that's one of them. see above for the specific one i saw.

 

Well the thing you linked to doesn't really appear to just be a receptacle for flash drives. It just is two pieces. The "drive" part of it has the playback buttons on it.

The thing in the picture really is just a thing which lets you plug in whichever thumb drive you please.

 

see.. this is exactly what pisses me off about Apple and Apple zealots. they have this notion that Apple is the first at everything. that they revolutionize the marketplace. the iPod was NOT the first HD-based mp3 player. they weren't the 2nd or 3rd. revolutionary? let's take a walk down memory lane..

(mind you, i'm not even listing all of them)
- Compaq Personal Jukebox - 6GB, avail. Oct. 99
- Creative Nomad Jukebox - 6GB, avail. Jan. 00
- Archos Jukebox 6000 - 6GB, avail. Jun. 00
- Archos Jukebox Recorder - 6GB, avail. Mar. 01
- Apple iPod - 5GB, avail. Oct. 01
and not even a month later..
- Archos Jukebox Multimedia - 10GB, avail. Nov. 01

let's not even talk about price. i specifically remember when these things were around that they were much cheaper than the iPod. what's unfortunate is that the success of it has forced competitors to push up the prices of their mp3 players.

it's same thing with the iShuffle. USB thumbdrive mp3 players are nothing new. there are countless available with screens so you can actually see what's playing! even the very first portable mp3 player had a freakin' track and time display. i know, because i owned it. and don't even get me started on that MiniMac.

i'll give Apple one thing, they have a phenomenal marketing department. these marketing campaigns of theirs manage to repeatedly convince people that what they're buying is indeed revolutionary, and worth the premium price tag.

 

Yup. That's so true. Apple people feel like they are elite... and they suck.

 

I will say that the earlier hard drive based MP3 players were rather clunky and not very friendly to the non-geeks among us. Apple did a good job of giving the iPod a great design and making it idiot proof. Only after it came out did you really see any hd-based MP3 players which had a similarly small form factor and any sort of level of ease of use.

Thumbdrive MP3 players on the other hand have had more time to evolve and become idiot proof, so Apple is entering a segment which they have less of a chance of dominating.

But really, why so much hate? It's just an MP3 player or whatever else Apple comes out with at any particular point in time. If you don't like it then don't buy it. Life is far easier if you realize that the average human IQ is only 100 and that's not exactly very high. Having lower expectations of standard human intelligence leaves you with less to be disappointed about.

 

no doubt their product will be more expensive and have less features than the existing players ...

but the mainstream recognizes the iPod brand and sees the product as "cute" ... it'll sell, they'll go for a premium on eBay, and apple will make more "i" stuff.

 

Actually the iPod Shuffle is pretty competitively priced for its storage capacity, it's just that Apple thinks people don't need a screen to sort through 200+ songs and will simply deal with letting the machine pick one at random. Or if they really want to find something specific then they have to keep pressing the track skip button until they find it.

 

i bet this is all a part of their master plan. they know they need a screen. we know they need a screen.

they'll generate alot of hype, blow the new units out of the stores, wait for sales to sag, then release the iPod Shuffle 2.0 in different colors with a screen for $200, keep the original at $150.

 

That iProduct parody is so close to the truth its disturbing. With Apple fanatics no wrong can be done by the company.

Its ridiculous... Apple introduced a $100-$150 mp3 player with no display. Then they advertise that like its a feature. Its unpredictable! You don't know what song is coming next! Then there's that Apple Mini which people are going nuts over because its small. But it costs $500, slower than a comparable desktop Mac, and it doesn't even come with a keyboard and mouse, let a lone a display. Apple must think quite lowly of their market to expect people to fall for that. And the funny thing is that they will fall for it, because their eyes glaze over every time they see a new Apple design, which isn't really innovating at this point but reapplying an existing look to other products.

Don't get me wrong, Apple has some great looking products. But thats all they have. They may have been daring to take a generic looking PC case and turn it into a nicely crafted work of art. That, however, isn't innovation.

Apple doesn't innovate. They take existing technology and market it as if that product is the first ever of its type. I guess they seriously expect people to disregard the fact that there are already dozens of other products doing the same exact thing.

As for their computers, Apple isn't responsible for the innovation there either. The PowerPC processor was designed and manufactured by IBM. This is the same IBM that in 1984 Apple rebelled against in 1984 in that famed television advertisement. Mind you that IBM has been making processors for Apple for years.

Sure, Apple had a part in customizing that processor, but its essentially the same processor IBM uses in other applications. As for the other components, most of it is generic, off-the-shelf parts. Their video cards are unspectacular, somewhat outdated, by PC standards, ATI video cards. The top of the line G5 comes with a Radeon 9600 XT with 128mb. The top of the line video card, which you can find in many PCs today is the x800 with 256mb. The most unique bit of hardware in a G5 is the motherboard, which isn't saying much. Even the cooling system for the G5's is adapted from existing PC technology. However, you're charged 50%-100% more for a Mac. For what? A fancy case?

Then there are those benchmarks. A Mac is twice as fast as a PC of equivalent speed! Isn't that amazing! Thats funny, I have a PC at home and a Mac at work and a 1ghz Mac is no faster than a 1ghz PC. In fact, there are things that PCs do faster. Adobe has admitted that Photoshop runs better on a PC than a Mac. Macromedia Flash absolutely performs better on the PC. So much so that many Flash developers are moving over to PCs.

The Mac's IBM PowerPC processor should have the advantage in that is uses RISC archetecture. That means it performs fewer instructions per clock cycle. However, software needs to specifically take advantage of that hardware. And it just doesn't come into play most of the time. If you're serious about performance you should be getting high-end workstations like Silicon Graphics machines, anyway.

So where do those benchmarks Apple uses come from. Well, it turns out that Apple heavily skews tests in their favor. Actually, they have an outside company do the testing. And while Apple doesn't have it, that company provides all the testing methodology. I read an interesting article about a year ago, which I can't find now, where they tear apart Apple's comparisons. Essentially, Apple severely cripples the PCs to ensure slow performance. And they run the Macs in a special developers mode, which is impractical for the normal user but boosts performance in specific applications. So they skew test results, and come up with these ridiculous claims of performance which are all false. Get any magazine where they compare a PC and a Mac and the Mac consistently loses, and badly at that.

I'm not even going to get into all the problems that Mac OS X has. The system itself is very stable, but everything else seems to suffer because of it. Its like the system does everything it can to save itself. You'll be working and the computer takes it upon itself to close the application. Sometimes you go to save a file and it crashes in the middle of the save! So much for saving often. It handles files in really strange ways. If you're copying files to or from a fileserver, and sometimes compressing files you run the risk of ending up with 0k files. Sometimes, just opening a file is enough to corrupt it, like happens with QuarkXpress. And it has all kinds of ridiculous problems with fonts and drivers. These are all common problems. They aren't unique to me. I know many designers, and different companies on different generations of Macs who've all encountered these problems. And thats not counting what I've read on forums.

Quality control is a big problem with Apple. It's been widely reported that iPods had serious problems with batteries. However, Apple charged people $80 or so to replace those batteries. My friend had an iPod about a year and a half and the thing failed. Their computers have been plagued by a number of problems over the years. The thing Apple products have going for them is that they're nicely built. Their cases are very well constructed. The premium paid over a other hardware, however, doesn't justify the price. And quite a few competitors offer products just as good if not better.

Don't give me this nonsense about hate or envy, or whatever else you what to believe. Too many Mac lovers carry this kind of elitist attitude. This way they don't have to face arguments and criticisms head on. You like Macs, fine, I have no problem with that. But don't try to tell me that Apple products are somehow superior.

 

I've been dealing with this sort of nonsense for years, and putting up with these less-than-perfect Macs for so long that I feel pretty strongly about the subject.