I am now fully convinced that Steve Jobs could shit on stage and the Apple fanboys would eat it up with a brushed metal iSpoon.
I came to this realization after reading the coverage of the “special event” that happened today. Steve Jobs announced that if you want a ringtone from a song on your iPhone you have to buy it first from the iTunes Music Store for 99 cents, then pay another 99 cents to get it converted into a ringtone. Isn’t that just awesome? Paying twice for the same song?
It’s awesome for Apple’s shareholders. Sucks complete ass for people who have to pay for this drek.
The iPod nano got uglified. Shorter, fatter, uglier. Of course it’ll sell like hotcakes.
The iPhone got its phone ripped out, resulting in the “iPod touch”. Never could have seen that coming. Why didn’t they give the “touch” interface to the iPod classic? Because that’ll come in November, just in time for holiday shopping.
Oh, and you poor schleps that bought an iPhone last week? Steve Jobs would like to say “thanks for your money, asshole” because they just dropped the price of the 8GB iPhone by $200. And eliminated the 4GB iPhone. And people say that Apple overprices their products…
[tags]apple, steve jobs, iphone, ipod, ipod nano, ipod classic, ipod touch[/tags]
#1 by Alasdair Allan on 05 September 2007 - 9:11 am
I don’t think you realise what ringtones cost. It’s not something I buy myself, I don’t really see the point, but the “latest” ringtone (usually a badly sampled couple of seconds of a song) can set you back as much as £5 (that’s US$10). When I heard how much they were charging all I though was, “Wow, that’s cheap, they’ve just buggered up the entire ringtones market for everyone else…“. All a matter of perspective I guess!
But yup, we all saw the iPod touch coming. I was more interested in the deal with Starbucks to be honest, it’s one of the first real location-aware applications that have made it to market. It’ll be interesting to see if it actually makes anyone any money…
#2 by Brad on 05 September 2007 - 9:40 am
That’s my point. Ringtones shouldn’t be expensive. They shouldn’t be cheap. They should be free for songs you already own.
What Apple’s essentially doing is charging you a buck to convert your song into another format. And it won’t even work on songs from CDs you’ve ripped, it’ll only work on songs you’ve already payed a buck for from Apple. They’re double-dipping, and everybody (you included, Al) thinks that getting a ringtone for their iPhone for a buck is cheap. Sure, it’s cheap when compared to the other rip-off artists out there, but it’s still a rip-off.
Apple pulls the wool over people’s eyes and everybody thanks them for it.
#3 by Chad on 05 September 2007 - 1:22 pm
It’s a free world. If they can charge it and people will happily buy it, who is to say they’re wrong? And who’s to say the people buying are wrong?
As for the people who bought iPhones last week… Who cares? A week ago they decided that the cost of the iPhone was worth it, and so they purchased. Dropping the price today does nothing to retroactively invalidate their decision. They might have waited a week for the price to drop, but you could always wait longer.
That’s always the way it goes with new-fangled tech toys. Whenever you buy a computer, you pick the one you want for the price you’re happy with, then you buy it. Then you IMMEDIATELY stop looking or thinking about it, because the day you buy a computer is the day it becomes obsolete.
#4 by Brad on 05 September 2007 - 10:07 pm
Chad, the Internet is hardly a place for logic and rationality. :-)
#5 by Chad on 06 September 2007 - 3:06 am
Heheheheh. You’re absolutely right, of course.