iPod. Price or Performance?

Question

Is iPod really the best MP3 player out there, or do you mostly just pay for the name? I know that there are many other players around, and many perform very very well, but none seem nearly as popular as the iPod. Why is that the case?

Answer 1

iPod really is a good device. In fact, it probably is the best one out there. Europe is trying to make Apple give iTunes availability to other MP3 players because the others are too lazy to make up their own. Apple has countered by threatening to take all iPods off the shelf in Europe. If that doesn't tell you something, then what will?

Answer 2

That's just exactly what you said. They just pay for the name. iPod is good only because it's Apple's. As you may know, these are the problems an iPod has, but n one cares! :
1. it doesn't have any microphones, so you can't use it as a voice recorder, while almost all other MP3 players have a voice recorder & you don't have to pay for it separately.
2. It doesn't have any radios, while other have an FM radio.
3. It doesn't have any chargers, you have to use the USB for charging it & you have to but the direct charger separately if you want.
4. Compared with other players, it's heavy & big (unless the Nano that can be a good chois but it is not a full iPod & you even can't but FM radio or Recorder for that!!!)
5. The price is really high. You can but a 1 GB Creative Zen Nano Plus mp3 player with voice recorder & FM radio that uses only a single AAA battery & has good battery life & you can change it easily & it has got 10 different colors & has a display & ... which is only $69, while iPod Shuffle doesn't have any of these & is more expensive than that.

Anyway...Those who live in industerial & rich countries are trying to be cool by getting 60 empty giga bytes with them while in my country, maybe 2 out of 10 teens may know what an iPod is, & in my city which is the center of a large province in the country, but ONLY ONE STORE HAS iPODS, containing 2 Nanos, 1 U2 & 1 Shuffle, that's it!!!! & These products are over there for more than 5, 6 months & no one buys them, cuz they don't know iPod + it's really expensive. See how people are in African countries... Poor people...

Here are some of other well known brands: Sony Walkman, Creative, Z-Cyber, SanDisk, Mobi Blu (that has the smallest MP# player in the world weighing only 18 Grams), Samsung, Panasonic, and so on.

Answer 3

I researched a lot before buying a MP3 player and I found that Apple, while not being the best brand, was very smart. They force you to convert everything to ITunes, pay a ton of money for accessories, and then you are pretty much stuck with IPod forever. If you wanted to change after getting an IPod you would have to convert everything back and your accessories would be useless. Get the Creative Zen Vision M, I did after researching both that and IPod and am more than happy with my purchase.

Answer 4

iPods are good portable music devices. The reason that Apple is the most popular is that 1) their devices are very sleek and 2) with iTunes, there is a single end-to-end solution for consumers that works pretty seemlessly.

However, on a price performance basis, iPods are NOT the best option if you consume a lot of music.

First, Apple's stance is that they will only sell music, not rent it (based on something I heard first hand from an Apple rep on the radio station KFOG several years ago).

If you want to fill a 30GB player with music, hands down subscription music is THE least expensive legal means of doing so. Not buying it at 99cents, 88cents, 79cents, or even 25cents a track. For a flat fee of as little as $10 a month with a pre-paid subscription, you can transfer as many tracks as you like to your device. I have a 30GB Creative Zen Vision M and it'll hold about 5000 subscription music tracks at 192kbps quality. To fill that player would cost about 5000 on iTunes. That works out to about 41 YEARS of subscription music service at $10 a month. I have over 1200 subscription tracks on my player now, and add about 5-10 songs a week, sometimes more. That works out to be less than a penny a song a month.

There is another reason to go with subscription music. What happens if your computer hard drive crashes. You potentially lose all of that music you bought. A $$$$ investment down the drain. With subscription music, this is not a problem. Your music just moves with you from computer to computer and device to device.

Okay, next, competitors are coming out with better devices. I just read on Yahoo Answers that people find it pretty typical to use up the battery on a 30GB iPod playing just a few music videos. Apple only advertises a 2 hour video playback time. I just flew cross country twice with my Creative Zen Vision M. My son and I watched a full length movie each way (about 1 hr 45 minutes) and he watched 30 minutes or more of Lego animated films I downloaded over the internet (about 10 or so). Fully charged before each trip. Clearly the ZVM has better video battery life than the 30GB iPod video!

The ZVM also has a superior color video display (262,000 colors versus 65,000).

So, iPods are not necessarily the best players out there. It costs way more to get music for an iPod (legally).

I kind of think of the iPod and iTunes as fashion. People see a simple solution and so they get what other people get because they know it works.

However, as people become more informed consumers, the competitions' products become superior (look at the new Creative Zen V which is scratch resistant and has longer battery life), and people see that others are successful with alternative MP3 players, Apple's market share will decline. AOL used to be the most popular internet service provider because they made the internet easy. However, once people realized that there better, less expensive options that required only a little more work than AOL's internet on training wheels, people got the other products.

Answer 5

I think the quality of performance is pretty much the same in all of them. People do like the looks of the iPod better than most though and I got one because of the size. Mine is the 60 gig hard drive and I didn't see any other brands that big in the stores.