Customers visiting Apple Computer's online store can now post their own reviews of the products they buy--unless it's the latest iPod. That's because, though users can offer their takes on a variety of Mac and iPod gear from other companies, Apple automatically gives its own products a top "5-Apple" rating.
Apple allows customers to assign their own ratings, from one to five stars to products from other companies, such as iPod cases and speakers. In a frequently asked questions page, Apple explains its thinking. "We give all Apple products a rating of '5 Apples' because we think they're great," the company said. Apple went on to say, "Would you trust us to display less-than-perfect ratings on our own products? We didn't think so," but deleted that line Thursday afternoon. An Apple representative declined to comment on the reviews policy.
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News source: c|net
Apple allows customers to assign their own ratings, from one to five stars to products from other companies, such as iPod cases and speakers. In a frequently asked questions page, Apple explains its thinking. "We give all Apple products a rating of '5 Apples' because we think they're great," the company said. Apple went on to say, "Would you trust us to display less-than-perfect ratings on our own products? We didn't think so," but deleted that line Thursday afternoon. An Apple representative declined to comment on the reviews policy.
View: The full story News source: c|net
World of Warcraft will be available as a standard edtion for a suggested $49.99, and as a special collector's edition for $79.99. The special edition includes the game on both CD-ROM and DVD, a behind-the-scenes DVD, an exclusive in-game pet, a cloth map of the game world, a soundtrack CD, an Art of the World of Warcraft coffee table book, and a commemorative game manual signed by the development team. Both versions include a first month free. Pretty sweet.
"World of Warcraft has been our largest undertaking to date," said Mike Morhaime, president and co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment. "When we set out to create a massively multiplayer online game, our goal was to expand the scope of the Warcraft universe by offering an incredibly dynamic game experience. We're extremely proud of the game we've created, and we believe players will be very pleased when they see what we have in store for them."
Now, one of the only questions remaining -- apart from what your first character name will be -- is whether you can finish Half-Life 2 in time to pick up the next great PC release of the season. We think you can. We think this is going to be one very hot holiday.
Yet with poor battery life and poor sound quality, the iPod wont be getting 5-stars from me.
Of coarse, for $500 I do think they should ship with headphones beyond compare.
Creative audio players have a better signal-to-noise ratio than iPods do. In addition, Apple has not built a custom equalizer into their iPod, which is really the killer for me.
Yes its converting digital into analog. BUT some players do it better than others, this has to do with the built in DAC. You can buy DACs for thousands of dollars, so quality will obviously vary from player to player, usually scaling with price. This is not the case with the Ipod. (It also amplifies the analog audio, which can degrade/alter the sound even more)
It really does have average audio for its price. Last time I checked nomad zen was at or near the top.
Their stock headphones will probably be to crappy to tell, but get something decent. Even for under 100$ you can get great headphones (if you shop around and read reviews).
iPods are overpriced (but visually stunning) paperweights that lock you into their standards. I can get an iPod type MP3 player that allows me to download from a variety of music stores.
But it is!
If you buy an iPod the only online music store you can purchase from is ...iTunes
But!
If you buy a "Plays for Sure" WMA9 compatible music player you get to chose from not one but many (i cant count sorry) music stores
But yes it would be nice if somebody did both, but i dont think it will happen
Your "variety" of stores all offer exactly the same thing with the "same" DRM/features. It's a bit like elections in the former USSR or China where people would have to choice of two candidates but both were Communist.
WMA DRM also has not been cracked so you cannot play those protected songs you bought on linux for example or players that don't support DRM.
The fact that iTMS exists means you windows users have a "choice" of either Fairplay iTMS or WMA DRM. Without the Fairplay DRM, you would have "less" choice and the DRM on the WMA stores would still be really restrictive if Apple had not launched iTMS to compete with services that existed before using WMA DRM.
Last edited by 25808 on 05 Nov 2004 - 13:36
Last edited by 11680 on 06 Nov 2004 - 16:55
Gotta love Apple for being so "Open Minded."
Funny if you think about it, considering their slogan is "Think Different."
STV
STV
Here, let me bring you up to date:
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-269467.html?legacy=cnet
http://www.activewin.com/articles/general/1/article_94.shtml
http://www.winnetmag.com/Article/ArticleID/18832/18832.html
http://searchwin2000.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid1_gci821191,00.html
http://www.brama.com/survey/messages/14669.html
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=4440
... a search for Microsoft and Arrogant results in over 89,000 matches.
Macintosh and arrogant gives 49,200.
Not bad for a company that last I heard only had 4% market share.
You may be getting mixed results there, try 'apple arrogant -microsoft'
a mere 26,600 results (but in 0.40 seconds :o )
On the actual story (cause Im too lazy to re-post :p ) I reckon this is *really* bad marketing on the part of Apple. If they're not gonna play fair then they shouldnt have the system at all. Alternatively, they should have it for third party products only and disable it for their own, not give them a default of 5 stars
It's low, sneaky, immoral, unfair and very much against the widespread cultural belief of Apple being one of the major companies 'standing up' to Microsoft's so called "monopolising".
Since when was Apple a nice and generous company?
Good logic
To me it just shows insecurity in their products. If they don't trust their products enough to let people to revieew them obviously they are sub par to what competitors are offering.
The problem occurs when people who have an irrational hate for a company's products go on their site and starts saying bad things about it. I've met plenty of people who hate Apple products for no reason. They just think that because it's different, it's bad. If there were only intelligent people who could give good reviews, then Apple would probably allow people to rate and review their products.
Oh, okay. So it's bad for Apple to allow reviews of their own products because of irrational hatred, but **** all the other guys, right?
What's the point of reviews at all, then?
Some call apple’s behavior marketing… I call it propaganda.
btw i'm a fan of apple products, i have a 40 gig 4g ipod which i love. I just can't stand their propoganda, annoys the hell out of me
Name ONE other company that allows customers to review their own products on their website. I'm not talking about resellers, but company stores.
Name one.
Most companies don't have ratings for other products, either.
The only people I see actually going and writing a review, would be ones either really pissed off at how ****ty the product is, or ones that are really happy how great it is.
1/5 troll reviews saying, "total sh*t, f*cking crap" etc would be deleted...
if they're not going to allow ppl to rate apple products they should have just quietly remove the rating feature and avoided this problem- it shouldn't have even been implemented in the first place, who was the genius behind it?
"Sure the iSkin for the iPod is reviewable becasue it's not made by Apple and therefore may not be perfect but we know all are products are absolutly perfect so we won't both our customers with the hassle of being able to review them." -Hypothetical Quote
For some reason I fail to find the logic here. If your going to allow reviews of products on your site make sure that people can review everything, not just things made by thrid parties that are sold through the store. If your not going to allow reviews on every product on your page, including your own, then don't allow any reviews at all.
Well, yes and no.
From Apple's perspective (and the flock of PR and marketing gurus on its payroll) this is probably marketing.
From my point of view as a potential client, this is very bad marketing. In the relationship I may - or not - engage with Apple, I have the power -- although for too long, firms such as Apple (in any given industry field, this is not restricted to computing) tried to take that power from me (the consumer) and enforce 'top-down' its conception of the exchange (i.e. its products against my money), aided in that by the PR parasites assuring Apple that it was on top, while I was down.
This kind of attitude is actually a pale echo of a certain type of interventionist economies in recent history, and it's therefore not a big surprise if Apple is performing so bad in terms of market shares (in that respect, it's not a surprise either to find Al Gore among the members of the board, but that's another story).
I just love that bit where it says:
Well, I have news for you: whenever you're addressing the people out there in order to convince them to spend their hard earned money on your stuff, the only person entitled to think if your products are great or not is the consumer.
It was always true, albeit regularly ignored without to much trouble. However, with the new ways of communication coming to - mature - age, particularly with the 'blogosphere effect' (do you think that CBS/Dan Rather's preposterous 1971 word 2000 documents would have been exposed 4 years ago? Naah, me neither) this kind of down-your-throat marketing is suicidal.
And when bad companies can be pushed out of business as a direct consequence of their bad behavior, that's good news for the consumer -- that is to say you and me.
As for Apple's one-sided dialog with its consumers, I suggest the people in charge go google for "the cluetrain manifesto" and read it.
Because if they don't, their competitors and their consumers sure will.
Well, here it is; the player you've all been waiting for! This new iPod features a high res lcd screen - supporting up to 16bit colors! It's also our only iPod with a massive 60GB Hard Drive; not to mention you can view album art and picture slide shows!
But... The battery problem still isn't completely resolved, you're locked in with buying from the iTunes Music Store, and if you have genetically enhanced hearing, you'll think it sounds like ****. We should have shipped a better sounding headphone, but we're trying to turn a profit here.
Our review squad has been using the new iPod for about a month now, and we can tell you - the lcd screen has this nasty habbit of cracking... and the apple wheel? it broke off on jim.
As a company, we just can't reccemend this product - our iPod sucks; don't buy it.
...or apple won't write a review; either way. The Apple Store is designed to sell apple products; it would be assinine to give the products they're trying to sell a bad rating... they want people to think they sell good products.
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