Steve Jobs admits he was wrong

[a_unique_person]

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.

[coalesce]

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

Michael

[Smike]

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.

[Tirdun]

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.

[strathmeyer]

...and while the iPod is not massively over-priced, it's hardly the cheapest thing on the market.

Which iPods aren't massively overpriced?

[Hellbound]

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.

[Psi Baba]

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.

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.

[coalesce]

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.

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

[rustypouch]

I do not have an iPod because I like music. I have a DAP which does gapless when the tracks are ripped with LAME.

[kevin]

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.

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.

[Mercifull]

I think ipods are actually pretty good value for your money.

[TruthSeeker]

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.

[Anti_Hypeman]

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.

[Darat]

...snip...

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



...snip...

I'd say "The dude is an ego-maniac with the great sense to employ brilliant industrial designers."

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

I don't think you speak from a position of knowledge on this subject.

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?

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

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.

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 ;)

[joobie]

I do not have an iPod because I like music. I have a DAP which does gapless when the tracks are ripped with LAME.

i have a DAP that does true gapless no matter what codec you use. it also plays .ogg and .flac.

:)

[kevin]

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.

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.

[Hindmost]

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:

[Kopji]

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.

[Kopji]

PS: I got myself a 1gb Creative Nano+. This was about $120. Prices are still dropping fairly rapidly. I think that a 2gb flash unit would be as much as I would probably ever use.

The lifespan of a hard drive is going to be a few years at most. It's going to suck when people's drives start failing. The mtbf of flash ram is much higher, and with the temp extremes here I think a better investment, at least for people who drop things a lot...

[Rat]

The iPod's success and Apple Corp's current revival is his doing.
Do they actually call themselves 'Apple Corp'? And, if so, am I the only person still around who sees it and just thinks of the record company?

Cheers,
Rat.

[a_unique_person]

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 think his actions speak for themselves, sell a good product competitively priced, and you will do well.

By the time he decided to sell Apples competitively, it was too late, he had missed the boat.

He has learnt his lessons, but he would never admit to it openly. He does, however, want to be very, very, very rich.

[Zep]

I'm looking for a iPod or equivalent that I could use to hold all the photos I take on holiday. That is, I need to be able to use it as a BIG picture store.

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

Zen Vision and Zen Vision:M are both better than an iPod. Why? 10 times more color, better batteries, they fit better in the hand, the Vision has a 640X480 3.7 inch screen, both sport FM radio, you can record voice and radio on them... oh, and they will not get dirty everytime someone holds them! ;)

[roger]

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 would say the soft plastic that scratches if somebody blinks in the next room is even greater evidence of planned obsolesence. Egads, hard plastic exists!

[Mercifull]

Ive not really had any real problems with scratches in my ipod. Its no more scuffed than anything else I have like it.

[kevin]

Do they actually call themselves 'Apple Corp'? And, if so, am I the only person still around who sees it and just thinks of the record company?

Cheers,
Rat.

Yes to 1 and no to 2. Every time Apple enters a new market they have to make a deal with the Beatles. The original lawsuit said Apple (computers) could do anything except music. That agreement stood for many years until Apple (computers) opened the iTunes Music Store, although I think it was a bit shaky when they came out with the iPod. Apple (computers) had to go back and re-negotiate the original deal. I believe they gave the Beatles a truckload of money to let them open the store. I don't know if it's an ongoing payment or a royalty or what.

[kevin]

I would say the soft plastic that scratches if somebody blinks in the next room is even greater evidence of planned obsolesence. Egads, hard plastic exists!

nano's are supposed to have this issue. I've only owned real 8-) ipods. The metal on the back has always been a bit scratch attracting. And I've got a good scratch on my 10GB one from dropping on a concrete floor (still works).

I have soft cases for my ipods now.

I think if you take a scratched up Nano back to an Apple store you can sometimes get it replaced.

[kevin]

I'm looking for a iPod or equivalent that I could use to hold all the photos I take on holiday. That is, I need to be able to use it as a BIG picture store.

There are equivalents but to do this with ipod you need the iPod camera connector add-on.

http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/70502/wo/AD54S2KeMkCk3O8e0nroVUblmYK/2.SLID?mco=19333EF5&nplm=M9861G%2FA

[kevin]

By the time he decided to sell Apples competitively, it was too late, he had missed the boat.

Not his decision, he stopped the selling of computers competitively. He ended the clone program that Sculley had started and went back to the old model.

Note that the "premium" price Apple charged was never that significant. The reason Mac's were so much more expensive was the additional hardware Apple put in all it's Macs. If you had priced a Dell, with the same features like SCSI built-in, it came out to be around the same as the Mac. Apple just didn't have a barebones bottom end computer until the iMac, and then the mini.

But if you price the bottom end of Dell - $350 for a computer with a monitor. Apple still doesn't compare that well just on straight price, the mini, sans monitor, is $499.

The ipod is not competetively priced, it sets the price. All the competitors are pricing themselves against the ipod. It appears Apple is competetively setting the price because all other players are priced around the same as Apple. Apple could drop the price $50 and barely notice it. That would be competitive pricing.

[Hellbound]

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?

Nice assumption. I specifically compared models with similar capacities/features. If you notice, I made refernce to some features in my post. If you want to argue company standing, well, Apple's tech support is extremely good, with a (well-deserved) reputation for service.

IN any case my point was not to argue that iPod was the best. I was simply dispelling the niave myth that they are the highest priced items out there..i.e.-"over-priced junk". They offer a quality, high-feature product often at the lowest (or lowest third) of the price range. Where the iPods are more expensive, they have advatages over other competitors (larger capacity, additional media types played, smaller size, etc).

[chulbert]

Steve Jobs isn't wrong, you just misunderstood him before. ;)

[Hindmost]

I would say the soft plastic that scratches if somebody blinks in the next room is even greater evidence of planned obsolesence. Egads, hard plastic exists!

my wife got me the soft cover for it...keeps it form scratching as much and a bit better on drops.

glenn:boxedin:

[Psi Baba]

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 usually rip CDs in VBR with a range of 160-256 (or ABR at 192). I probably should go higher, but as long as I have the CD, I can always rip it again, and and average of 192 is sufficient for portable listening and keeps the file sizes to about a meg-a-minute. But if the digital file is my only copy of something, then I usually try to get a higher rate file. I sometimes record off of vinyl at a higher bit rate for archiving purposes. Not sure why other players didn't catch the public's imagination. I thought the Dell DJ would have, given the popularity of their computers, but I still think marketing has more to do with it than quality or value. It appears that they don't even sell the hard drive players any longer, just the flash players.

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.
I used to use cassette Walkmans religiously (mainly for my commute on the bus), but the biggest drawback was having to select a tape every night or every morning, guessing at what I might be in the mood to listen to when the time came. With a flash player, I'd be in the same situation, only with the added inconvenience of having to load files onto the player from my computer (Even less convenient than plucking a tape off the wall). I love having a sizable portion of my music collection with me at all times. I like having the option to listen to an "album" in the classic sense, or to choose everything by an artist or in a certain genre, and even shuffle the selections within any of those parameters. Often I just put in on shuffle and select the entire playlist. It's a completely different level of enjoyment.

[Almo]

I don't have an iPod, but I'd get one. I expect computer products I buy to be NICE to use. I just got a dual 2.0 GHz Power Mac. Wow, what a nice piece of hardware. Even the experience of unpacking the thing is nice. Using it is nice, setting up stuff on it (like FTP servers and the like) is nice. Yeah, it was expensive. But it was worth it. I could have paid half as much for a PC, but I'd hate having to work with Windows all the time. If I'm gonna fork a load of money for a computer that I'll use around 30-40 hours a week, I'm gonna get one I LIKE.

[Hindmost]

For those of you toward the geek end of the spectrum that want to get a good synopsis of the history of the PC and MAC stuff from the beginning...take a look at the following link. (it is a transcript of a show on PBS a few years back) It is great to see where is all started and one need not have a computer science degree to understand it all.

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/transcript.html

glenn:boxedin:

[blutoski]

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 ;)

I think for me it was "all or nothing": I have easily 500GB of music, so i just got a 512 Suffle for jogging and auto.

[WildCat]

So what happens when the HD on an ipod goes poof and 30 GB of music vanishes from your collection? I'd much rather have a flash memory player personally, no moving parts.

[WildCat]

I'm looking for a iPod or equivalent that I could use to hold all the photos I take on holiday. That is, I need to be able to use it as a BIG picture store.
Zep, why not just get a 2.5" drive enclosure and HD of your choice? They're small and simple. I have one of these (http://www.digitaldingus.com/reviews/macally/macally250otg.php), it's worked great and has storage galore w/ the 80GB HD I put in it. Not expensive either.

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

I think for me it was "all or nothing": I have easily 500GB of music, so i just got a 512 Suffle for jogging and auto.

Wow, I barely reach about 50GBs!

[kevin]

Wow, I barely reach about 50GBs!

I'm around 85GB, but I could trim that up a bit by deleting a lot of the radio shows I record for later listening.