an invention is finished...

[acroyear]

...not when you've added every feature that can be added, but have taken out every feature you don't need.

Question: Did Apple (with iPod and iTunes) invent the idea that you don't actually need a "stop" button anymore?

Certainly "stop" was a remnant of the tape days - to hit stop would also move the heads away from the tape so the magnets didn't rip the tape out of the casing as you tried to eject it.  CD's inherited it but nobody really thought that you didn't need it.  It really became a function of the fact that there wasn't an easy way to say "go back to track one" - or rather, the lack of a feature to allow for real random access made the stop button, as a "reset" function, necessary.  By providing direct playlist access, the Apple products thus showed that "stop" wasn't necessary.

Except it is on most cheaply-built PCs.  When playing a CD in a crappy cd-rom (and there aren't any good ones anymore), the disc continues to spin like mad, usually making quite a racket, until you have to give up and eject the damned thing.

But it certainly isn't on a DVD - how many people *really* use the stop feature on a DVD player?  You don't.  Why?  Because as a reset to the beginning, it means you have to put up with the 2-4 minutes of bullshit "Don't copy my crap" and "I'm going to play my corporate jingle at 10 times the volume of the actual film" screens that you can't skip through...sometimes in 3 different languages (usually for anime with its interpol references).  So you don't bother.  You just pause, or hit menu.  Stop becomes not only superfluous, but actually detrimental.

I wonder if iPod and iTunes would have recognized the ability to ditch the "stop" button if DVD players weren't around to show its futility.

I do note that YouTube's player doesn't have a "stop" - just play which becomes pause.

No, I've not eaten dinner yet.  Why do you ask?

Comments

[neadods.livejournal.com]

how many people *really* use the stop feature on a DVD player? You don't. Why? Because as a reset to the beginning

*blink* On my player, I can hit stop and return to where I was playing before. If I want to utterly reset, I have to take the disk out.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

some newer players do this, but being inconsistent (it only works that way on 1 of my *6* players here in the house) it's not a learnable response. it's too little too late to change our collective reaction to a dvd's stop button, which is to assume it's a reset.

*especially* given that the real reset button, "top menu", never works on any player out there! In fact, my newest player requires going to a menu to try the top menu option since so few dvd's actually bother to do anything with the function.

The point of it, from the manufacturers perspective, was the ultimate (from a customer's perspective) reset - bring me back to the main menu *as if* i've seen all of the pre-show warnings, logos, and previews. Only it's the DVD's programming that enables that and none of the studios bothered, so far too often you just get the same "X" you get if you try to skip through those same screens during disc startup.

[thelongshot.livejournal.com]

It isn't that they didn't bother, it is that they don't WANT you to use it. They want you to see all of that crap before the movie starts, which is why the next chapter button gets heavy use.

[thewhitedragon.livejournal.com]

Mines the same thing, only it keeps track of positions on the last 10 DVDs played. *grin*

So yeah, Joe's argument, to me at least, is illogical.