Thursday, March 27, 2003
Did the iPod knock SonicBlue down to a lower bitrate?
Even as MacUser reports that the iPod is doing better than ever, MacCentral reports that the competition may be finished. Even if the Rio itself isn't washed up, the company SonicBlue apparently is, having filed for bankruptcy protection last week. So is this a case of Apple having muscled its way into the mp3 player market and killing off the little guy? No, I'd say SonicBlue killed itself.
I bought myself a Rio 600 back when iTunes was still SoundJam. For a little under $200, I scored 32 Megabytes of music storage. I knew that this wasn't enough room to store any serious amount of music, but my desire to dive into the world of mp3's trumped my ability to see that this wasn't the way to do it. When encoded songs at the "standard" 128 Mbps, I could fit less than ten songs on the Rio at any given time. This meant that as soon as I got tired of listening to the same handful of songs over and over, I had to erase the Rio and load up other music from the computer. I soon discovered a few tricks, such as encoding the songs at a lower bitrate, so they would be smaller and more songs would fit. But there's always a price to pay, and I soon found that the lower the bitrate, the less listenable the music became. If I wanted to stuff a full-length album into my Rio, I usually encoded a few "favorite" tracks at a decent bitrate, and the rest at a lower rate. So why not just give up altogether and go back to using my Discman, which played actual CD's? One simple reason: any player large enough to hold and play a full-size CD is too large to fit in your pocket. At this point, the Rio's tiny size was the only thing keeping me in the land of mp3.
One of the Rio's most highly-touted features, the "backpack", was supposed to allow me to purchase extra flash memory that would fit inside the case. But the prices were insane. Adding an extra 64 Megabytes, merely tripling the Rio's tiny capacity, would have run me a cool hundred dollars. I decided against it out of principle: this mp3 thing was a novelty at best, and I refused to sink any more money into it. I was already flushing money daily on replacing the Rio's single AA battery, which had to be replaced every ten hours (or usually much less) of listening time. This turned out to be so impractical that I even took to taping a spare battery to the side of the Rio just to guarantee that I would have an extra one with me, if I needed new juice while I was out and about.
The final straw came when I was using the Rio outside on a particularly moist and humid day (hey, this is Florida), and the beast just stopped working. Completely dead, nonresponsive, however you want to describe it, it was a goner. I was all set to pack it up and take it back to the store when it occurred to me that the humidity might have gotten to it, so I took the back off and let it set indoors to dry out. Sure enough, it fired back up a few days later. But the psychcological damage was done; I wasn't going to play this game anymore. Mp3 was obviously not ready for prime time, and my patience was gone. My Rio has largely been gathering dust ever since.
Apple's introduction of the iPod addressed every one of the Rio's shortcomings: it included a hard drive to hold thousands of songs, it had a rechargeable battery built-in that managed to recharge directly from the computer, and it used a super-fast FireWire connection so that loading up dozens or even hundreds of songs in one sitting was practical. Perhaps best of all, the capacity was so large (a full 150 times that of my Rio) that I had the option of encoding my favorite mp3's at a much higher bitrate than the standard 128 Mbps, allowing for excellent sound quality that I could only have dreamed of in my Rio days.
After purchasing my iPod, I no longer even consciously paid attention to SonicBlue's offerings. I saw something called a "RioVolt" in a store once, and it turned out to be nothing more than a CD player that could read mp3-CD's. The thing was bigger than a Whopper sandwich, even before it gets smashed in the bottom of the bag underneath the french fries. If that was SonicBlue's answer to the iPod, then SonicBlue may well have done better in the hamburger business. The company fell so far off my radar that I never did hear whether they managed to come up with a hard drive-based "iPod clone". And my radar apparently wasn't the only one they fell from: during the holiday quarter, the Rio barely racked up a third of the iPod's sales on a monetary basis. So the bankruptcy filing was not exactly a surprise.
I'm never one to root for a smaller company to go under at the hands of a larger one, but Apple didn't kill SonicBlue. Before the iPod came along, the mp3 player market was full of novelty toys and overpriced compromises, and in many ways the iPod's competition still hasn't improved. Sure, eDigital has an Odyssey product that essentialy clones the iPod and repackages it, and even does voice recording, but so what? Soon enough, Apple will release a new line of iPods that will only serve to give the competition something else to take too long to copy too poorly. The fact is, Apple leaped into a market that it had no prior experience with, and is already raking in more than a quarter of all the money being spent on mp3 player purchases in the United States. For good measure, the iPod's numbers in Japan are even higher.
No one of any stature seems to want to enter this market and give Apple a run for its money. Sony, the pioneer of the original Walkman, has been conspicuously absent. Even Dell, long known for finding the most cost-effective and least effort-laden way of achieving the status quo, gave in and simply started selling iPods on its own website. And despite the fact that even the $299 entry-level iPod is more expensive than most of its competitors' top-end models, it's being outsold by the more expensive 10 Gigabyte iPod model. Clearly, people are willing to spend real money on an mp3 player when it's done right.
My favorite statistic is that "the Windows version of the iPod accounted for 58% of the iPods sold, compared to 42% for the Mac version". Considering how many more Windows users there still are in the world than Mac users, this is quite an impressive stat for Mac users to brag about. We all know that you can make statistics say anything you want them to, but my interpretation says that Mac users are around five times more likely to own an mp3 player than Windows users are. If that doesn't tell you where the personal computing market is headed, maybe you should look here for a stronger clue.
Is your iPod now part of your permanent wardrobe? Did you suffer through a Rio player first? Are you a Windows user, but your iPod is making you think about joining the rest of us in Macintosh heaven? Are you twiddling your thumbs waiting for Apple to finally release another round of updated iPods so you can buy one? Sing your tune.
Even as MacUser reports that the iPod is doing better than ever, MacCentral reports that the competition may be finished. Even if the Rio itself isn't washed up, the company SonicBlue apparently is, having filed for bankruptcy protection last week. So is this a case of Apple having muscled its way into the mp3 player market and killing off the little guy? No, I'd say SonicBlue killed itself.
I bought myself a Rio 600 back when iTunes was still SoundJam. For a little under $200, I scored 32 Megabytes of music storage. I knew that this wasn't enough room to store any serious amount of music, but my desire to dive into the world of mp3's trumped my ability to see that this wasn't the way to do it. When encoded songs at the "standard" 128 Mbps, I could fit less than ten songs on the Rio at any given time. This meant that as soon as I got tired of listening to the same handful of songs over and over, I had to erase the Rio and load up other music from the computer. I soon discovered a few tricks, such as encoding the songs at a lower bitrate, so they would be smaller and more songs would fit. But there's always a price to pay, and I soon found that the lower the bitrate, the less listenable the music became. If I wanted to stuff a full-length album into my Rio, I usually encoded a few "favorite" tracks at a decent bitrate, and the rest at a lower rate. So why not just give up altogether and go back to using my Discman, which played actual CD's? One simple reason: any player large enough to hold and play a full-size CD is too large to fit in your pocket. At this point, the Rio's tiny size was the only thing keeping me in the land of mp3.
One of the Rio's most highly-touted features, the "backpack", was supposed to allow me to purchase extra flash memory that would fit inside the case. But the prices were insane. Adding an extra 64 Megabytes, merely tripling the Rio's tiny capacity, would have run me a cool hundred dollars. I decided against it out of principle: this mp3 thing was a novelty at best, and I refused to sink any more money into it. I was already flushing money daily on replacing the Rio's single AA battery, which had to be replaced every ten hours (or usually much less) of listening time. This turned out to be so impractical that I even took to taping a spare battery to the side of the Rio just to guarantee that I would have an extra one with me, if I needed new juice while I was out and about.
The final straw came when I was using the Rio outside on a particularly moist and humid day (hey, this is Florida), and the beast just stopped working. Completely dead, nonresponsive, however you want to describe it, it was a goner. I was all set to pack it up and take it back to the store when it occurred to me that the humidity might have gotten to it, so I took the back off and let it set indoors to dry out. Sure enough, it fired back up a few days later. But the psychcological damage was done; I wasn't going to play this game anymore. Mp3 was obviously not ready for prime time, and my patience was gone. My Rio has largely been gathering dust ever since.
Apple's introduction of the iPod addressed every one of the Rio's shortcomings: it included a hard drive to hold thousands of songs, it had a rechargeable battery built-in that managed to recharge directly from the computer, and it used a super-fast FireWire connection so that loading up dozens or even hundreds of songs in one sitting was practical. Perhaps best of all, the capacity was so large (a full 150 times that of my Rio) that I had the option of encoding my favorite mp3's at a much higher bitrate than the standard 128 Mbps, allowing for excellent sound quality that I could only have dreamed of in my Rio days.
After purchasing my iPod, I no longer even consciously paid attention to SonicBlue's offerings. I saw something called a "RioVolt" in a store once, and it turned out to be nothing more than a CD player that could read mp3-CD's. The thing was bigger than a Whopper sandwich, even before it gets smashed in the bottom of the bag underneath the french fries. If that was SonicBlue's answer to the iPod, then SonicBlue may well have done better in the hamburger business. The company fell so far off my radar that I never did hear whether they managed to come up with a hard drive-based "iPod clone". And my radar apparently wasn't the only one they fell from: during the holiday quarter, the Rio barely racked up a third of the iPod's sales on a monetary basis. So the bankruptcy filing was not exactly a surprise.
I'm never one to root for a smaller company to go under at the hands of a larger one, but Apple didn't kill SonicBlue. Before the iPod came along, the mp3 player market was full of novelty toys and overpriced compromises, and in many ways the iPod's competition still hasn't improved. Sure, eDigital has an Odyssey product that essentialy clones the iPod and repackages it, and even does voice recording, but so what? Soon enough, Apple will release a new line of iPods that will only serve to give the competition something else to take too long to copy too poorly. The fact is, Apple leaped into a market that it had no prior experience with, and is already raking in more than a quarter of all the money being spent on mp3 player purchases in the United States. For good measure, the iPod's numbers in Japan are even higher.
No one of any stature seems to want to enter this market and give Apple a run for its money. Sony, the pioneer of the original Walkman, has been conspicuously absent. Even Dell, long known for finding the most cost-effective and least effort-laden way of achieving the status quo, gave in and simply started selling iPods on its own website. And despite the fact that even the $299 entry-level iPod is more expensive than most of its competitors' top-end models, it's being outsold by the more expensive 10 Gigabyte iPod model. Clearly, people are willing to spend real money on an mp3 player when it's done right.
My favorite statistic is that "the Windows version of the iPod accounted for 58% of the iPods sold, compared to 42% for the Mac version". Considering how many more Windows users there still are in the world than Mac users, this is quite an impressive stat for Mac users to brag about. We all know that you can make statistics say anything you want them to, but my interpretation says that Mac users are around five times more likely to own an mp3 player than Windows users are. If that doesn't tell you where the personal computing market is headed, maybe you should look here for a stronger clue.
Is your iPod now part of your permanent wardrobe? Did you suffer through a Rio player first? Are you a Windows user, but your iPod is making you think about joining the rest of us in Macintosh heaven? Are you twiddling your thumbs waiting for Apple to finally release another round of updated iPods so you can buy one? Sing your tune.
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