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There’s an article by Donald Norman that has been stirring up controversy online. Whereas last time I thought he was wrong, this time I think he’s right—mostly.

In general, he’s correct that people don’t buy the simple, well-designed stuff. Instead, they buy the stuff that looks like it has the most features; and they tell what that is by looking at how many settings and controls it has.

Not always, though. The best exception that proves the rule is the now almost ubiquitous iPod.

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$99 for a leather iPod case? And he wasn’t laughed off the stage?

That iPod Hi-Fi looks like it was stolen from the set of Space: 1999, doesn’t it? Come to think of it, a G5 would fit the decor of John Koenig’s desk perfectly. Perhaps the Apple iPhone will look like a commlock?

Then there’s the Intel Mac Mini. We all knew that was coming. However, while the MacBook Pro comes with a Mobility Radeon X1600, the Mini comes with a craptastic Intel GMA950 integrated graphics chip. The old Mini had a slothful Radeon 9200, but at least it had dedicated RAM, whereas the Intel shares its video RAM with the main CPU.

In addition, the CPU speed has dropped from the MacBook’s 1.83GHz dual cores, to 1.5GHz single core. If that wasn’t bad enough, the entry level price has quietly risen by 20%–the $500 PC is now a $600 PC, $800 if you want dual cores or a DVD burner. Price up comparable Dell machines, and that price looks pretty hard to defend.

There are a couple of problems leading to the high price and hardware nobbling. The first is that Intel are charging over $250 for a Core Duo processor, whereas a G4 was well under $200. The second issue is that Apple have to be careful not to make their new cheap Intel boxes embarassingly faster than the PowerPC systems they’re still selling. The Intel iMac was almost as fast as the top end quad G5 workstation, so making sure the Mini wouldn’t be too fast was probably a requirement. Hopefully by the end of the year the G5 will be history and we can have an improved Intel Mini.

A lot of blather about the video iPod has missed the point. No, I don’t think that many people are going to want to buy 320×240 copies of TV shows and music videos at $2 each, that they can’t even burn to a DVD. That’s not why the video iPod matters.

You’ll notice that the new video iPod is still almost exactly the same as the old iPod, because it’s still primarily a music player. That’s why people will buy it, for music. If it was supposed to be a video player, it would have a bigger screen and smaller controls; you don’t need a big rotary dial for something you’re looking right at, but you do need things like brightness, contrast, and color controls, and probably a multi-way DVD-like joystick.

The point of the whole exercise is that Apple has about 90% of the digital audio player market. Now every iPod will have video, which means everyone buying a new iPod for its music capabilities will incidentally have the ability to play videos while they’re sitting bored on a bus or plane. They wouldn’t have bought a portable video player just for that, but if their iPod incidentally does the job, they’ll probably start encoding content for it.

And when they do, it’ll be MPEG-4, based on QuickTime, with H.264 video codec and AAC audio.

Right now, downloaded video is a mess of crappy pseudo-standards. Obsolete container formats like AVI and ASF. MPEG-4 codecs like XviD and DivX, but not put into actual MPEG-4 files, because that would be too useful. Dozens of crappy encoders and tutorials teaching people to assemble bastardized cross-breeds of Ogg audio and MPEG-2 video, XviD and MP3, H.263 in AVI containers, and so on. Plus, of course, the closed proprietary crap like WMV and Real.

Now thanks to Apple’s video iPod, out of the madness we might actually settle on a single standard that’s actually a standard. Every software encoder out there is going to have a simple preset for iPod, just like some of them already have simple presets for PSP. (Which is also MPEG-4, thank goodness.)

It’s basically exactly the kind of thing Microsoft would do. Use a 90% market share in one market to dictate the formats everyone will use across another market. Except that if Microsoft did it, they’d be dictating that everyone use their proprietary Windows Media standards, whereas Apple is going to push the entire industry into the open MPEG-4 standards—which are already cross-platform, playing happily on Linux, Windows, Mac, and a bunch of DVD players too.

If there’s a clear loser here, it’s Real. No matter how much they pretend to be open, they still keep their codecs locked closed, and refuse to allow anyone to legally transcode Real formats into anything else. That approach worked for a while, making them #1 in the market, then keeping them at #2… but now they’re going to drop to #3 or lower. Nobody’s going to want content in Real format that they’ll never be able to play on their iPod or PSP. The block on Real’s audio on the iPod might have been hackable (for a while), but hacking the iPod to play Real video is going to be impossibly hard. And if I’m not allowed to turn Real media into a format I can use, why would I even bother downloading it? Or encoding to it?

Meanwhile, MPEG-4 now has a fighting chance against Windows Media. Combine the video iPod with the gradual gains Blu-Ray has been making against Microsoft’s preferred option of HD-DVD based on WMV9, and the media landscape no longer looks like it will belong to Redmond.

Apparently there are some people still falling for that “freeipod.com” pyramid scheme. I posted a pretty skeptical analysis last month, but TrollJournal ate it. I thought the whole pyramid would have collapsed by now, but it seems not. So, let’s repeat the analysis…

Let’s try to give freeipod.com the benefit of the doubt, and be optimistic in our analysis.

First off, note that every time someone goes to the site and registers directly, rather than being referred there, nobody gets credit for that new member, so existing members are less likely to get their free iPods. So, let’s assume that the only way people ever join is by being referred, hence maximizing the chance that people who sign up will get an iPod.

Next, note that there is clearly a finite world population. Once the necessary referrals have signed up and won you your free iPod, any additional referrals are just reducing the number of people remaining who might sign up, and again reducing the chances of the people who have already signed up finding enough new members to refer. So let’s also assume that nobody collects more than the minimum number of referrals required, which is 5.

Now we need to estimate how long it takes someone to find 5 referrals. I’m gonna say 24 hours, partly because it seems like a reasonable number, and partly because it makes the mathematics really easy. Everyone knows at least 5 people who read their e-mail more than once a day, right?

Our final assumption is that it doesn’t get harder to find referrals as time goes on. This is a ridiculous assumption, but hey, we’re trying to be optimists, right?

Enough assumptions. The nugget of data we need is when the whole scheme started. I did some searching on Google, and found public postings about the site dated July 19th.

So, we have our algorithm: we start July 19th with 1 member. Each day, each member who hasn’t won an iPod (i.e. those who joined the previous day) finds 5 new members, and becomes eligible for a free iPod. The next day, each of those new members will find 5 more new members so they can get their free iPod, and so on.

I wrote a quick Perl program to compute the results.

Jul 19:
 Site has 1 members.
 The 1 most recent members find 5 more.
 Apple has shipped 1 iPods.

Jul 20:
 Site has 6 members.
 The 5 most recent members find 25 more.
 Apple has shipped 6 iPods.

Jul 21:
 Site has 31 members.
 The 25 most recent members find 125 more.
 Apple has shipped 31 iPods.

Jul 22:
 Site has 156 members.
 The 125 most recent members find 625 more.
 Apple has shipped 156 iPods.

Jul 23:
 Site has 781 members.
 The 625 most recent members find 3,125 more.
 Apple has shipped 781 iPods.

Jul 24:
 Site has 3,906 members.
 The 3,125 most recent members find 15,625 more.
 Apple has shipped 3,906 iPods.

Jul 25:
 Site has 19,531 members.
 The 15,625 most recent members find 78,125 more.
 Apple has shipped 19,531 iPods.

Jul 26:
 Site has 97,656 members.
 The 78,125 most recent members find 390,625 more.
 Apple has shipped 97,656 iPods.

Jul 27:
 Site has 488,281 members.
 The 390,625 most recent members find 1,953,125 more.
 Apple has shipped 488,281 iPods.

Jul 28:
 Site has 2,441,406 members.
 The 1,953,125 most recent members find 9,765,625 more.
 Apple has shipped 2,441,406 iPods.

Jul 29:
 Site has 12,207,031 members.
 The 9,765,625 most recent members find 48,828,125 more.
 Apple has shipped 12,207,031 iPods.

Jul 30:
 Site has 61,035,156 members.
 The 48,828,125 most recent members find 244,140,625 more.
 Apple has shipped 61,035,156 iPods.

Jul 31:
 Site has 305,175,781 members.
 The 244,140,625 most recent members find 1,220,703,125 more.
 Apple has shipped 305,175,781 iPods.

Aug 1:
 Site has 1,525,878,906 members.
 The 1,220,703,125 most recent members find 6,103,515,625 more.
 Apple has shipped 1,525,878,906 iPods.

Aug 2:
 Site has 7,629,394,531 members.
 The 6,103,515,625 most recent members would need to find 30,517,578,125 more.
 Apple has shipped 7,629,394,531 iPods.

Everyone on the planet now has an iPod.

So there we have it. If we set our assumptions to maximize your chances of winning an iPod, everyone on the planet already has an iPod.

Of course, the nice thing about having code to crank out the numbers is that I can now fiddle with the assumptions. If we assume it takes everyone two days to find 5 more members, then the remaining population of the earth got their iPods today, August 16th. So, if you didn’t get yours, don’t panic, it’s probably in the mail.

Update 2004-09-24

Forbes is reporting that people are suing freeipods.com for not shipping them the free iPod they qualified for. The company claims Apple simply isn’t shipping them the thousands of iPods they’ve ordered, and that people will get their free iPods real soon now, honest.

Oh, and the lucky suckerscustomers of the service also say they’re being inundated with spam.

I’m shocked to find out from Forbes that this may not be a legitimate business operation. Shocked, I tell you.

Thanks to all my sympathizers;
I am wearing my Sennheisers.
There’s an iPod in my pants,
Watch me do the iPod dance.

It seems like everyone has an iPod. My officemate at work has one. Half the people on the T who are wearing headphones are wearing little white Apple earplug headphones. Even penniless graduates have iPods. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before I see a homeless person with an iPod, begging for iTunes Music Store credits. Yup, it looks like everyone has a goddamn iPod.

Except me.

It’s not that I don’t want one. They’re really nice, especially now they have the all-touch-sensitive control surface and the backlighting. The sound quality is good (according to Stereophile magazine’s tests, better than most CD players). With a 40GB iPod I could put basically my entire music collection on, plus some radio shows and audio books.

It’s not a money issue either. I have the cash. No, it’s a guilt issue. The iPod exceeds the threshold at which I feel guilty for spending money on frivolous pleasures like music.

It goes without saying that we don’t have an HDTV either, even though it would be great for my movie addiction.

I also can’t persuade myself that it would be OK to get a maid, much as I would like a spotlessly clean and reasonably tidy house. I tell myself that it would be pointless because we just don’t have the space for all our stuff, but I know that even if we did have the space and started out with a clean house, I’d feel really bad about paying someone to clean and tidy for us.

If you listen to portable audio equipment a lot, you’ve probably noticed that most portable units can barely drive a set of headphones. You have to crank the volume all the way up, and even then the sound is either distorted beyond recognition, or feeble and lacking in‘kick’. This is particularly an issue with MiniDisc units and very small MP3 players.

The solution to the problem is simple: you need a headphone amplifier. Unfortunately, they’re generally big and expensive. Either that, or you have to build them yourself. So, how would you like an audiophile-grade headphone amplifier that’s barely larger than the 3x AAA cells that power it, yet features a carefully designed headphone crossover circuit to expand the soundstage and avoid that “voices in your head” effect?

Would you like it to have plenty of power to drive even a set of electrostatic headphones or high-end Sennheisers? Would you like it to be super-efficient and run for 120 hours on one set of batteries?

If the answer to these questions is ‘Yes’, pick up an XIN Super Mini Amp.

I’d really like an iPod. Apple are now selling them laser-engraved with the message of your choice.

Do you think they’d sell me one engraved “Fuck you, Hilary Rosen”?