Apple co-founder believes iPod has about run its course - Page 2

Woz is wrong on several points.

First the iPods days are not numbered. One of the great things about the iPod is its name. The name is generic in way that allows it to keep reinventing itself. While the iPod was first an MP3 player, it has morphed into a more general purpose computing device. When does Woz perceive that we will stop using handheld computers? The answer is probably never. The iPod will continue to become 1-more powerful, 2-more affordable and 3-more ubiquitous.

Next, Woz equates Apple with a religion that does not allow it's followers to challenge it. This is why Woz is Woz and Jobs is Jobs. Woz was a great inventor...Jobs is a great businessman. Woz doesn't understand business(ever hear of CL 9 or Wheels of Zeus?). Apple is not a religion it is a corporation in the business of making money. The only business Woz is good at is being curmudgeon and that ain't paying to well.

Lastly, he is considering naming his child "Zowoz". The brilliant idea of a man who has been married four times. Steve is good with technology, but not so good at understanding people. Woz is known for his practical jokes and pranks. In some ways he is a child in a man's body.

Pretty lame Woz, why on earth would I give up my iPods that store thousands of albums very conveniently for me to listen to wherever I am without scratching 1 CD or album????

Cause you say it's over? I remember Woz saying that the iPod did not have a future when it first came out. Woz just either doesn't have a big music collection, doesn't get the iPod or is so blahh that he doesn't need music in his life - There's a reason Steve Jobs wouldn't write the foreword to his book .....He's just a dork.

Naw, Ballmer is taller, and moves around a lot more. \

I'm not saying he's right or wrong, I'm just saying who gives a shit. He bailed years ago time to move on. I'm sick of this guy.

And it looks like we're just about done with civilization as we know it, too. No more money to be made here. It's time to move on.

Notice no mention re the weight!

So?

I don't think you've refuted anything I said.

The article title infers something from those quotes that wasn't actually said IMO. Call it picky if you want, but the article clearly says that Woz stated that "the iPod has run it's course." The quotes only indicate that he said it would run it's course or perhaps is about to.

This is not the same thing. The article turns what he said into a definitive pronouncement when it was not.

Anyway as others have said Woz doesn't always know what he is talking about so it's probably a moot point.

My guess was about the same...

Kathy Griffin gives a shit!

There has to be some Freud in that some where.

Market saturation has done nothing to stop the iPod, since Apple continues to sell MILLIONS each year. Woz should continue to stick with naming kids...since he seems to have a knack for it!

The Nova never had >70% market share and patented technology significantly more advanced than its competitors.

Palm is dying.
Symbian is dying.
Windows Mobile is going nowhere quickly.
Linux is going nowhere slowly.

When did he say you would? He said that the iPods life has reached saturation, there are other digital music players around. I think I agree with him to, most people that want portable music bought an iPod plus a lot of people that don't really use it since they got it. The new iPods look like the old ones so why would most people buy a new one? Hence saturation point same as what happened to the walkman a few years after it came out.

The other stuff he said I also agree with. Of couse Steve Jobs doesn't know what the next big thing will be until it comes along. Mobile Me isn't really anything new and practically everything in Leopard had been around in some form of another before. Then there's cover flow that they heavily advertised for the iPod but it was bought off another company. There's nothing wrong with Apple doing this but it does prove Woz correct.

As for what he said about Web 2.0 I think I've been saying that since people were getting excited about it. Even google are having trouble making money from You Tube.

I think you've misunderstood his point, but his point isn't as clear as it should have been. I don't think he really meant that the product will go away, just that there will be a peak or plateu. For one, just about any handheld or otherwise portable device can play music files these days. Another, I don't think most people's media collections double every year, and once the player exceeds the size of the collection by a margin, the player really doesn't need to be upgraded or replaced nearly as much. If you already have three players, do you really need to buy a fourth? That's the point. He's not talking about people not using the devices anymore.

I think it's kind of like the "Walkman" brand - it's not gone, but it's not a market force like it used to be decades ago. The same can be said of nearly every major brand.

On the book, the thing that I remember was that Jobs initially agreed to do a forward, but backed out after having read the whole book.

Regarding this whole thread, I don't remember seeing nearly so much hostility towards Wozniak, it's pretty surprising to me.

The title has always said "about run its course."

You insulted my editor's credentials and suggested he made a poor interpretation of Woz's quotes, which "is why journalists go to school and bloggers are not journalists."

Here is a link to an article the Washington Post just syndicated:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...100701734.html

Here is the title:

Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak: iPod Is Dying And The iPhone Is Too Closed

I don't think anyone is inferring incorrectly. I responded because your comment opened the door for some clown to make a baseless post (since deleted) suggesting we completely fabricate news on a daily basis.

Best,

K

This brings up a good point.
Sony has begun putting its "WALKMAN" brand on cellphones.
The problem is... too little, too late.
Had Sony been innovative and started doing this in 2001 or 2002, they might not have lost the market they once dominated.

This is the difference with Apple.
Rather than wait for someone else to out innovate them, they are reinventing their products and staying years ahead of the competition.

I'm not surprised. It's not like Ballmer is saying these things, it's a guy who helped start Apple. It hurts the Mac Faithful. They smell a traitor, because you only hear the bad things Woz says. And it seems more frequent of late...

quote from Dances with Wolves: But the soldiers hate me now, like they hate no other.

You're all debating a guy who dates Kathy Griffin?

No, he did not make the first Mac; he single handedly designed the Apple I, Apple II and IIgs...the Mac is an entirely different animal which Woz only had minimal influence on.

I heard Woz speak a couple years ago.

The guy was obviously a technology genius years ago, but he comes off as way out of touch. He seems like more of an eccentric crank who doesn't really get what people want out of their technology.

And so, what's your point?

Palm *had* more than 70% of the market. Actually, once upon a time, there was no PDA but the Palm. This didn't prevent Palm from dying from lack of innovation and being stuck in its niche concept. I don't see how the iPod is any different in the long term?

As for car, that's also a bad example. There used to be a time when the automobile giants in the USA were really that, giants. Nowadays, they're just leftovers from the past century. And the car concept is dying slowly itself. As more and more people live in cities, where cars are just useless, and as they become more and more expansive to maintain and park, they will slowly fade into oblivion. Just as the horse-drawn carriage or the steam engine.

This is the very nature of technology to become obsolete. And it goes much farther than a concept merely evolving through the ages. For instance, even if we still call it "computer", there is so little in common between the ENIAC and a laptop that it isn't even the same concept. Same with the "phone" - nowadays, phones are barely used to phone other people.
If in 50 years we are still surfing the web, no matter on what "cool" device, if we are still listening to music on a zPod or whatever and if we're still talking about computers and mobile phone, no matter how evolved, it will be a sad day for humanity. Because it will mean we have gotten stuck into the tools and evolving them rather than coming up with new concepts.

So, it is without doubt that the iPod line will become obsolete - pretty soon actually, to be replaced by the iPhone and the Touch. Because the concept of carrying music around on a limited capacity device is becoming obsolete. Why limit yourself to a tiny 120Gb when there is Tb of content to experiment?
But in the long run, even the iPhone will fade away, as a concept. Even if it manages to grab 100% market shares - it will only go faster then.

Woz has been burning bridges and using up what good will he had in the Apple community.
Woz has business dealings with former Apple bigwigs such as Ellen Hancock and Gil Amelio.
I can only imagine the sour grapes being served up at those meetings.

I have a slide rule AND an abacus. The abacus is on my iPod. What's your point?

My "Is that a watch?" watch.

What bridges, specifically?


More frequent? The last AI story I found was a year ago.


Frankly, what I'm seeing here looks more like a buildup of venom and people trying to find excuses to pour it on someone. It's fine to disagree with him, I'm just not seeing where this kind of reaction is warranted. I think this thread is proving the religion point, anything that's considered the slightest bit heresy is given a good ol' tar and feathering.

Both of which still exist and are still used.

ZOMG WOZ WRONG!!
ZOMG WOZ LAME!!
ZOMG WOZ ZUCKS!!
ZOMG WOZ CLULESS!!
ZOMG WOZ WOOOOOOZZZ!!!!!

WTF is this, the spanish inquisition?

And haven't you all just supported his religion analogy with your blanket dismissals and outraged indignity? Bear in mind that religions don't work on FORCING people to not challenge the status quo, but by bending them mentally so that they are predisposed not to. Seems pretty religious in here right now.

Now, Woz's claim that iPod is going the way of the dodo: There's some merit in that. The iPod as a music player only is almost dead. The shuffle is the only one that still just does music, and it's a niche item. The original iPod is, for all intents and purposes, already dead. It has evolved into a different device entirely, namely, the Multi Touch platform device. This is epitomized in the iPod Touch, and in the iPhone. These are not music players any more. They are what the PDA should have been all along. The other models, the nano, and classic, in particular, are definitely on the way out the door, and are around still only because large portions of the population either prefer a lower price point, larger storage, or smaller size, or just don't want to move over to one of them thar newfangled contraptions. Their market share will shrink though, as Apple continues to develop the MT models, and people get used to them. Walkman didn't die, it got replaced, slowly, by the cd player, which, in turn, was replaced by the MD player*, which was replaced by iPod.

Now on to stocks. Apple is way overpriced. In the beginning, stock value was originally based off of (in large part) the amount of dividend that a particular company paid to its shareholders. A stock, sans speculative buying, has no other value. Microshaft hit $400 (or whatever ungodly number it was) not because they were paying out large dividends that made it a reasonable investment, but because market-manglers, such as those who have brought on the current financial crisis, saw it was rising and bet that it would rise more. It's a completely false value that has been built up. Apple's shares, if we dispense with the absurd logic that does nothing for you will increase in value just because other people also want it to do nothing for them, are totally worthless right now. Apple hasn't paid a dividend in DECADES (correct me if I'm wrong). So Woz isn't too far off the mark to say that Apple is overpriced. Also, it is an observed phenomena that the markets BASH THE HELL out of Apple's stock over even the SLIGHTEST HINT that Steve J. is NOT inventing something insanely great this week. Apple is a volatile stock, so it isn't reasonable to assign it the same value as more stable ones, even accepting speculative buying. So stop with the paranoia and blind devotion to your portfolio, and give him some credit for having actually thought about this.

As to his programming skills: Are you all totally freaking retarded? Are you really trying to convince everyone that a guy who basically started the PC industry would not, over the course of 30 some odd years, EVER bother to learn C++? Are you stupid? The guy doesn't have a JOB. He has tons of time. Of COURSE he would. He is GEEK. Hear him code.

Now, as to why not do it on the desktop, the answer is that, duh, not everything is suited for desktop. Like live navigation, for example. Are you REALLY going to go geocaching with your Mac Pro strapped to your back? Live navigation just happens to be one of those things which is prohibited by Apple's iPhone SDK license agreement. Case closed.

Just to head off some of you chuckleheads at the pass, it is painfully apparent that a platform which is TOO open, such as Windows Mobile, is prone to being shredded by crap software which is both poorly designed, and poorly coded. Having a restricted platform is good, but having it excessively restricted is bad. I'm reading Woz as saying that Apple is leaning a bit far on the too-restricted side of things. I have no argument with him on that.

Bite me.

C


*J/K. Just making sure you're paying attention.

The sun don't rise an' fall on AppleInsider JeffDM!

http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/13/v...iffins-iphone/

Maybe you're right. I listen to a lot of Leo Laporte and Woz seems to come up a lot. There was an embarrassing incident with Woz cutting in line at the 3G launch (or not cutting in line). Regardless of whether or not he did it he strikes me as a magnet for that kind of attention.

Venom? Maybe. You can't say Apple fans wouldn't react the same way to just about anyone who rained a little on Apple - and probably with MORE venom!

Like I said in my first post in this thread, I think Woz is just an awkward personality who invites this brand of headline.

That's a funny statement to make considering the iPhone and touch ARE iPods.

Sure, the early generations of iPod are obsolete. But as long as the old iPods are replaced by newer iPods with more features, I don't see how iPod is going anywhere.

iPod is a Cadillac!

I don't think my iPod touch looks like any other of my previous iPods in any way whatsoever, but more importantly, it's a brilliant little hand-held computer/multia-media device.

I'm sixty years old and have owned many gadgets since the sixties, but the touch is far and away the most useful and the most fun. I love it.

I am quite convinced that the touch is going to be a huge success and eventually overtake the iPhone in sales numbers. The TCO of the touch is a fraction of that of the iPhone, and you can now make phone calls with the touch.

In the near future (perhaps between 2 and 5 years from now), wifi will be ubiquitous and the touch, with more powerful chipsets and much more memory, will evolve into THE hand-held computer/media/phone device.

Nope, just people pointing out that the guy is out of touch. Which he really seems to be. And I don't buy his attempt to head off criticism by insisting that people are zealots, reminds me of John McCain trying to brush off (valid) criticism by insisting that the media is biased and out to get him.

Like most of the above you may have missed that the 'iWatch' Woz meant was the verb not the noun. In other words a device to watch something with and not to tell the time.

<SARCASM>
You're completely nuts, K, of COURSE you all fabricate the news. Hell, everyone knows Apple doesn't even really exist. It's just a lie the Democrats cooked up to distract everyone from the cake.
</SARCASM>



C

iPod Touch is a Rolls!

Agreed, the iPod is a small hand-held computer.

As well, I disagree with Woz about the Walkman, it was never a fad, as one person stated, it started of as a Cassette player, then a CD player, and if Sony had had some vision, they could have had an iPod-like Walkman before Apple. Sony just wasn't on the ball.


Exactly, Woz is an inventor or engineer, he likes to tinker. When he gets bored with something he likes to move on. Jobs is a businessman or designer with a long term vision, and a knack for simplifying designs.

I agree with the content of your post. But as a journalist who went to school i can't resist pointing out that it's infer, not "imply". Keep a dictionary handy (I do, and just as i was about to nail you for "ubiquitousness" i looked it up, and damned if i wouldn't have been wrong!)

That is definitely an established BS technique, but just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they aren't really out to get you. The fact is that the world has justifiably established a stereotype for mac users as fanatics. Mac fanatics are real, and in the decades between 1984 and now, they made up the most visible, and certainly the noisiest, segment of the user base. That perception will only change as more average, boring people start using macs in average, boring ways. Only when it is observed that people who don't really care ALSO use macs, will the stereotype die. He may be wrong on some or all of the points he was quoted on, but he was definitely right that the vitriol would flow from the fanatics. We see proof in this thread that it has.

C

oooo, now where did I put that welfare check?

C

While woz is a bit premature on the death of the iPod (unlike the walkman, nothing better has come out), he is right a lot of other things, especially the openness. If you're not open with developers, they're note as likely to develop. He's also complete right on the Apple can do no wrong quasi-religious angle and about us challenging Apple. Look, Apple may have produced the iPhone, but the community made it what it is today in lieu of Apples shortsightedness about the product. If we had challenged Apple, the platform might still be an expensive ipod with a phone and a lot of unrealized potential. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't always listen.