Digital Home Thoughts: PC World Readers Rate MP3 Players

"Apple's secret to success isn't that hard to figure out, according to IDC analyst Roger Kay. Apple spends more time and money on design than do other companies, he says, and it "has a higher [production] cost in order to deliver greater reliability." However, Creative and Sony received slightly better results than Apple in a couple of measures. Owners of Creative and Sony music players reported fewer problems that would affect their ability to use the device: 8 percent of Sony owners and 12 percent of Creative owners--versus 16 percent of Apple owners--indicated such a problem. (The overall mean on this measure was 14 percent.) Still, Apple kept its customers happier about overall reliability."

The survey is somewhat out of date being completed between April and August of 2004 and has not too many surprises (iPod was top rated, imagine that). What does come to the surface that iPod users are more forgiving of the limitations of their players than most of the other players. The iPod's ease of use seems to overcome the difficulty using the device with Windows and sharing music with your friends that have WMA players. Design and features seem to be more important than other features at least this year. As Creative, iRiver and others get better and easier to use players on the market, I'm sure their ratings will improve and might surpass Apple by next year. Time will tell.