Apple's music player wins following

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Two years ago, software designer Ian McFarland Hp Laptop Battery bought a Sony Vaio Music Clip, but after finding it slow to download music and ``no fun to use,'' he returned it.


He then tried a CD MP3 player, but rejected it as too ''clunky'' and listened to music on his laptop, until one day in a store, he found the iPod.

In December, McFarland decided to buy Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod MP3 player, which he now takes with him everywhere.

Among the reasons: In contrast to the one-hour capacity of Music Clip, McFarland estimates his iPod holds up to 20 hours of music, just over 600 songs, leaving him with 1.3 Gigabytes of storage space free.

``I love having my whole record collection with me while I'm driving,'' said McFarland, who makes regular trips to Los Angeles from his home in San Francisco, where he works as a consultant and is writing a book about Java.

At a retail price of $399, the iPod is pricier than other MP3 players, but its 1,000-song, 5-Gigabyte capacity, convenient size and sleek interface are attracting music lovers and geeks alike.


Following Apple tradition, the industrial design of the iPod is nothing short of cool and easy to use. But it Hp F2024A carries the same baggage that many Apple products before it have labored under -- its relatively high price tag and a technology that works only with the MacIntosh operating system, not the much more universal Windows. That threatens to keep the iPod inside the ``Apple ghetto,'' even though Apple sees it as a breakthrough product for the masses.


As ever for Apple, the design wins kudos. The white lucite and stainless Omnibook XE3 steel device -- the size of a deck of cards -- stands out from the generic black-box look of most other consumer electronics.


The iPod has few buttons and no knobs. A touch wheel allows users to scroll quickly through the music content, which can be categorized by artist, song or album title, or user-created playlist. Information is easy to read on a backlit two-inch diagonal LCD screen.

``I love the retro touches, the Chicago font. It's got this very early Macintosh (news - web sites) feel,'' McFarland said. ``It's got few controls, but they do everything you need. And I love the feel of the little wheel.''

SMALL SIZE, LARGE STORAGE

IPod buyers are willing to pay a premium for a small form factor and large storage capacity, analysts said. There is no other digital audio MP3 player available that holds as much music and is as small as the iPod.

Flash memory-based MP3 players are small, but don't hold many songs, while other hard drive-based players tend to be much bigger.

For example, the Rio Sonicblue 800, which sells for $225 to $300, is slightly smaller but has only 128-Megabyte flash memory and holds only four hours of music. Both the Rio Sonicblue 800 and the iPod feature batteries that last 10 hours.

Meanwhile, the 6-Gigabyte Nomad Jukebox from Creative Technology Ltd., priced from $200 to $300, has more storage, but weighs more than twice as much as the 6.5-ounce iPod and is about four times as big, according to Stan Ng, product line manager for the iPod. The Nomad's battery lasts about four hours.


``The iPod is less expensive on a per-megabyte basis,'' said Susan Kevorkian, a research analyst at International Hp 346970-001 Data Corp. in Mountain View, California. She predicted iPod prices will drop as more hard drive makers enter the growing market.


Only iPod uses Firewire technology allowing for download rates of up to 30 times the speed of other devices. Users can download 1000 songs in less than 10 minutes, while simultaneously recharging the battery, Ng said.

The iPod works with Apple's iTunes music jukebox technology, automatically transferring new songs onto the device when the iPod is connected to the computer.

Apple has skirted the piracy problem by giving the iPod only one-way transfer capability. Users can download songs to their iPod from only one machine and cannot transfer them from the iPod to any other device.

``Everything on here (iPod) I have a license for,'' McFarland said. ``I don't listen to anything directly off the CD anymore.''

MACINTOSH ONLY -- FOR NOW


For now, the iPod works only with computers running the Macintosh operating HSTNN-DB02 system, limiting its market to the 7 million people running Mac OS 9 or OS X, roughly 5 percent of the U.S. personal computer market, analysts said.


``The Mac community is backing it as their MP3 player,'' said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies in San Jose, California.

But at least one company, Mediafour Corp., is developing software that will allow iPod to work with Windows machines. Even without Windows compatibility, there's enough of a market to sustain sales.

``The iPod has been selling faster than we ever would have expected,'' said Thomas Armes, president and chief executive of Elite Computers & Software, California's largest Mac-only reseller. ``It's probably the fastest selling Apple product we've ever carried.''

Armes, whose offices are directly across the street from Apple's in Cupertino, California, said he sold out of the first shipment of 250 iPods in two weeks and has moved more than 700 since they hit the shelves Nov. 10.

In his keynote at Macworld on Monday, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs (news - web sites) said the company has sold about 125,000 iPods.

Other unique features of the iPod are its linguistic capabiliti4es -- it can display words in Japanese, French, German, Italian and Dutch -- and the fact that it can be used as a portable hard drive to store data and transfer it to another computer, Ng said.

In addition, the iPod features 20-minute skip protection, versus the usual 10 seconds CD players have, and high-fidelity head phones for good sound quality, he added.


``It's not going to change the world -- it's just an MP3 player,'' McFarland said. ``But it's such a big evolutionary HSTNN-UB02 step that it's significant.''