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by BigZaphod 5411 days ago
"Do they expect Apple to continually innovate in a non-competitive market?"

Probably, yes, and I would argue there is some reason to believe they would do so. Look at what happened in the MP3 player market: Apple utterly dominated that market long ago, and yet they kept messing with the product lines, adding models, changing the feature balances, etc. There was and still is a lot of experimentation going on there and there's essentially no real competitors in that market anymore. "Portable music player" and "iPod" are practically synonyms.

Apple (with Steve Jobs at the helm, anyway) is different from many companies. They don't see themselves as competing with other companies. Instead I believe they consider Apple of the previous year to be the competitor to beat for the current year.
1 comments
icebraining 5411 days ago
>Apple utterly dominated that market long ago

Was that true outside the 'States? I don't remember the iPod ever dominating here, while in the tablet market the iPad does seem to dominate.

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BigZaphod 5411 days ago
I don't know. Perhaps the utter iPod domination was largely a US thing - especially since it went hand-in-hand with Apple coming back from the dead and them not initially having the resources to go global in a big way?

I think Apple has been largely US-centric up until the iPhone, so that could explain why there's a disconnect online when topics like this come up since obviously non-US people will have had a different Apple experience over the last decade or so than those of us here who have been seeing iPods everywhere for years.

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ljf 5411 days ago
Interested to know where 'here' is for you. In the UK ipod did and still does dominate the public perception of modern portable music.
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icebraining 5411 days ago
>Interested to know where 'here' is for you.

Portugal. There were iPods, but as far as I'm aware they didn't dominate the market - in fact, I believe Creative players were more popular.

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saturn 5411 days ago
Well, the iPod certainly dominated in Australia, at least. I have to think for a second to even remember another brand of mp3 player. Ah yes .. the Creative Rio, or Zen, or something. I have never actually seen one in real life.

I would also like to know where you are from. iPod was an incredibly strong brand here. It was basically synonymous with mp3 players. Anything else seemed, and in truth was, second best. I owned 3 or 4 of the things.

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