| Wednesday, January 12, 2005 |
17:11 - Engadge, Number One
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000177027029/
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Engadget.com has a detailed photo-review of the iPod shuffle and its operation, including an uproarious tale of how after the editors decided that they had to have the thing the moment it was announced, they fought their way through the crowds in Moscone Center and out the door on their way up to the Apple Store on Market Street... only to discover that dozens, if not hundreds, of others had made the same exodus in search of the same grail. But the smirking Apple Store employees knew they were coming, and had parked a semi-trailer full of shuffles behind the store just to make sure that all the geeks lining up, grabbing them two or three or six at a time, could get their fill.
Get a load of what Creative's CEO said about the thing, though. I guess you gotta admire his pluck, if not his marketing savvy.
Aziz pointed out to me in e-mail that the iPod shuffle's lack of an LCD is, in fact, not a bug but a feature--something he's been looking for everywhere, even in the Tokyo gadgetry nexus, for years... to no avail. While it's clearly a necessity in the high-end players, he considers an LCD an unnecessary and near-useless gimmick that serves only to inflate the price, in the flash-player segment. In that market, as I see it, everything's about checkboxism, about one-upping your competitors. You've got to come in at the same price point but with one more feature than the other guy, be it an FM tuner, a voice recorder, a better LCD, hard drive duty, a designer lanyard, whatever. The one thing you can't do, though, is de-content. How could you? It'd be suicide. Even if it's decided internally that a flash player is just as practical without an LCD, what manufacturer would have the stones to go to market without one? Customers would breeze right by it, especially if they think like the Creative guy.
A company that breaks the spiral pattern of feature-creep and dares to cut out what many manufacturers see as an essential feature for the packaging, if not for the users, has to be in the position Apple's in: a Colossus bestriding the industry, decreeing from on high which features are really useful and which ones aren't. Now that Apple has made the first move, and gambled on the idea of a screenless player whose only vestigial control not shifted back into the iTunes end of things is a Shuffle switch (with all the bizarre and silly marketing slogans that go with trying to pump it up), other manufacturers are bound to follow suit. I'll bet a lot of them are going to welcome the excuse to shift direction.
But not Creative, apparently. Very well, then: see you four years ago, Sim Wong Hoo!
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Brian Tiemann
