Unless they bought massive amounts of music over iTunes, I don't see why you would.

Long lasting battery, popular, known to be durable, variety, 2 year warranty, easy to find accessories and parts in stores, and made from a company people trust. You can't go into Best Buy or Radio Shack and find an entire section of the store deticated to Creative players and accessories, but you can find a section for iPods. iPods are popular for a reason. Commercials help, but if an iPod wasn't a quality product, they wouldn't be selling like they are.

[QUOTE=Victor Van Dort]Long lasting battery, popular, known to be durable, variety, 2 year warranty, easy to find accessories and parts in stores, and made from a company people trust. You can't go into Best Buy or Radio Shack and find an entire section of the store deticated to Creative players and accessories, but you can find a section for iPods. iPods are popular for a reason. Commercials help, but if an iPod wasn't a quality product, they wouldn't be selling like they are.[/QUOTE]
The battery sucks compared to most players (14-ish hours maybe as compared to 20-30 hours on iAudio X5L), popular...so?, durable--don't make me laugh. The only one that you could argue is durable is the Nano, and that being because it uses flash mem, which would make MOST flash players durable, variety....there's two colors?, warranties come with almost all players, usually 1-5 years, accessories add fucntionalities INHERENT in other players, made from a company people trust--okay.

You find sections for iPods because they sell the most because the majority of people are ignorant. I don't see how you'd call that a plus though--that's like saying "You wouldn't find a section dedicated to the Nintendo DS in European gaming stores, but you would the PSP"--you still might want a DS. iPods are okay, but they're not really THAT high quality. The majority of players around the same size and price point have more functionality, usually are of a higher build quality (ie--won't scratch easily, won't crash easily [iPods are known for crashing a lot, no matter what gen], much more durable [except MAYBE the nano. Maybe.]) and offer a higher audio quality.

So wait...you had a point somewhere in there. I thought.

I've dropped my Mini I can't even count how many times, and it still works 100% fine. I've never had to restart my iPod for any reason. It's never crashed on me. It has easy to navigate menus, and a really nice click wheel. 14-hour battery life is more than enough, and iTunes is very user friendly. (You guys are all on crack if you think iTunes sucks...OMG OPINIONLOL) You plug in the iPod, and it's as easy as click and dragging your music into iTunes, and that's it. You can organize your music any way you want. Another great thing about the iPod having so many accessories is if my belt clip snaps and I need a new one, I don't need to special order one from online, I can stop at a bunch of different stores and just pick one up. The iPod also has a nice shape. They are very thin and lightweight. It isn't one of those weird egg shapped, bulky, blocky, crappy shapes that never feels right. Also, try to get support from Creative or one of those companies as you get support from Apple. I had some questions about my Mini, so I e-mailed apple, and before the day was even half over I got a response. iPods are awesome.

This is the strangest post formatting I have ever seen.

[QUOTE=Victor Van Dort]...iPods are awesome.[/QUOTE]
Especially 30gb video iPods. With Invader Zim on it.

I'm surprised how close the poll is (tied even at time of posting).

Also surprisingly, when I bought my iPod Mini (about...one and a half years ago) it was the cheapest of all players in every store I tried. Out of all the players I was allowed to handle before purchasing, it was also the one that felt the most comfortable. I'm sure I could throw in other points here, but I'd just be reiterating what's been said already (namely the lack of noticeable difference in sound quality).

I've always like creative's stuff more. Maybe it's annoyance with the whole pop-culture thing with ipods. I tend to just listen to stuff off the cd, radio, or computer, though.

[QUOTE=Victor Van Dort]I've dropped my Mini I can't even count how many times, and it still works 100% fine. I've never had to restart my iPod for any reason. It's never crashed on me. It has easy to navigate menus, and a really nice click wheel. 14-hour battery life is more than enough, and iTunes is very user friendly. (You guys are all on crack if you think iTunes sucks...OMG OPINIONLOL) You plug in the iPod, and it's as easy as click and dragging your music into iTunes, and that's it. You can organize your music any way you want. Another great thing about the iPod having so many accessories is if my belt clip snaps and I need a new one, I don't need to special order one from online, I can stop at a bunch of different stores and just pick one up. The iPod also has a nice shape. They are very thin and lightweight. It isn't one of those weird egg shapped, bulky, blocky, crappy shapes that never feels right. Also, try to get support from Creative or one of those companies as you get support from Apple. I had some questions about my Mini, so I e-mailed apple, and before the day was even half over I got a response. iPods are awesome.[/QUOTE]
Okay, so you've dropped it some, never had to restart it, and you like the navigation. That doesn't mean it's the most durable, never crashes, etc etc (also 14 hour battery life is just horrible. It may be enough for you, but imagine if you could go weeks without having to recharge your iPod--that's what 30-ish hour battery life is like. Hell, my PSP gets ~12 hours of battery life if all I'm doing is playing MP3s, and to be honest it should get a LOT less with the display.). iTunes isn't my mp3 player of choice, and it also doesn't support all file formats. If it's in .mp3 or .wma you can drag and drop (though they just added .wma support to the newest version of iTunes--before that you had to convert it yourself). Belt clips aren't that big of a deal considering most mp3 players come with them now (mostly soft leather ones) and it's not hard to find accessories for them. I'll give you the design factor is a nice one, but the only thing it has on the competition at the moment is its slim nature which really isn't aparrent in the mini. The mini also lost a LOT of support--one of the unfortunate things about Steve Jobs' flighty nature. When he moves on to a new product he really moves on--OS9 almost had no support on OSX. Kinda sad, but that's how Jobs is.

Most mp3 player companies have a call center you can call in if you need help, which is oddly enough a lot more instant than an email. Also, if you have any really technical needs as Temp put it sometimes Apple comes up with really LAME excuses as to why they won't replace your stuff, unlike other companies. My friend couldn't get his 3g iPod battery replaced before the class-action lawsuit a while back because it wasn't technically covered in his warranty for some reason (they called it an "Act of God").

Also, back on the subject of iTunes--I wouldn't mind it as a media player, or an alternative to drag and drop, but as the ONLY way to put your music on an iPod I find that really lame. Also, sometimes when it syncs you lose ALL your music on your iPod (happened to many friends of mine), which really sucks.

Got me a Rio Pearl 5 Gb for £90, because I work in the industry - sure, Rio have gone out of business now, but it plays music, which will do me just fine.

Plus in my experience, iPods suck: we get more iPods returned than any other MP3 player, and that's not because we sell more of them: proportionally, just so many more come back.

[QUOTE=Victor Van Dort]iPods are popular for a reason.[/QUOTE]
So are Bose products, but not because they're good. Bose is popular because of marketing. The products themselves are technically inferior to other products a fraction of the price. No, this is not subjective - they literally reproduce sound FAR more inaccurately than many other products a fraction of the price. So I don't really think that's a good argument...

[QUOTE=Victor Van Dort]iPods are popular for a reason.[/QUOTE]
So are Kanji and Koi tattoos, labret piercings, Starbucks, and McDonald's. People are sheep, they want to be seen as hip and trendy, they want to fit in. If you can convince them that buying something will make them look attractive, you've got them by the palm of your hand.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]Unless they bought massive amounts of music over iTunes, I don't see why you would.[/QUOTE]
Want. Not everyone is going to spend time doing their homework on other players. They look to see what a store has, and decide. Apple has saturated the market, and thus carries a majority of players sold.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]Also, back on the subject of iTunes--I wouldn't mind it as a media player, or an alternative to drag and drop, but as the ONLY way to put your music on an iPod I find that really lame. Also, sometimes when it syncs you lose ALL your music on your iPod (happened to many friends of mine), which really sucks.[/QUOTE]
Only if you're an idiot and click the wrong options, or decide to clear out the iPod playlist in iTunes.... there's alot of reasons. I can't see the program randomly dumping your playlists as a reason for loosing everything. Programs do what they're told. If iTunes made a habit of doing that, I'm sure alot more people would have the problem.

BTW, there is a Winamp plug-in that lets you transfer to iPod.

Not to mention there is ephPod, which can do that.

And I agree with phoenix. You have to be pretty stupid to clear out all your songs on your iPod when syncing. iTunes always says when you stick an iPod into a different a computer "This iPod is linked to another library. Do you want to clear your existing library and replace it with songs from this library?". So yeah, they'd have to be freaken stupid to click Yes. And if iTunes randomly cleared iPods, I highly doubt that many people would use it then because there ARE alternatives.

I have 4 or 5 friends with iPods, and nothing like clearing library has happened. So yeah....that argument is null and void on both our sides.

When switching computers the clearing out thing is a big problem because by default it syncs up and clears (my friend cleared his mini like this). It's not a big deal as you do have to accidentally hit enter or have to just skip past the message by hitting enter or space, but imagine if you're syncing while chatting and happen to hit space as it asks that--you're pretty screwed. You'd be surprised how often stuff like that happens to me just when people are trying to send files to me over AIM.

They have saturated the market, but that once again doesn't mean they're good or quality and certainly not the best. That's the entire point of my post--I'm trying to inform him. I don't see what your point is with that saturation bit.

Buck--I know about the winamp plugin, but that's not much better than the iTunes option. And unless that other method you mentioned is some form of drag and drop, even then that's still too much to go through just to get drag and drop functionality.

I've been reading this thread, and discussing it with phoenix. I must say Yoshi, you either have a ****load of friends or friends who are extremely rich to own all this crap. You ALWAYS have a friend or someone who has had a bad experience and note that it's not just one friend, but friendS.

Yoshi, stop it. You're losing this arguement, and I generally read what pops up or atleast scan it before I click an answer. Two people are against you for saying songs are lost in syncing, hence you're losing.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]When switching computers the clearing out thing is a big problem because by default it syncs up and clears (my friend cleared his mini like this). It's not a big deal as you do have to accidentally hit enter or have to just skip past the message by hitting enter or space, but imagine if you're syncing while chatting and happen to hit space as it asks that--you're pretty screwed. You'd be surprised how often stuff like that happens to me just when people are trying to send files to me over AIM.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, which is why it's, you know, good sense to WAIT FOR THAT MESSAGE if you know it's going to come up before DOING anything else. Especially if iTunes is running. Accident yes. Stupidity still factors though if you KNOW it's coming up and you keep doing something you know will bypass it if you're not careful.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]They have saturated the market, but that once again doesn't mean they're good or quality and certainly not the best. That's the entire point of my post--I'm trying to inform him. I don't see what your point is with that saturation bit.[/QUOTE]
Point? Average users are going to do homework on what they saw, and likely still end up going with iPod simply because it's a brand everyone knows.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]Buck--I know about the winamp plugin, but that's not much better than the iTunes option. And unless that other method you mentioned is some form of drag and drop, even then that's still too much to go through just to get drag and drop functionality.[/QUOTE]
What, pray tell, is WRONG with the way iTunes handles syncing with the iPod? Drag and Drop, it's simple. The only issue you seem to be having with it is the fact you have to USE iTunes to do it. HEAVEN FORBID you have to use ANOTHER program OTHER than Windows to sync up your music player, wasting that ever precious RAM for all of a few minutes.

Actually, I do have a ****load of friends. And they are all pretty rich--most of them have parents that work for NASA. I'm sorry I know people who are technologically endowed?

Also, I find it interesting that I'm "losing" an argument when I can't find any good rebuttals to my points (or...what you could call my points).

The song synching thing is only an annoyance--I already stated that much. It's not a reason in and of itself not to buy the player, as I already established it takes either a bit of ignorance, absentmindedness, or stupidity to actually clear your iPod. Why don't you stop taking every side against me just because you don't like me? Or do you still have a grudge against me because I called you a stupid ****ing 14 year old kid?


Drag and Droppability lets me drag files over as WELL as song files and also makes it so I don't have to have iTunes on every computer I sync up to. I'd say that's a pretty damn big downer--it's one reason why I don't like Creative alternatives all that much.

I'm aware you can use iPods as harddrives, but if I remember right you then can't use it as a music player. Also, another annoying thing is the fact that you can't copy music FROM your iPod to another source if you import it from iTunes.

well I'm going to wade in here with my thoughts...

I've had two mp3 players, one was quite early on and was a creative jukebox (looked like a CD player but wasn't) and I've now had a 3rd generation 20gb ipod for the past 3ish years, with no problems at all with the battery, but with the occasional restart needed, once or twice if memory serves.

I'm not really going to knock the creative labs jukebook as comparing it to something now-a-days would be slightly unfair, but I will say this, the battery life sucked, 2-3 hrs if you were lucky.

The ipod, well, there are good things and bad things about it, mainly itunes in my opinion, I don't like it, I'll admit I haven't tried the winamp plugin (which I will shortly) but the way apple is forcing everyone to use itunes to transfer music and is getting rid of the ability to just drag and drop songs to the ipod like any other normal player is rather annoying to say the least.

The battery life I've never been concerned about, it lasts any long journey i've been on and thats all I've ever needed, people make a big deal out of battery life and I personally can't see the reason, the problem people had with the earlier ipod is the way it charged through firewire I believe, everytime you connected it up it would start charging, maybe only a minute sometimes but all the little charges did the battery life no good what-so-ever. Each time you charged the battery its life would go down, hence each time you plugged it in you knocked one off the supposed 700 charging life.

I think apple realised that although a good idea to be able to charge through the computer it caused more problems than it was worth, plus the fact that USB was more wildly supported prompted the switch over to USB, which is probably a good thing.

The form and function of the ipod can't be knocked, it does exactly what its meant to do and very well, apple have sticked with the click wheel because it works better (I believe) than anything else out there. The look of the ipod's is also one of the main selling points, I think they are by far and away the best looking players out there.

I will say that I did try the creative zen mirco just today and without the need to read instructions I was able to queue up songs and navigate through it with little or no problems, but it was blantent that the menu system was a rip-off of apples, but in all honesty there aren't all that many different ways you can navigate an mp3 players functions.

People love to knock the ipod and find faults in it because it is so successful, (makes me warm inside to think this trait exists in non-english people too ).

However the next mp3 player I buy won't be an ipod...nope, it'll either be one of the SanDisk models, hopefully a flash model will be out soon with around 16gb of space, what with samsung just starting production on the highier capacity NAND chips, or I'm not going to buy an mp3 player at all but instead buy a phone that has a decent amount of space on it...namely the Nokia N91, we all (well me anyway) carry our mobiles virtually everywhere we go now-a-days, why carry something else when you don't need to.

K, I might buy a small 512mb player for when I go to the gym but otherwise I shouldn't need anything separate, the N91 is due out buy the middle of this year, has 4gbs of space and expect an even highier capacity version to come out 6 months down the line, the era of the ipod will soon be over I think unless apple does something amazing that warrents its continued existence.

[QUOTE=James Bond]I will say that I did try the creative zen mirco just today and without the need to read instructions I was able to queue up songs and navigate through it with little or no problems, but it was blantent that the menu system was a rip-off of apples, but in all honesty there aren't all that many different ways you can navigate an mp3 players functions.

People love to knock the ipod and find faults in it because it is so successful, (makes me warm inside to think this trait exists in non-english people too ).[/QUOTE]
For one, ironically enough Creative got the patent on those menus...so iPod knocked off Creative.

Also, I used to love the iPod until I got informed on what all resides out there. Then, while it was still good, I began to see the flaws. Now I really see very little reason for most people to get it. They will, because of marketing and saturation, but if someone's going to ask to be informed about a different kind of player...I'm going to lay all the good and the bad out. Unfortunately, compared to most players, as I've already stated the only good you have are the Clickwheel and integration with the biggest music store out there.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]Or do you still have a grudge against me because I called you a stupid ****ing 14 year old kid?[/QUOTE]
When the hell did you do this?

Yoshi, personally, I just don't care for the way that in most threads you post in you end up derailing them into an arguement. This one was meant for that, so I'm not mad about this one.

Good for you? Why don't you actually add something to the argument instead of playing cheerleader then?

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]...as I've already stated the only good you have are the Clickwheel...[/QUOTE]
At least until M$ puts out their own player and takes advantage of their patent.

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]For one, ironically enough Creative got the patent on those menus...so iPod knocked off Creative. ;)[/QUOTE]

thats just plain funny and sad at the same time.

On the syncing issue, I do appreicate it is a little stupid, but really you have to been a total moron to actually wipe the ipod, no offense to any of Yoshi's Nasa friends meant by that, I've just clicked things in the past thinking that I know what they are and then finding out later that they aren't.

When plugging your ipod into another person's computer I'd be a lot more careful to notice anything different. Its a bit of a none issue personally because you maybe do it once and then have to transfer your music back over from your computer, but you won't do it again....(lets hope). The syncing on the whole I think is a good thing, but it does have its downsides as mentioned.

As for the drag and drop thing and only being able to use it as a hard drive or mp3 player and not both, that isn't the case, at least with the 3rd generation, I've got about 5gigs of backup files on mine and it works fine as a player.

But I am with Yoshi on the itunes front, the creative labs products could, last time I knew, be used perfectly fine without any of creative's software, the ipod (for the average, knows nothing else, user) can't. Yes there is this winamp plugin which sounds great, but the they won't be told about it and have to find it out themselves.

The reason for this is plan in my eyes, force people to use itunes and eventually they will find the itunes store and then start spending more of their money on apple, makes perfect sense, that doesn't mean I like it.

As for better players out there, there are plenty, if I was to buy a larger capacity player I'd go for the Zen Vision:M, has the looks (nearly) of the ipod yet can do so much more.

As for flash players, although the looks of the nano are second to none, but the SanDisk players are great and offer so much more, as does the new Neeon from creative.

Problem for apple's competition though is the ipod is now a fashion accessory too, thats something they are going to have a hard time getting over.

[QUOTE=James Bond]On the syncing issue, I do appreicate it is a little stupid, but really you have to been a total moron to actually wipe the ipod, no offense to any of Yoshi's Nasa friends meant by that, I've just clicked things in the past thinking that I know what they are and then finding out later that they aren't.[/QUOTE]
To be fair, their parents work at NASA. Some of them are pretty stupid. :p

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]
I'm aware you can use iPods as harddrives, but if I remember right you then can't use it as a music player. Also, another annoying thing is the fact that you can't copy music FROM your iPod to another source if you import it from iTunes.[/QUOTE]

1. You can use it for both. Just enabling it as a "disk drive" will let you use it as a portable hard drive, but you still can listen to music. In some of the Lord of the Rings documentaries, they talk about carrying full copies of the movies and listening to music on the walk to give them to peter jackson

2. 'Tis true that you can't take songs from the iPod. But you gotta admit, all they are doing is trying to prevent copyright infringement. (I don't like it, either). There are plenty of third part apps that let you take songs from the Pod though. Senuti for Mac, ephPod for windows (If you haven't guessed by my posts, I love this program).

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]I'm aware you can use iPods as harddrives, but if I remember right you then can't use it as a music player. Also, another annoying thing is the fact that you can't copy music FROM your iPod to another source if you import it from iTunes.[/QUOTE]
*buzzer* WRONG. The Shuffle will allow me to designate a set portion of the memory aside for use as a harddrive while still maintaining the other portion for music playback. Now, if the Shuffle, the LOWEST end of the iPod spectrum allows me to do that, I'm pretty damned sure every other iPod model does too. The exception possibly being the really REALLY old ones.

And the importing.... why? I mean, if you really HAD to do that, activate the HD function, drag the files to iPod that way, then move them over to the new source. You're also calling this an annoying thing.... Annoying to you and maybe a few other power users, yes. But again, this does not make it a bad product for the masses. How many people really need to do what you're saying?

What this all comes down to is fairly simplistic. Apple has made an easy to use player + software aimed at the larger percentage of computer users, and it's worked very, very well. You can't please everyone, but they have pleased the large majority of the masses.

[edit] Bah... late on most points but I don't care.

Techincally, also, forgot to add this. If you turn on hidden folders you can actually drag songs off the iPod if it has Disk mode enabled. They are in a freaken weird folder structure, but if you did a search of it if you were looking for a song, you could find the folder and just drag and drop out. CAn't drag and drop in a song though, however (and expect it to show up in the the artist/album/song etc).

I remember now that that bit about the harddrive was wrong, yeah. But about activating the HD function--why should I have to? I know it's supposed to be an anti-piracy issue, but say I took my iPod to my aunt and uncle's and they didn't want me to install anything on their computer but they wanted me to put some CDs on there (technically you could call this a legitimate use of backups, especially since they would most likely already own said CD)? Yeah, I could activate the HDD function...if I was at my computer. Point is, that's a setback. You're fighting a losing argument--trying to defend every facet of the player when every player has a chink in its armor. The iPod just has more to "power users" like me. Also--about the harddrive functionality, if they're trying to make something easy for people to use they really make it hard for you to switch your music from computer to computer.

I agree that they made an easy-to-use transferring system. I just wish that was an alternative--it wouldn't be hard to do, Steve Jobs is just a tightass and a weirdo (I don't care how much of an apple fanboy you are/can be, you can NOT defend Steve Jobs' craziness).

I find it interesting that I'm posting this anti-iPodism on an iBook though

P.S.--I found the REAL reason why you should never use an iPod. They use Comic Sans MS (or something horridly similar) as the default font for iTunes. That's just inhumane.

Comic Sans MS isn't bad looking at all.

[url]www.bancomicsans.com[/url]

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]P.S.--I found the REAL reason why you should never use an iPod. They use Comic Sans MS (or something horridly similar) as the default font for iTunes. That's just inhumane.[/QUOTE]
Uh... No. You suck at IDing fonts. BADLY.

iTunes uses Tahoma as the main display font. It always has. Older iPods use Chicago as their display font. I believe the newer ones (from the looking I've done, seems to apply to the color screen variants only) also use Tahoma.

Now, I'd LOVE to know when Tahoma and Chicago suddenly started looking even remotely like Comic Sans. To anyone who doesn't look at them alot, yeah they might look like the same thing, but considering how you HATE it and all.... I'd think you'd be able to tell the difference.



So here's what I did to prove that if anyone is interested.... Took screenshot, ran it into Photoshop and through my lists of fonts, found a match. Then to make sure, took a section of the text and ran it through WhatTheFont.com (freaking awesome little site....) and it concured with my result. Repeated the same thing using pictures of various iPod screens.

It can't be arsed to read all that happened while I was asleep last night, but I will say that...

*DEEP BREATH*

I did not buy an iPod to look trendy. When I am listening to my iPod it sits in my back pocket, covered by my shirt or in a front pocket on my satchel. No-one can see it, as far as anyone is concerned I could be listening to anything from an old walkman to a little tiny flash player.

Phew.

JOKE[/i][/size]

[QUOTE=Dj Yoshi]JOKE[/i][/size][/QUOTE]
Then it was made painfully unobvious by you.

Which is why Greenboy got it? Chill the **** out dude. People say I take things too seriously.

Did Greenboy get it? Or was he just saying Comc Sans doesn't look that bad? Also, Yoshi that was a bad attempt at a joke if it was one. Or maybe your covering your a** for making a stupid comment. Either way I'm leaving this thread on the note of iPods are awesome. kthxbai.

It was a joke. Jesus, I don't really care about Comic Sans. Hell I don't even take the site I posted seriously.

iPod. However, if I had to pick another player, the Toshiba Gigabeat S-series looks pretty good.