iPod: The Inferior Music Player

Apple currently owns the entire music player market. They are also moving in on taking the smartphone and TV recorder categories with the iPhone and AppleTV. Anything Apple creates these days seems to be considered cool. The Apple brand represents the opposite of Microsoft. That’s what makes it so cool to own something by Apple. Can’t afford a PowerBook? Buy an iPod and at least you’ve bought into part of coolness of Apple. Then you can say “I think different!” as you show off the flashy iPod on the train to work every day. You could buy a Zune, but eww, that’s Microsoft.

What most people don’t realize though is that Apple is now a huge force. It is no longer the underdog. This can make the Apple brand unappealing to most buyers. We all know that if something becomes too cool, it later becomes uncool. It will happen, it’s only a matter of when.

The popularity of the iPod has overstayed its welcome. There are many other music players on the market that are better in many ways. The Creative Labs Zen comes to mind as one great music player that nobody seems to be buying. Why by an iPod when you have to deal with issues like these?

• Having to deal with iTunes to move files to the device instead of a regular file system.
• The inability to easily get songs off the device if you somehow lose them on the computer.
• The inability to play FLAC formatted files.
• Sound that isn’t as good as other players.
• Cheap headphones (You are now encouraged to upgrade to the higher end headphones)
• A battery that goes bad in a year that has to be sent to Apple for replacement.
• An easily scratched surface. (A case used to be included to help prevent this, but Apple has cheaped out on including it.)

I could’ve sworn that the old iPod I bought 4 years ago was much better in quality. I want to say the quality of these devices has dropped off over time. Why should Apple worry about quality though? People will buy anything Apple sells.