Quote:
Originally Posted by
NasserAE 
Average teens are the target buyers for the Shuffle due to relatively low cost, small size, and durability. How many 12 year-olds you've meet put sound quality over price? You will be surprised how many people don't know the difference between 128 bit and 256 bit or mp3 and AAC. Many don't even notice the difference. Not everyone is music and tech savvy.
It's true that some people buy the Shuffle as a secondary iPod but they already know the limitations and compromise and they accept it.
Then does it make since to buy a $1200 HiDef LCD TV to use it with a $10 DVD player to watch SD content?!
I feel left out. I got no email or anything alerting me to the fact that you speak for all people who buy shuffles. Sounds to me like you are pulling statistics out of your bum. You are entitled to your opinion, but you seem to want me to think of it as fact. Data, please.
How many 12 year olds do you know who buy their own anything? Have you been sitting in on Apple marketing meetings lately? If you have that kind of access, I worry your gonna lose your job if anyone at Apple catches you posting so openly on a site called, "Apple Insider." I may be going out on a limb here, but I'm guessing you are about as privy to Apple's marketing plans as I am/aren't.
None of their marketing mentions anything that seems even remotely limited to teens as a target market to the exclusion of others ("others" as in adults who actually have money to buy things). The I'm a Mac "kid" in the commercials is 31 years old. I go to a gym in an affluent area with the parking lot full of Beamers, Lexus, Porches, and the occasional riff-raff they let in with Suburas (like mine). The gym is packed with long lines of well healed people, youngest age starts mostly at ~late 20s early thirties. The more predominant age is 40-50-ish. I'm talking week nights, 6:00 to 9:30 pm. Most have sport-type mp3 of some sort, most of them shuffles or nanos. I rarely see a teenager in the joint when I'm there.
Apparently, YOU would be surprised at how many people DO know EXACTLY the difference between 128 bit and 256 bit or mp3 and AAC (especially teenagers). A 900 bit AAC sounds like crap with crappy speakers. 128 bit sounds better with better speakers, than with crappy speakers. If they happen to hurt your ears or keep falling out, than you have yet another variable many people choose to satisfy outside of Apple's one-size-fits all form factor. It's true that some people buy the Shuffle as a secondary iPod but they already know the limitations and compromise and they accept it. When I bought mine the main compromise for me was capacity and admittedly, what seems like lesser sound quality to my ears. That was fine with me because I knew I had excellent earphones that would still feel great in my ears, still sound great, and at least let the sound quality come through at the best it can for that model of iPod. Now Apple is counting on people to accept even more compromise for no real reason, other than Apple's hopes they'll ignore a glaringly limited design shortcoming. That is what many people refer to in technical terms as, "a Sucker." The emperor has no clothes, but look at his cool new (insert Apple device here).
Your counter analogy about the HD monitor makes no sense, it has nothing to do with the one I offered. All Apple CPUS are capable of producing the minimal resolution of the monitor I talked about. Higher end graphs cards are faster and offer more features specific to some things, like games and 3D. However, you will get all the benefits of a better monitor (color fidelity, contrast, pitch, ability to calibrate) if you put it on the mini as you would on a Mac Pro as far as looking at a good monitor vs. a crappy monitor. The anlogy holds, it doesn't matter what machine you hook an output device to. If the output device offers less quality than what the signal being delivered to it represents (or it distorts or colors that signal in a degraded way) you are shortchanging your self. Your opinion re: how much you want to spend addressing that is obviously different from mine, but no more valid.
Let me simplify:
crap + crap = crap
good enough + good enough = good enough
excellent + excellent = excellent
good enough + excellent = good enough
good enough + crap = crap
excellent + crap = crap
Apple headphones = crap
