Dear Apple,I cannot understand why you would come out with a new version of the iPod Classic this year and not allow people who bought one last year to benefit from the software enhancements you've made. It seems like a bit of a slap in the face really. I am a loyal Apple customer, have owned two iPods and three computers over the years, but I see you growing to be more and more like an arrogant giant who builds obsolescence into your products. Was there a major hardware overhaul that I am not aware of, or did you just change a few specs and offer new features in the hopes that I would abandon my perfectly serviceable one year old iPod for a new one? I for one would really like a "genius" feature on my Classic to make new playlists. My iPod holds all my music and can go for days or weeks without being plugged into my MacBook (which has a dinky harddrive, forcing me to store my music externally) especially if I could quickly generate new lists.
Here's my suggestion: allow me the choice to purchase a software update for my iPod. Charge me 10 or 20 bucks, whatever you think is fair, but don't come out with a product that is virtually the same as mine and offer new features that are unavailable to me for marketing reasons. That just burns my ass and creates ill will. Apple is not the only brand out there and I'm not fanatical about anything—give me, and other consumers, enough reason to jump to another MP3 player, operating system, or whatever and we probably will.
4 comments:
That's odd, because when they did the same thing with the iPod Touch, they did let you "upgrade" your software and purchase the new standard features that were in all of the new models. I wonder if it's something to do with how the iPod classic updates its software, because it really seems like a silly move on Apple's part.
I agree. I'm not as incensed about it, but it is irritating: there are no major hardware revisions noticeable to warrant the total unavailability of this singular feature. From all the reviews, the software is the same; still slow, still buggy. It seems it has been repackaged to include Genius and that's pretty much it. I have the 80gb and am very happy with it. But I would like Genius!
Well, to be honest I find it quite useless for me, but I guess it depends on what kind of music you have and listen to most. For a lot of classical and jazz, it is pretty off base quite often, though for more contemporary and popular music it is a lot better.
I use my iPod for working out for which I always need new up-tempo lists, plus I have a lot of contemporary rock that I rip and then forget I've added, this is why I like the genius feature and why it would be useful to me. I can see it being useless for classical and jazz though.
I agree that they probably let most of the bugs go unaddressed while adding the genius feature as a minor enhancement. All of their effort is going into iPhone, Touch, new Nanos, and selling stuff on iTunes; Classics are a "mature product" and therefore yesterday's news.
Sky, The reason they updated your iPod Touch is probably because they wanted to encourage you to buy stuff from the App Store. And it was partly the notion that you could buy the other upgrades for Touch that got me thinking: "why can't I do that?"
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