| Wednesday, September 21, 2005 |
17:07 - One day the cargo planes will return
http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/ditty
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Wow. John Gruber has the goods on the elusive, mysterious iPod shuffle killer, the Dell DJ Ditty:
12. Note footnote attached to claim in “Product Highlights” that the Ditty can pack 220 songs into 512 MB of memory, roughly twice the songs Apple claims can fit on a 512 MB iPod Shuffle.
13. Follow footnote to see explanation that this storage estimate requires encoding songs as 64 kbps WMA, which bit rate is half that of Apple’s default of 128 kbps AAC, and roughly equivalent in fidelity to that of transmissions carried over tin cans and string, but which, perhaps, is not a dirty marketing trick, but, rather, a fair assessment, considering that anyone with such profoundly bad taste in industrial design who would consider purchasing this device probably also has such bad taste in music as not to notice that their 64 kbps-compressed songs sound like mush.
14. Sit back and recall, with tremendously smug satisfaction, a decade’s worth of tech industry punditry holding that superior design would never get Apple anywhere, and that Apple should instead, you know, be more like Dell.
He's got a picture, too, which apparently took some effort to find. I guess Dell wants teachers to confiscate these from kids thinking they're Bic lighters. Which you know they'd do. I had campus cops swoop in on me from time to time for carrying a bassoon reed soaking in water in its case before first-period band.
Sheesh. DJ Ditty. Yeah, that's a name that'll roll off the tongues of the hip set. You know, every day I see another reason to be glad Apple never listens to the criticism of clueless naysayers and does its own thing.
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Brian Tiemann
