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I Went to Macworld and All I *Didn’t* Get Was A Lousy WiFi iPod

Posted on January 25, 2007

Well, I didn’t actually attend Macworld but I figured the title worked.

Another year has gone by and we’ve got no WiFi-enabled iPod.  (A $600 iPhone with WiFi doesn’t count.) This feature just seems to fundamental to me, so basic.  Having to be tethered to a PC to download from iTunes or sync your podcasts just seems so against the grain of the everything-mobile world we live in.  And the iPod doesn’t make it easy (for the average consumer) to get content from multiple PCs either; you’ve of course got to have iTunes installed, your playlists defined and optionally your podcast subscriptions configured.  So not only must you be wired, but you are effectively bound to a single PC.

You can’t blame Apple entirely, no one else really has WiFi either.  Sure, the Microsoft Zune has WiFi, but it’s for Zune to Zune sharing only, and it’s a limited-power/range implementation of 802.11 b/g.

All I want is WiFi in my regular 5G video iPod.  If I were designing the feature I’d have the iPod be a full fledged WiFi client with support for running a slimmed-down version of iTunes and the ability to download content directly from the iTunes Music Store or from my PC which holds my entire song/podcast collection.  Note that I’m not looking for iPod to iPod WiFi.  This will just become another conduit for piracy and people are already irritated with Apple’s DRM and the state of DRM in general.  And look how well the Zune music sharing DRM was received.

Why hasn’t Apple done this yet?  I have several theories:

• They don’t have to; there’s no (significant) competition.  And from the beating that the Zune has been getting by the media and through anecdotal accounts, it isn’t a competitive threat(yet).
• WiFi-enabling iPods won’t sell more of them.  Despite my desire for the feature, people I’ve spoken with aren’t holding off for WiFi before buying one.
• The iPod monoculture already has people willing to pay lots of money for the existing devices.  Why reduce margins by adding manufacturing costs?

WiFi iPods will appear eventually, but on Apple’s timeline.

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