I remember Microsoft introduced a DRM / certification program they called "Playsforsure".

Two years later they introduce the Zune, which could not play "Playsforsure" music people had purchased from MSN..

Until you actually need to run a business. Then money is much more important than the preferences of your employees. That's why Apple has barely penetrated the business world beyond overfunded startups that are more driven by hype and design wanna-bes than actual profit.

Being easy and pleasant to use and own is also an important capacity.

I had the OG white Zune. It was the same price as an iPod ~$250. The reason I chose Zune was the Zune Pass. A precursor to Spotify. Plus growing up in the Seattle area, I knew other people who had them and we would trade songs.

100% - the iPod wasn't just good enough, it was more than enough for almost everyone. The Zune was firmly in the diminishing returns category by the time it came out.

Not much difference between storing as many songs you can listen to in a lifetime, or storing twice as many songs as you can listen to in a lifetime.

me still thinking about the iRiver H320 I was lusting after...

The turd brown color certainly didn't help

This shorthand that marketing means a bad thing is actually not true for Apple. Apple's marketing is how it ought to be at every company. They do market research to figure out what users need, they famously came up with the iPod's click wheel, they don't just do the ads. Of course Apple is eminently critiquable, but its marketing division is what everybody should do.

The Kin was pretty cool. Very usable with cheap hardware and cheap data plans. If the timing was a bit different, Microsoft might not have been tempted to commit infanticide.

Reading with understanding is absent in your skillset.

I exactly wrote that Microsoft devices were quite bad as they came too soon. And Apple came at the right moment, when low power chips were powerful enough, touchscreens were precise enough without a pen. And device had acceptable consumption, batteries had decent capacity, lifespan.

Imagine having to go to Start - Programs - Phone, in order to make a call.

I feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good.

When the iPod came out you largely had two options for carrying your music collection on the go. You either carried a binder of CDs, or you had some niche player like Mini-Disc or an MP3 player. Both alternatives were expensive and had limitations similar to a CD in terms of number of tracks you could carry.

I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality.

Creative's Muvo was a weird form factor that was larger than an iPod. It had a horrid interface both on device and for loading music. It's only grace was that it was slightly cheaper than an iPod and didn't need a Mac with FireWire. Although iircc this was pre USB 2.0 so not having FireWire would mean loading music took forever and a day.

The iPod allowed you to carry most, if not all, of your music collection in a package slightly larger than a deck of playing cards. And it had a fantastic interface for navigating music on the device.

This was at a time before most people had laptops and if you had a PC it was at home and used sparingly. The iPod was such a compelling mobile computing device that it drove adoption of the iMac. Apple would eventually release iTunes for Windows and USB support but that was many years later.

IIRC the Zune had a much better DAC on the device than any ipod. I own two of them and the sound quality was always notably great.

“Squirting” was ridiculed at the time and the word itself scaring away women. Jobs killed it then in an interview with a classic quote: Microsoft = Cold tech and Apple = Humanity. MS scares her away, Apple gets the girl.

> QUESTION: Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?

> Steve Jobs: In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.

I have an M2 Pro MBP 16GB, compared to the latest MBP issued by my employer a couple months ago, I see zero difference in real world performance. Can’t speak for Office on Mac, I have not used it in over a decade, but for typical full stack web dev I literally don’t need anything more.

You better check health of your machine then.

Sorry, poor wording. It's the Neo that's on the bottom in many reviews, but the M5 is regularly beaten by Windows laptops. My usage of "consistently" was in the sense of regularly beaten, not in the sense of always beaten.

Jesus, they're still calling their chips Lake? As in Skylake? As in 2012?

Citation needed. I've owned Apple laptops for many years - and I'm a video editor (amongst other things). If this is the case it's new behaviour.

Build quality, keyboard and displays are consistently reviewed as being nicer for the Neo than that price range of windows laptops.

> But talking this authoritatively on something without doing the reading, that's grating...

Thanks for your prejudice on me without knowing anything about me. In short, I'm a HPC sysadmin and programmer who works in a HPC center, separated from the actual hardware by a couple of floors.

We can discuss how transistors' heat generation doesn't discern about ISAs or being in a DAC or a cutting edge microprocessor, and we can even discuss how implementation of some functional blocks generate heat regardless of the ISA being involved. If you want we can discuss how saturating memory controllers affect pipeline saturation in processors even...

But talking this authoritatively on something with that amount of prejudice, that's grating.

> Xiamoi is some random chinese company not known for high end chips and was able to catch up impressivly in a short period of time

Xiamoi is a huge company and is a commonly known brand. They’ve been making chips for a long time. They didn’t start a few months ago and catch up with Apple on their first try.

> random chinese company

Oh i have soooo many news for you!

Are they well known in China? I'm seeing that Chinese tech has decoupled from the West. They have all this cool stuff that we do not hear about because they aren't selling it to us because they don't need to. It's usually been stuff with better price to performance or ultra low prices though, rather than ultimate performance stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if they made a top end chip that everyone in China knew about, and we didn't.

> Xiamoi is some random chinese company

That might be the funniest thing I read all day. Xiaomi is a massive company that makes all sorts of things, including a lot of pretty high-end mobiles, and has an annual revenue in the order of 75 billion US.

It’s no Apple, but it’s not exactly “some random Chinese company” either.

> catch up impressivly in a short period of time.

They're using ARM designed cores. So it's more like Apple just isn't as far ahead of ARM as some people claim.

ty for the concern.

I'd like to back up my belief and claims based on my metrics and experience.

If data backs it up, then I will apply my baynesian thinking to change my mind.

Anecdotes normally triumphs in real life and biz, but not in online communities.

I've seen so many I am not from China comment in all of the countries I mentioned like in HK, Japanese, Korea, Malaysia, but all turns out they are. Some of those countries communities expose countries, and yes, they are from mostly Guanzhou.

It's just funny how it's consistent they deny their own heritage. Be proud of who you are.

There's that legendary German sense of humor.