OK, some of you people need to do yourselves a huge favor and never attempt to run a business.

And you could change the battery!!

And lol @ this thread, completely destroyed. 

Yeah, but they'd release a firmware update that would either remove the ability to put new music on the iPod, or remove the ability to change the brightness of the screen. 

@Isamu, it was destroyed during the OP =P

I Disagree, Sony was the last company to adopt mp3, Sony DVD players was the last ones to use/adopt mp3, even Sony's "mp3" players didn't use mp3 in the first years.

Sony fanboys thinks that Sony is the best in everything, just like apple fanboys. I'm not saing that Sony or Apple doesn't make good product, but they're certanly not the best in everything.

Sony likes to impose their media (MD, Betamax, UMD, memorystick, etc...) to everyone, same as Apple.

If you want a app to your Ipod/Iphone/Ipad you have to buy it on Itunes.. and only works on one device..

But people just love that, what can I do?

Not really....

Size as number of employees means nothing on the stock market.

When purchasing another company there are only really two ways to do it...

- a stock offer

- a cash offer

or a mix of the two above.

Sony's market cap is 37billion$.

Apple's marketcap is 218billion$.

Obviously Sony can't do a stock exchange.

Even with their current assets, there is no way any bank would loan Sony 220 billion$ in the current economy ( keep in mind that they would have to offer a premium to the stock to get people to sell too so most likely they would need 250billion$+).

Apple could on the other hand make either a stock or a cash offer ( they would have to borrow 25 billion$ or so for a full cash offer and that should not be a problem with their balance sheet).

For such thing to happen there would need to be enough Sony shares on the market and that is not really the case, a decent percentage of Sony share is held by private japanese investors...

There would be a lot of issues with regulators too as the Japanese government would not look kindly on a foreign company trying to purchase Sony.

Finally the market would not like the move and Apple stock would get punished ( because Apple's growth and profit would slow down a lot with the merge...)

Can you provide proof you have the stamina to satisfy over 100K ass-hungry employees?

What does the last to adapt to MP3 have to do with anything?

I am by no means a sony fanboy. I am a fan of Sony Playstation 1, 2 and 3 though. Sony used to be great when they had the walkman and discman, thier entire audio prowess dropped afterwards. Thier TV's were the best you could get, when CRT was king. Now, they are just in the top 5. Sony as a company is a story of a company that used to be king, but has now been demoted to the likes of a prince. Still high quality, but no where near the top.

The reason I think the Sony iPod would do more is that sony has a long history of adding more featuers then their competitors. So if they did come out with it first, and it hit big like the walkman/Apple iPod did, then it would be feature laden up the wazoo. Or did you forget how many extra featuers the Sony Discman had before it became obsolete.

Yes, they do tend to try to cram thier media down people throat, I don't blame them though, look how well it paid off for the few standards that they helped get adopted. That alone is well worth the loss of failed standards.

What have MP3 have to do? To show you that even sony comes with an "Ipod", it would't work with mp3, Sony DVD players was the last ones to use mp3/VCD/Xvid/DVIX/JPEG...

I just want to show you that on that time sony wanted you to pay more on things that can "play" less features, Sony has waking up becouse they are losing market. Now they simply have to add new features on their products, if they don't do that they will be gone.

if anything like this happened it would be the other way around: Apple buys Sony. Apple is a company that is making money with their gaming division, Sony is not. Its still a horrible idea.

Regardless of whether or not Sony could leverage the buyout, I think the could since they are so important to Japan. The market shift this would cause would make for some really amazing competitions.