Steve Jobs admits he was wrong

Evidence or link where he admitted he was wrong, or is this your projection on what's going on?

Michael
 
Bear in mind that the iPod's success was helped by apple's experience in making software (iTunes) and hardware look good and be fun to use.

...and while the iPod is not massively over-priced, it's hardly the cheapest thing on the market.
 
Except that iPods are still sold at a premium price. A 4GB iPod Nano is ~$250, the SanDisk version is $180 and Creative Labs has a 6GB for $190. You can find all these cheaper, but they're going to go down in price at the same rate. The price seems to average out for the high-end models, but I suspect the magic 300 and 400 price point marks are more to blame for that.

Apple has always sold products that tended to be more expensive than their competition. The company promotes quality, stability and style as features that they claim lower price products don't match. Just look at the iPod accessory line and try to find similar products for other MP3 players. People rave about the iPod control widget and gripe about other players' clunky buttons or unresponsive controls.

Jobs has been wrong before, he stated that the customer didn't want video on the iPod and they weren't going that direction. When customer feedback and the competition showed he was wrong... well, go check out the high end iPods and note the video playback. I don't own a single Apple product, but friends who do are very satisfied and don't seem to mind paying for the product. Lexus and Porche seem to be following the same plan.
 
Actually, when I purchased my iPod, nothing on the market of a comparable capacity was any less expensive (except a few "cheap" brands, and the difference wasn't much). I bought a 6GB iPod Mini for $250. The next closest I could find at the time (about a year ago) was a 1GB for $180.

Sure, if you want the one that "just came out (the Nano, for example)", it'll be more expensive. Even then, though, not always. My Mini was one of the first 6GB Minis that came out.

I'll be one of the first to complain about Apple's overpriced computers (believe me), but the iPods are, as far as I've seen, very reasonably priced. Other maufacturer models of comparable prices (that I've found) either offer fewer features (i.e.-limited playlist functionality, can't hold an address book, no clock, can't be used as a USB hard drive, USB only/no firewire, etc) or a much smaller capacity(512MB compared to 1GB, 1GB compared to 4GB, or 4GB compared to 6GB), or a larger physical size.

From CompUSA.com:
Apple Product:..............................Cheapest Competitor:
30GB iPod Video: $299.99.............20GB Gmini by Archos: $279.99
512MB iPod Shuffle: $69.99..........512MB Centon player: $69.99 (all others more expensive than iPod)
60GB iPod Video: $399.99.............No comparable product
2GB iPod Nano: $199.99...............Vibe 2GB Player: $229.99 (all others more expensive than iPod)
4GB iPod Nano: $249.99...............Olympus 5GB Player: $227.99 (two others cheaper than iPod, all three larger than the Nano)
4GB iPod Mini: $230.99................Olympus 5GB Player: $227.99 (all others more expensive than iPod)
1GB iPod Shuffle: $144.99............1GB Centon Player: $99.99 (all other more expensive than iPod)
6GB iPod Mini: $289.99................6Gb Zen Micro Player: $233.99 (only category I found that included competitors where iPod was the most expensive option, instead of the cheapest or mid-range).

iPod is rarely the most expensive player for a given capacity/functionality; where it isn't the cheapest, it's almost always either the smallest or has the most functionality, and some of it's offerings aren't matched by competitors. In ALL cases, the iPod handles a much wider variety of audio formats than its competitors.

I don't think you speak from a position of knowledge on this subject.
 
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Huntsman said:
Actually, when I purchased my iPod, nothing on the market of a comparable capacity was any less expensive (except a few "cheap" brands, and the difference wasn't much). I bought a 6GB iPod Mini for $250. The next closest I could find at the time (about a year ago) was a 1GB for $180.
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I bought a 20GB Dell DJ (1st gen) for $189 when the 20GB iPod was selling for $299. I tried the iPod, and actually prefered the Dell which has longer playing time per charge, a shuffle play that works in any configuration, and a nicer backlight. I can also use the Dell DJ as a portable hard drive (it has a separate data folder). It also plays wma files as well as mp3s.
 
Psi Baba said:
I bought a 20GB Dell DJ (1st gen) for $189 when the 20GB iPod was selling for $299. I tried the iPod, and actually prefered the Dell which has longer playing time per charge, a shuffle play that works in any configuration, and a nicer backlight. I can also use the Dell DJ as a portable hard drive (it has a separate data folder). It also plays wma files as well as mp3s.
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Having it function as an external hard drive is terrific. That's the other great thing about having a 40GB iPod: i can bring all my Photoshop work back and forth from work to home without having to always reburn CD-RWs. Two questions: 1. what bitrate do you use when you rip mp3s, and 2. aside from the cool factor, why do you think that players like the Archos Jukebox and Dell DJ never really caught the public's imagination and became real heavyweights in the mp3 marketplace the way the iPod did?

Michael
 
I do not have an iPod because I like music. I have a DAP which does gapless when the tracks are ripped with LAME.
 
a_unique_person said:
After years of selling Apples for a 'premium', and getting hardly any of the market share, he sells IPods for a competitive price and corners the market.

Well, at least he finally learned his lesson.
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3 mistakes in this message.

a) Steve Jobs never admits he's wrong. Most recent example -- switch to Intel chips. Apple is advertising this as doing a favor to Intel. No admission of guilt in those ads.

b) iPods are not sold at a competitive price. Apple recognizes no competitor to the iPod and at their market share they are correct. Before marketing/distribution costs Apple has a profit margin of 50% on an iPod -- nothing competitively priced has a profit margin of 50%. The Mac mini, a computer sold for a 'premium', has a profit margin of 44% (also before marketing and distribution).

c) Steve Jobs learns no lessons. The dude is an ego-maniac with a cool sense of industrial design.

The real reasons iPods cornered the market:

* first company to produce one that had marketing muscle behind it. Rio, iRiver, etc... too small to get noticed by non-geeks.
* it plays music very well. Unless your definition of music is the gap between songs, it's actually hard to find a player that plays as well (assuming a decent rip to begin with)
* forced upgrade path. If you buy music from iTMS and want to buy a new player -- you must buy an iPod to play that music, or hop through a burn-to-audio-cd-re-encode-to-MP3 workflow.

iPod sets the price points, and because of volume corners the markets on the parts need (see articles on Apple's flash memory grabs). Other players can't get the parts in cheap enough to compete. And if any serious contender comes along, Apple has a 50% profit margin to play with.

I've owned 3 ipods. All too expensive. I buy no music from iTunes. Currently I rip CDs at 320Kbps, but most of my music is bought from EMusic.com which provides 196Kpbs MP3s.
 
I won a Dell Pocket DJ at our Christmas party. I am very happy with it.

My sister has had two iPods simply die on her. Apparently, this is very common. When we returned the second one, I saw at least five other people in the store making the same exchange. I am not tech savvy enough to be able to explain what goes wrong with them. Fortunately, the Apple people seemed quite generous in making the exchanges.
 
I use a 256 mb player and sawp out the music every now and then. I still dont understand the desire to carry 400 days of music around with you.
 
kevin said:
...snip...

c) Steve Jobs learns no lessons. The dude is an ego-maniac with a cool sense of industrial design.



...snip...
Click to expand...

I'd say "The dude is an ego-maniac with the great sense to employ brilliant industrial designers."
 
Huntsman said:
I don't think you speak from a position of knowledge on this subject.
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Huh, so, when you buy a car you just look at the price to decide which ones are overpriced. Interesting.

What about all the other characteristics? Do they count at all?
 
Anti_Hypeman said:
I use a 256 mb player and sawp out the music every now and then. I still dont understand the desire to carry 400 days of music around with you.
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Yup, and I dont understand why would I want just a brief sample of my music when I can carry almost all of it everywhere I go ;)
 
rustypouch said:
I do not have an iPod because I like music. I have a DAP which does gapless when the tracks are ripped with LAME.
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i have a DAP that does true gapless no matter what codec you use. it also plays .ogg and .flac.

:)
 
Anti_Hypeman said:
I use a 256 mb player and sawp out the music every now and then. I still dont understand the desire to carry 400 days of music around with you.
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When you have a 4 day out of town travel with 6 hour plane flight there and back, the need for more than 256MB becomes a necessity.

And when your mood changes, one moment i might feel like listening to classical the next like listening to punk, then the need for a broad range of music is also necessity.

So while I don't have 400 days of music with me, I do have 6000 songs, 18 videos and 400 photos. And I wish I had more drive space so I could fit all 10,000+ of my tracks on it.
 
I really like my ipod, but I wish they would have made it so the battery could be changed easily...it seems like planned obsolesence on Apple's part. Of more recent technology, it seems one of the most useful.

glenn:boxedin:
 
I don't see all that much of a change in Apple's marketing except to make iPods easier to find and purchase than Apple computers.

Jobs was out of Apple for quite a while. It would be hard to blame him for a lot of their mistakes. He may be an egomaniac, but he is a visionary egomaniac. The iPod's success and Apple Corp's current revival is his doing.

The iPods themselves are very competitive, stylish, and represent overall good value.

iPod accessories are much more expensive than most other mp3's.
The Apple brand carries a premium. If there is a weakness it is in maintaining the perception of high quality. They need to be careful about issues like batteries going dead and hard to read displays. Those can be fatal to the Apple brand, where it might not hurt another.

My kids broke the last portable CD player last month, and instead of replacing it I got them Creative mp3 players for about $90 ea. About the size of a bic lighter... These include an FM radio (that can be recorded from), had 512m ram usable as regular flash drive, can rip mp3's directly from a line input (like recording old vinyl records), and have a little microphone for recording digital audio. The AAA battery lasts about 15 hours, even with playing rock music.
Cheap enough so that everyone can have their own mp3 player and mooch each other's music.

If I did all that in Apple gear the price difference would start to be painful pretty quick. (Settling with something that makes it easier for the rest of the family to use seems a reasonable compromise to having the best. 'Family bundles' might be an opportunity that nobody seems to be taking much advantage of.
 
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