Nisaea said:
Hello,
Here's my take on the iPods. Apple has to do something, and do it very soon as it is already far behind in the mp3 player race in terms of features. Look at those players:
iRiver iHP-120: 20Gigs, USB2, plays all formats save AAC, Digital line in and line out, Analog line in and line out, voice recorder (direct-to-MP3), volume controlled microphone (direct-to-MP3), FM radio and a 16 Hours Battery. (Very basic mac compatibility, can serve as a hard drive.)
349$
DMC Xclef 500: 40Gigs, same thing as the iRiver except that it has a 20 hours battery, uses an ordinary (i.e. user upgradable) drive, is fully mac compatible and can serve as an external hard drive as well.
Again, 349$.
To get 20Gigs in an iPod, you have to pay 50$ more and you still don't get any line-ins, digital or otherwise, no internal microphone, no radio. You only get AAC compatibility. And you're still far from the Xclef's 40Gigs.
Hmmm... Seems like the iPod, last I checked, supports much more than just AAC. Oddly, "all formats save AAC" apparently means (at least according to the DMC specs page), "MP3 and WMA Music Playback". That's not exactly "all formats". Heck, in sheer format count the iPod has it beat (iPod also plays quicktime lossless and aiff formats). Neither player gets anywhere near "all formats", if for no other reason than that neither supports OGG or FLAC or APE or MP3Plus, etc. In other words, if your beef is that the iPod just won't support your Buy.com WMA library, say that. Don't disguise your partisanship as a general "doesn't support enough formats" complaint.
As for user interface, they're probably not as easy to use as the iPod, but we're not children and it's not rocket science anyway...
Well, that's kind of funny. I generally don't regard myself as an imbicile either, but I had massive ongoing troubles trying to get my wife's RCA Lyra to connect up to our Windows PC (to pull from our MP3 collection). The software was flaky, the connection was tempermental (and if it failed at the wrong spots you'd lose everything on the device and have to start from scratch. Great user design, there.) Moreover, the device itself had a crappy interface and the device itself crashed routinely.
Now, of course, that's not the iRiver or DMC models you're promoting above, but it's silly to implicate that the rest of the industry has come anywhere near catching up to Apple in interface or stability, not even to the "good enough" cash cow market Bill Gates is so good at weaseling into.
And what if they're not as pretty as the iPods? It's not as if I'll be putting them on display at a museum! Most likely they'll spend most of their time in my pockets...
Yeah, if you can fit them! Those suckers are HUGE!
An iPod, on the other hand, fits nicely into my pockets and into my hand, doesn't take any thought at all to control, and, yes, looks nice. Very nice.
I really want to buy an iPod to go with my Macs, but these days it's getting harder and harder. I'm not a teeny-gadget type freak, so the boring Mini doesn't do a thing for me. I want a full featured mp3 player / hard-drive / recorder and Apple is lagging far, very far behind.
Apple sells one of those full-featured devices. It even plays movies. It's called an "iBook". If size is not a problem for you (which is obvious given your approval of the iRiver/DMC bricks), then why not just get a notebook to lug around with you?
[Edit: Here's a site trying to sell the DMC, which apparently unwittingly posted a feature-by-feature comparison to the iPod

. I don't think that the DMC comes out ahead, but that's just my opinion. Of course this doesn't even begin to address ease of use, style, and such, but it's revealing nonetheless. I am little concerned at the recharge time required by the DMC, personally, given it's apparently low-voltage DC line in, but that's also not addressed here; it could require a high current which might make up for the low voltage. The site is:
http://www.digmind.com/store/index.html#Comparison
]