Is the era of the iPod over?
So, my 60 gig iPod “Classic” was stolen out of my car recently. Sure, I left the door unlocked, but it was sitting in my driveway. I don’t live in a shady part of town. Once the wife got knocked up with twins (yeah, I shot two past the goalie), I sold my soul and moved to the ‘burbs. It was probably some teenage kid down the street, which is why I installed extremely bright motion-detecting lights over my garage. I take some satisfaction knowing that some douchebag now owns an iPod that has “Eric Rulz” (it was a gift) engraved on the back and is filled with a lot of weird music. But that’s neither here nor there. What’s important is that, while I was pissed off at first, I didn’t exactly miss the thing. iPods are a pain in the ass. Manually hooking them up to bloatware like iTunes is beyond a waste of time. I know there are easier ways of transferring music than with iTunes, but all of them still kind of suck. I tended to listen to the same damn music over and over because I dreaded the whole process of refreshing my music and waiting and waiting while iTunes “sync’d” my new music. I feel sorry for iPod users now that my Nexus One has Dropbox. I drag music into my Dropbox folder, and it syncs up to the Android client on my phone. By the time I open the app the music is already there, and I can stream it. Instantly. Granted, I need some sort of mobile signal, but I have yet to fire up my tunes in an area where I couldn’t even eke out a text. So, with Apple’s big announcement tomorrow about the new generation of iPods, I can’t help but wonder who the hell needs these things anymore? The iPhone I can almost understand, since it can, you know, ostensibly make calls and such, but the iPod just seems so anachronistic at this point. When even our moms have Smartphones, iPods don’t exactly represent the future of music on the go, you know? Do you plan on watching Steve Jobs snow you with double-speak about how listening to music on a 1.7 inch screen will make it sound so much better?
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Zune on a mother-effen-phone. Honestly, I don’t see the need for a seperate music player or a seperate camera as long as you have a current phone. The only thing that the iPod has is a very large storage capacity. Of course, being part of the cloud, the effective data on a phone is limitless but that also eats your battery pretty quickly.
I think as long as Blackberry’s sell so will iPods. They’re the only people who really need that niche filled. And fine, give me shit for it, but we all know that Android is falling behind in this with iTunes and Zune clearly ahead. They’ll be caught up with some similar offering within six months though I bet.
No way I would want anything to do with a Zune. That whole Zune Pass thing is nonsense. You can’t burn the music you pay for? Give me a break. Ok, I could maybe be talked into this Zune: http://amzn.to/cD2SjU. But, yeah, Google bought Simplify Media, so they may beat Apple to the punch on a cloud solution.
as much as i love my zune over my ipod, not many aftermarket car stereos are zune friendly (if any)
my zune runs my home stereo while the ipod lives in my car’s glove (i haven’t touched it in 6 months!) and both share the same directory for music.
Exact same thing happened to me. Left car unlocked, woke up in the morning to find iPod gone. And I had the custom engraving in the back of “BAD MOTHER FUOKER” which I thought was a pretty clever alternative, as Apple blocked any profane language. Anyway, calling the police and saying “Mine’s the one that says Bad Mother F…er” would have been one of those great moments in life, but I never called because I really didn’t miss it. That and I knew I’d never actually get it back. But it was kind of a relief to know I didn’t have to use itunes anymore or manage my disorganized hodgepodge of music.
Looking forward to Zune player on Windows Phone 7. Hopefully Zune Pass is legit.
I can’t imagine that Ford Sync doesn’t work perfectly with WP7 and Zune…it’s pretty inevitable. Being that I lie in NYC car compatability doesn’t matter to me but I have to imagine that they are at least thinking about this. Who knows if they are hiding things because they don’t exist or because they are going to unveil a bunch of things we never even thought of…
until I can get the battery time and storage capacity of my 160GB ipod classic, I will not rely solely on a converged device. Streaming services are well and good, but not so much on a 14 hour flight…sure I can keep my phone plugged in via on-board power but every once in a while the in-seat power is broken or non-existent, so I would have no chance of having a phone when I land…
@David K
I sat down with one of the Sync engineers when I went to the press preview day at the NYC Auto show. They were only working on iPhone, Android, and Blackberry support… 0.o I asked about windows mobile and Windows phone support. He said that WinMo was not in the pipeline, but said that WP7 would be supported after it launched.
As for the ipod, the classic is pretty much a waste of money IMO. Sure it’s huge, but you’re better off with an iPhone or Android device. You can get 32GB of storage and UNLIMITED streaming via data. Listening to any music you want. Can’t beat it.
ive come across the same issues with finding a zune friendly car CD player, it just doesnt happen, ive come to terms and i returned the zune (because i really only use an mp3 player in my vehicle, for the record, i did love the device otherwise) i got a 16gb microsd card and one of those miniscule micro sd card readers that plugs into usb, i plug that into the USB slot on my cd player and dont bother with a separate mp3 player anymore, not only is it easier to load songs to it (drag and drop) but pretty much anybody that gets in my car goes “whats the in your cd player”, i tell them its a 16gb memory card and usually the response is “oh man, that thing holds 16 gigs!!, thats sick!!”
ps. @ chris, there are android devices capable of 48 gigs (captivate has 16 built in and 32 expandable)