What has happened to head units?

[klaw81]

The ipod doesnt come and go. It has come and set its place in the world and it is here to stay for a good period of time. The usb 2.0 standard has been around since 2000 - Im not saying its not good technology, but is hasnt changed and therefore you cannot say it 'keeps getting better' (although USB 3.0 is due this year). Ipods trump the USB for storage - 160Gb for Ipod vs maybe 8Gb for a USB stick. More capabilities? None that I can think of.

Both have their strengths, but you cant knock the Ipod just because you dont have one. Its pretty much a USB stick with extras. If anything its the ipod with more storage and more capabilities.

What I meant is that as iPods change with the changing times, the old adaptors and plugs aren't likely to remain compatible. I could have bought an iPhone three times over for the cost of my current phone but Apple have a culture of control in all their products, and while this attitude continues I will never buy an Apple device. </rant off>

USB stands for Universal Serial Bus..the key word there is UNIVERSAL..the worldwide, open-source, benchmark interface for all manner of electronic gizmos. The standard for USB will not change and will remain backwards-compatible for the foreseeable future. That means as improvements are made (the devices that use them, and the data speeds they are capable of), the port increases its usefulness accordingly. I can charge my phone, and power a foam dart launcher from my head unit if I want!

160Gb is nothing, USB can support 500Gb devices if you want, and they won't cost half as much as an iPod either.....just plug in a portable hard drive of your choice. The size of flash drives just keeps going up, and SSD are also gaining popularity.

 

[padrickz88]

When are we gonna get head units with hard drives inbuilt?

sony currently have one it has 1gb(i think) of space in the face of the headunit

 

[WK Woody]

1 GB?! Not good enough. They can cram 8GB into a micro SD card for under $100 so it cant be because of lack of space or price

 

[StoneX]

Pioneer's one from years ago... DEH-P900HDD Car Audio - - Pioneer Product Archive

 

[kopper69]

The only problem with having storage built into the head unit is getting your music on and off easily.

klaw81, if im not mistaken the ipod adaptor cable has been the same for every ipod released, meaning any ipod will work with the ipod adaptor. I cant see apple chaging it any time soon. Yes apple retain a lot of control over their creations. It is their interface, not their specs, that are the reason for their success. They need to retain this control to avoid copycats.

SSDs cannot be popular until they are readily available, cost effective and show some decent size. At the moment you would struggle to get one and would be paying close to $800 for something like 32GB (or half the price for half the capacity). Hard to be popular with specs like that - Capacity isnt their strength. Certainly not a cost effective option to carry music.

Can you really control a foam launcher? I just cant see how you would control it unless you have the carputer.

Can agree though that if you didnt have an ipod, there would be no point purchasing one simply because your head unit supported it - There are better ways to carry a collection of music. If you did have an ipod though, purchasing a head unit with ipod support makes sense.

 

[StoneX]

Yeah, I find the built in hard drive units very slow to put music on... Both the Pioneer on'e i've used copy and encode the music in real time, so you have to listen to ever CD you plan to put on there. That would take hundreds or thousands of hours to put your collection into the head unit.

An external hard drive via USB is what i'd prefer but then the user interface on the head unit to navigate thousands of songs would have to be easy to use.

 

[klaw81]

It's true that SSD is still a long way off, but I predict all laptops will use them within 5 years - the price of all similar technologies has dropped sharply once a few manufacturers start using them. Currently, they are way to expensive (compared to flash memory of the same capacity) to consider.

Yes I can and have used foam rocket launcher in my car - it has buttons on the base for control, but it takes power from a USB port. I really shouldn't admit to that

I would suggest that Apple's success is mainly due to their marketing. Apple have a habit of taking old technology, adding a few cool features and a good user interface, and claiming it to be revolutionary, groundbreaking and fashionable. To their credit, their user interfaces are very good, but they really don't invent much new stuff - they just re-package an existing idea in an interesting and funky manner and market it extremely well. However, I agree that if you own an iPod, having an interface with your car's head unit would be a big bonus.

StoneX, I have a Double DIN DVD player that reads MP3 files off a DVD so I have several hundred songs on one disc. I find that getting the song I want is about as easy as finding it on my PC at home - if you group your songs in folders by artist or genre, and you can see a list on the screen, there's nothing to it. Of course, those with iPods already deal with this too and I imagine they handle it just fine. Anyway, who really has 300gb of music they actually want to listen to all of?

 

[StoneX]

4.7GB is slightly different to 80GB+.

Most iPod interfaces via head units are not easy to navigate, like the iPod is.

 

[Bilbs]

im not saying that none of them are any good, but the one i have now, i got mid last year, it has Blue OEL, 7 band eq, front and rear preouts, sub out, mp3/wma/aac, flip face, sub high pass/lowpass settings, and i paid $300 for it brand new NOT OFF EBAY, it was from a normal retailer, i cant remember the model No at the mom, but to get something similar at the moent, you are looking at about $4 - 500, and i would never buy any H/U other than Pioneer, dunno why, just like them, but why are they moving away from OEL allready? I think it is far better than the old calc style displays that they are going back to

 

[StoneX]

They're limiting features like OEL to certain models so the buyer has to pay more to get certain features... It's marketing. OEL isn't a massively sort after feature, things like USB and iPod are the priority these days.

Blue OEL looks ugly and tacky anyway... Full-colour OEL or segmented LCD or dot-matrix for me