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Silicon.com questions iPod quality, brand

updated 06:55 pm EDT, Mon June 20, 2005

Silicon.com


The first signs have started to emerge this week that Apple's must-have iPod music players are "actually ," silicon.com says. The article looks at iPod quality a "damaged brand" as factors contributing to this sentiment. The article cites Duke University's iPod program as evidence of the latter. "Only" one third of freshmen used their free iPods for academic purposes. As for build quality, the article points to poor battery life on some test units. "The battery on one unit now lasts for just an hour after a full charge and the click wheel has given up the game, rendering the iPod mini virtually unusable." Brand experts claim "Apple has cheapened the image of the whole iPod range with an average product like the Shuffle. We're betting the mini's dead batteries and broken click wheels didn't help, either [...] Is this the first wave of an iPod backlash?"


by MacNN Staff

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  1. jhorvatic

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Apr 2005

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    06/20, 07:09pm | report spam | Reply |

    Whatever

    I have two first generation 5gig iPods and the latest 60gig Photo iPod. All of them are working flawlessly. Apple was rated number 1 in quality so this story has no merit.

  1. GreatWhiteNorth

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Apr 2005

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    06/20, 07:12pm | report spam | Reply |

    Bah!

    With any product there are bound to be bad apples (no pun intended). But, I've owned every generation of classic iPod, a mini and now have a shuffle. *None* of them had or have a single issue.

  1. tinytim

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Jun 2005

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    06/20, 07:26pm | report spam | Reply |

    Evidence is lacking

    The support for the claim that the iPod is not soo good is pretty limited in this article. Not too many Duke University students used them for educational purposes -- is that a surprise? And one person from silicon.com bought 3 iPod minis which had to be sent back twice each. This is the "my friend bought a Honda which turned out to be a lemon, so all Hondas are lemons" fallacy. Does silicon.com have any credibility?

  1. slider

    Mac Elite

    Joined: Oct 1999

    0
    06/20, 07:31pm | report spam | Reply |

    Oh Please!

    One side says, "iPod sucks b/c you have no choices" and "iPod sucks b/c it's too expensive". Solution, offer more affordable version of the player at different price points, so now you get, "iPod has been cheapened by cheaper models".

    Can't win! We want everything right now and we want it for free.

    To add my own experience, I had a second gen 10GB, worked flawlessly, replaced battery after 3 year and got 10 hours of continuous play time; sold on eBay, buyer very happy with it. Next and current iPod, 30GB photo, dropped it a dozen times, still runs perfectly.

    Slow news day I guess.

  1. cooner

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Sep 2003

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    06/20, 08:01pm | report spam | Reply |

    Shuffle "average" ...?

    *If* there's a consistent quality problem it should be look into, but I agree this sounds like "My friend bought a Honda lemon, so all Hondas are lemons" fallacy someone pointed out above.

    I also have to question, though, why they deem the Shuffle an "average" product that cheapens the line? The price point seems just about right to me, on par with other MP3 players. And I must say, while I've been very happy with my 2-gen 20GB iPod for several years now (still with the original battery), I've found that I actually *use* my 512MB Shuffle far more regularly than I ever did the older iPod, or the flash-based Rio I had before that. No quality problems and excellent, elegant design to me. Several of my friends have Shuffles and feel likewise.

  1. ff11

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Apr 2004

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    06/20, 08:12pm | report spam | Reply |

    Say it ain't so Apple

    You mean somewhere on the campus of Duke university a student has a broken iPod. This is a travesty. How dare Apple sell millions of iPods without advertising the fact that somewhere, someday, one of them could break.

    THIS IS TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!!!!

    And while we are on the topic, I think Apple is being highly irresponsible in allowing so many students to use their iPods for noneducational purposes. I think Apple should IMMEDIATELY disable the ability of the iPod to play music and games. They could start by programming it to distinguish between music and speech so they could have it delete all music (they would also have to come up with a way of exempting educational music, of course).

    Alternately, they could simply have an iEnforcer accompany each iPod. The iEnforcer being a burly guy with a stick who would whack the student if they attempted to use their iPod for non educational purposes.

    Come on Apple, get on the ball.

  1. Sebastien

    Dedicated MacNNer

    Joined: Apr 2000

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    06/20, 08:24pm | report spam | Reply |

    I never thought

    iPods were worth the money - too little features for too high a price.

  1. climacs

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Sep 2001

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    06/20, 08:30pm | report spam | Reply |

    slow news day I guess

    hey hey w how many will die before you're through?

  1. HowieDI2

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Aug 2002

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    06/20, 08:32pm | report spam | Reply |

    check out the competition

    They should check out the competition before writing and article like that. When you make 16 million of something, there will always be some duds. Furthermore, the competing products have also had some battery and other quality issues. It's just part of the business. Apple is not immune to having quality problems. That being said, all 3 of the iPods that I have owned have had zero issues.

  1. lkrupp

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: May 2001

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    06/20, 08:58pm | report spam | Reply |

    Looking for page hits...

    Second paragraph...

    "For Apple's legions of diehard fans we're sure we've just committed some unimaginable sin by uttering those words but let us look at the evidence."

    Somebody's fishing for page hits. That's the problem with Mac sites like MacNN. They use automated bots to sniff out articles without regard to content or reliability. The bot finds something and MacNN prints it. The writers for these sites know it and put out stuff they know will be picked up and printed.

    Also noted that, so far, there have been NO reader responses to the article posted. So much for journalism in the era of instant reporting.

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