Apple says that Sony's walkman capacity claim is misleading

July 8, 2004

Sony recently released its Walkman, a competitor to the iPod which claims to store 13,000 songs, unlike the iPod with 3,000 songs less capacity in double the space.

Apple's Vice president of Hardware Product Marketing, Greg Joswiak said that Sony's advertising is misleading as this capacity is only achievable with an average bitrate of 48kbps. At this bitrate, no audio codec sounds anywhere near like CD quality. If audio were compressed at 128kbps like that used in Apple's 10,000 track rating, the Sony player would only hold about 5,000 songs. Apple's
iPod could just as easily handle more songs as long as the consumer is willing
to sacrifice quality for smaller file sizes per track. GristyMcFisty submitted the following news via our news submit :

SPINSTERS AT Apple have hit back at the Japanese walkperson giant Sony for daring to call its beloved iPod a light weight.
When Sony released its rival to the i-Pod it claimed that it could hold 13,000 songs compared to the iPod's flacid 10,000, even though the total capacity was half the size.

Greg Joswiak, vice president of Hardware Product Marketing at Apple appeared to be besides himself with rage when he talked to MacCentral.

He said that Sony was misleading folks with an advertising gimmick. He said Apple would never ever do that in a million years but he didn't mention the fact that Apple was nabbed by the UK Advertising Standards Authority for overegging the speed of its processors recently. OK.

He said that Sony could only stuff 13,000 songs on the hard drive because its ATRAC3 (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding for MiniDisc 3) compression system could be set at the low rate of 48Kbps which was nowhere near CD quality.

This reminds me of Microsoft's claim that WMA 9 is CD quality at 64kbps and MP3 quality at 48kbps. A similar claim is made even with HE AAC and Real Audio. However, I have yet to hear any codec match its claim even at 64kbps.

Source: The Inquirer