The Olive Symphony: The mega iPod for your stereo

Funny that is has a ''classical music'' target audience to it when this thing can of course be used for any type of music. Looks like a marketing mistake to me. I think it will probably be the logical extension of the i-pod. Pretty interesting...

The story about the Olive product is the most e-mailed story from the NY Times in the past 24 hours. Apparently plenty of people, possibly even some non-audiophiles, are very interested.

Seems silly to me. How different is this from, say, the Escient products? I also think its kind of odd to spend that much on something that is a closed "black box" when you can easily replicate the functionality with known, best-of-class off the shelf hardware. And get something that has much more functionality. Computers for people who don't like computers.

Edesilva, that's the whole point. Hide the internal workings of the computer and design a simple human interface. Do you think any iPod users care what operating system the Pod uses?

Onhwy61--I agree that the Olive represents an attempt to mask a computer with a more friendly face. I guess my problem is that for any moderately technically competent user--like most of the folks on A'gon--its hard to see the value proposition. Face it, if you can operate a browser, you can surely run iTunes. Frankly, your computer probably already has enough horsepower and disk space to play in this game, and all you need is a reasonable interface between the computer and the stereo... A M-Audio Transit is what, like $100 bucks? I guess my $0.02 for anyone thinking of this is that two years from now, you will feel an awful lot better if you make the moderate investment in learning enough about computers to go with a normal platform instead of this kind of box...