Why an 'iPod killer' will never kill the iPod

Apple has certainly improved, but I don't see iTunes as much more than a well written library program with an MP3 player tacked on.

If I had the money I could easily build and design a better, sleeker MP3 player than Apple. It's just the fact that all the companies who are coming to compete in the MP3 player market don't have a history in it. I used to own a Sony MP3 player, and fuck did it butcher the iPod Shuffle in usability and play time, I mean it had 50 hours of playback! It was, and still is, the only MP3 player on the market that can actually play all the music on it before its battery dies. If I ever needed a small MP3 player again I'd either dig up the old Sony one or buy the newer model.

The iPod Classic sits in the multimedia market, not in the solely MP3 market. This is where the problem comes in. iPod's competition doesn't know how to make something that looks worthy of the money. Zune was a piece of plastic crap, plastic was flashy when the original Walkman came out, but if anyone from Microsoft cared to look out of their window on a highway they might see that plastic is trash.

I have a cheap motorola phone, no bells or whistles. My girlfriend has a more expensive phone with a camera and mp3 player and what not. It's the same phone, it even takes the identical battery, yet hers has a metal back plate and everything else and weighs 3 times as much. This, in peoples minds, equals value.

I could easily use the iPod's example and build a better MP3 player. It's quite simple; use a slightly wider LCD screen and display in widescreen, which should all blend together in a deep black so that you can't see the difference between the LCD and plain black when it's off (the mp3 player I had from Sony did this and people liked and commented on how cool it looked, because it was cool). The front plate should be a single piece of unbroken electrically conductive glass so that you can operate the controls (similar to how the iPod works) but without it ever, ever being able to get dirt stuck between the cracks. The back plate should obviously be scratch resistant aluminum.

All of the above design is off the shelf or, in the case of the LCD, easily designable. However, the cost of such an MP3 player would be too high that you can't guarantee people will buy it, which is exactly why Microsoft or Sony hasn't made something like this. Apple has a keen following, it's risks aren't going to bankrupt it or a division, so it's free to experiment; other companies can't experiment in the market, that's reserved for the lab only because if they fuck up slightly then no one will pay the money.

From an actually-working standpoint, its even worse. I had to install Quicktime a while back on Windows to convert some weird-format Quicktime YUV files to something usable--it instacrashed upon trying to convert it. After reinstalling a few times it worked, but it took over 2 hours to start the conversion. This was a conversion from raw YUV to raw BMP. Oh, and then it took about 2 days to do the conversion for a single film. Seriously, folks.

I've constantly heard its much better under OS X; but at least my experience on Windows says its not merely bad, but the single worst media player I have ever used (yes, worse than Real.)

I'm a long time Mac user, but that pretty much nails what iTunes really is. Ever since Apple bought out SoundJam and turned it into iTunes, the app's focus has been less about song playback and more about being the "showcase" or demonstration for what QuickTime is supposed to be used for. QuickTime was little too far ahead of its time for its architecture to be compatible with modern systems; though, at least on the Mac platform, its been able to survive as a respectable, if creaky, media API. (QT really was a child of the multimedia CD-ROM era. The media model it uses isn't really a good fit for streaming Internet data.)