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Is Apple trying to trick iPod users?
Steven Hoskins, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, recently told me the following story and I begged him to write it up for us. Basically, he found that Apple reversed the colors of standard AV cables so that people who try to hook their iPods up to a TV using a non-Apple cable assume it won't work:
For years I have used a standard AV cable that connects from the mini-AV-out on most digital cameras to composite video and audio RCA jacks on televisions. The jack/plug color coordination is standard: red and white is for stereo audio; yellow is video.
Apples latest iPod can be connected to a television as well, and I immediately uploaded an iPod movie and plugged in my trusty cable, but to no avail. After re-reading the manual, I turned to Apple's website, where I found a wealth of information on Apple's AV Connection Kit for iPod, about $100, which included a cable to connect the iPod to a television. Hmmm. I was fairly miffed my trusty $30 cable could not do the job.
Noted on its website: "Important: You should only use the included cable. Other RCA video cables won't work. Though other cables may look similar, only the Apple iPod AV Cable works with the iPod Headphones and AV port."
Somehow during later experimentation, I accidentally attached the wrong color plugs of my cable to the television RCA jacks -- and it worked! It looks like Apple has merely changed the standard color scheme to make people believe their regular cables are incompatible. Sneaky Apple.
If anyone has similar results, please let us know. (We don't know if experimenting is dangerous to the devices, though.) I should add that the AV cable is now available from Apple without the full kit for $19.
RELATED:
Wall Street Journal on Broken iPods
A Call to Artists - and to Owners of Broken iPods
Good Luck With That Broken iPod (New York Times)
Pain in the Pod (Chicago Tribune)
Posted by Carrie McLaren on 12/15/2006 | Permalink
Comments
Wouldn't suprise me from a company that's so secretive about it's performance results. BTY, did you see where itunes sales are crashing?
Posted by: susan | Dec 15, 2006 3:17:32 PM
Hey Carrie, that's absolutely correct. All you have to do is swap the yellow and red cables. The $99 iPod AV kit described above is a little more complex--it includes a remote control, charger, and iPod dock, so it isn't just a standard cable, it'll charge your iPod, let it sync with iTunes and bridge the gap to your TV/entertainment center. However, you can save about $10-$14 bucks on the price of the Apple AV cable by using a standard minijack -> three plug RCA cable.
I wrote this up for Macworld in March and one of the readers (who obviously knew more than I did) sent the following response:
Anyway, what I really want to say is that this doing of Apple's is not so sinister as it might seem. They aren't simply trying to trick you into buying an Apple-branded A/V cable. There is actually a very good reason for why they've done it, and that is because if they didn't, then plugging in an A/V cable would require a software switch to switch between A/V output and headphone output.
By doing it the way that they have done it, you just plug the appropriate cable in and automatically get the right output. No fiddling required and never a bad result. This is because a normal A/V cable of this sort has the video signal in the middle. On an audio cable that is one of the audio channels!! So if you don't swap the wires, and you don't set some software switch appropriately, you end up sending audio down the video line, or vice versa. Apple simply did that swap within the cable itself, so the video channel is now the third one, and the audio channels both come first, in the same order as in a headphone cable (which has a shorter connector, and so doesn't touch that 3rd, video channel.)
By way of counter example, my Canon digital video camera has combined headphone and A/V out jack, but you have set in the menus whether or not you have plugged in a headphone or A/V jack. Aside from the need to do this switch, having the setting wrong gives rather unpleasant results.
Also, to Susan, iTunes sales: not really crashing --even according to the analyst who wrote the oft-misquoted report. It was more a case of bad reporting by The Register that got picked up by a bunch of blogs.
Posted by: mat | Dec 15, 2006 7:03:29 PM
I found an off- market video cable on ebay for 95 CENTS that works great - I didn't even have to switch the plug colors!
Posted by: Ryan Dunlavey | Dec 16, 2006 3:34:40 AM
So you had a 30 dollar cable that hooked up to the iPod connector? This story doesn't make sense to me.
Posted by: James O'Leary | Dec 18, 2006 5:24:56 PM
What boggles me is that folks seem surprised that Apple is anything but a cold, hard, corporate money machine. Apple has never shown a particular affinity for its adherents, no more than any other computer maker. I really don't understand how anti-brand loyalty folks routinely show loyalty to a company that is not distinguishable from the rest. Totally perplexing.
Posted by: Tod Brilliant | Dec 19, 2006 1:06:10 PM
Hahah. It's because they market it that way, Tod. They have some really clever people working for them in their marketing division, that's all.
Posted by: Kiwi | Dec 30, 2006 5:19:31 PM
Plug your standard headphones into your mini-AV-out on most digital cameras and you will not hear the sound correctly.
Apple made the iPOd AV jack to be compatible with a standard headphone plug.
AV out on digital cameras is not standard for headphones.
Posted by: Chris | Mar 15, 2007 8:27:03 PM
