonter’s iPhone”? The phone.
Add comment September 5th, 2007
Apple announced today, that they have sold their 100 millionth iPod.
That is a whole lot of iPods! To put that number in perspective, here are a few stats I came up with. Disclaimer: I can’t even remember when I last took a math class.
The average cost of the iPod, since the October 2001 release date is $296.20. So, consumers have spent more than 29.6 billion US dollars on iPods - more than many countries GDP.
The average length of an iPod (taking all current models into account) is 3.07″. If all the iPods ever sold were laid end to end, they would stretch from Los Angeles to New York City, wrap around the Fifth Avenue Apple Flagship Store, and head back to LA - only to stop 73 miles from downtown Los Angeles. This is approximately 4850 miles of iPods.
Any others? Who wants to calculate the landfill waste or diminishing marginal utility for each additional iPod one acquires? I’ll leave that to the Freakonomics blog.
1 comment April 9th, 2007
Today Apple and EMI Music announced that all of EMI’s music library will be offered via iTunes without Digital Rights Management (DRM). These “premium downloads” will be priced $0.30 higher, at $1.29. In addition to the DRM-free music, the premium downloads will offer the higher 256kbps AAC encoding (current songs are 128kbps) for better sound quality.
This is a major step forward for downloadable music and consumer choice. No longer is your iTunes music chained to only your iPod. For now, I will still be using an iPod as my music player of choice because I believe it is the best. This is just what Apple hopes will happen.
Innovate with future iPods + large iTunes library of DRM-free music = retain and grow customer-base.
“We are going to give iTunes customers a choice—the current versions of our songs for the same 99 cent price, or new DRM-free versions of the same songs with even higher audio quality and the security of interoperability for just 30 cents more,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think our customers are going to love this, and we expect to offer more than half of the songs on iTunes in DRM-free versions by the end of this year.”
Apple estimates that other labels will soon join EMI in offering DRM-free music and that 2.5 million iTunes songs will be DRM-free by the end of 2007.
Apple Press Release
EMI Press Release
Add comment April 2nd, 2007
Maybe Microsoft’s Zune is late to the game. Maybe the Zune needs help catching up with the iPod. But, is it really necessary for this morning’s Today Show to place the new Zune (released today) next to Apple’s 4th Generation 2 bit grayscale 160×128 LCD iPod?? This 4th Generation, pre-Color Photo iPod, was running the show way before the Zune release. In fact, it was released more than more than 2 years ago in July 2004.
It seems the newer 5th Generation 2.5 inch color screen iPod would have provided a much more accurate visual comparison for Today Show viewers. Also interesting is that they chose to use the iPod Mini (released in January 2004!) later in the segment, rather than the new “thinner than a number two pencil” iPod Nano.
I was puzzled why a ‘credible’ morning news program would visually mislead customers - then at the end of the segment Matt Lauer reminded us viewers that MSNBC and the Today Show owned at least partly by Microsoft…and it all made sense.
Those that have read other blog posts on this site may or may not have realized that I prefer Apple, but this kind of reporting is just poor form. Every viewer can’t be expected to geek out and notice things like this and they may just come away deciding to buy their daughter a Zune just because “it looks newer”.
1 comment November 15th, 2006
TechCrunch reports on a new streaming music website, Blogmusik, that they think will soon be gone (due to digital rights management). I think it is just a quick way for the Blogmusik creators to make big bucks from site advertising while the website lasts.
In other music news, if you haven’t used it yet, Pandora Internet Radio is a great streaming service that automatically finds music that matches your preferences. Unlike Blogmusik, you can’t choose the exact song you want to hear, but in some ways it is more powerful because it can help you discover new music.
1 comment September 9th, 2006
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « May | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |||
