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Why iPod Mini is a smart move for Apple
Ample Dave writes "Ars Technica has an analytical article up right now that looks at Apple's strategy with the (many would say overpriced) iPod Mini. I have to admit that I bought into the rumors of a dirt cheap iPod Jr., and thus was very disappointed when the real price of $250 was announced, but this article changed my mind. It leads me to wonder about Apple's other pricing games. You an see this kind of thing with the eMac and iMac, too."
I'm pretty sure this slight hype about lowering the price of the iPod will still do positive things for Apple. Since they kind of have a stigma of high prices, as many articles as they can get about lowering them will pay off.
I'm as much as an Apple fanatic as most of em; I've got my two Dual G4s, my powerbook, and my 3rd generation 20Gb iPod, and I'd agree with this article completely except for one thing...
It costs an extra $120 to get all the accessories that should come with the damn thing! Why is it so much extra to get the armband, the dock, and the remote? For $250 the should be included.
Yup, right. But Apple is doing other things right, too - like Mac OS X being a solid operating system based on Mach and various BSDs. We run our web and CVS server on OS X and it's cranking along just fine.
The Army reading list
No, all the rumours were based on a 1" 2GB drive that was on the market already. The rumour sites didn't realise that they could go higher than 2GB, and the 4GB drives were announced the same day.
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
No- 2GB. Why? We were all expecting a cheap player. As such, we didn't expect a cheap player to hold too much.
When you are expecting lower prices, you expect lower specs.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
On the other hand, high-end MP3 Players (like the new Rio, whatever it's called) are almost $200, but for another $50, you get a much larger capacity.
I think it's worth it, I'm a student and can't afford it, but I would buy one if I weren't poor.
And no, I'm not a Mac User/Activist
ah, thanks. his response in "that sounds ok" was a little misleading. Having a 2GB increase would seem to evoke a better reaction than just being "ok".
anyway, thanks for the clarification
What a scoop!
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
you've just been upsold by $50
Thats like digital cameras these days.
Only $250! But the CompactFlash is so small as to be stupid. And you'll need a case. And some rechargeable batteries. And an AC adapter. And a docking station. And...
After its all over, you just spent $500 on something that costs $225.
I guess thats the new Bait and switch? Or can you come up with a better name for it? (upselling?)
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Sure you say "I can get 11GB more storage for only $50!!" But that is the geek inside of you, always wanting bigger, better, faster, more.
How many people don't even have enough MP3s to fill the 4GB mini? Answer: A LOT. They don't give a crap that they can have every MP3 in the world in their pocket. They want something easy to carry, and being cute pink helps too.
I have always admired the ipod for its design and interface, but even with as small as they made it it was too big for me so I have been through a few flash players. But come Feb 16, guess which new player I'm going to have....
Also, IMO, the ipod mini is going to pave the way for where the ipod is going. As the 1 inch hard drive capacities go up to the 10, 20, 30 GB range, I can forsee a time when the ipod is discontinued and the mini takes the center stage.
"But does it have OGG?" (Answer: No, and it never will.)
I think the price comparison chart is a bit off, since there are cheaper 512mb players to be found. I got mine at http://www.pcwebshopper.com/mp3.html. No, I don't work for them. Oh yeah, it doubles as a USB drive.
Lasers Controlled Games!
color is not dumb.
Read Robert Scoble on why Apple is locking users into the DRM only one product supports (iPod). Scoble works for Microsoft, for those, who didn't know.
As he states in the article: "Secondly, the iPod is cool. Apple is cool. Is the iPod Mini cool? As a married, Caucasian male in his mid-30s who thinks he looks good with a shaved head, I feel somewhat ill-qualified to judge what is and is not hip." Is he trying to review the iPod, or to tell us he's a member of the Aryan Nation?
I was just looking at an article in the paper about this, and similar devices by other manufacturers weren't very much less, and in many cases had much less HD space. And objectively speaking, they weren't nearly as cool. So I won't begrudge Apple their pricing scheme.
But still, it's not like it's wristwatch-size. When I heard the rumors of a small iPod, I shrugged and said "it's already small." It's like hearing about a new version of Photoshop. I was happy with version 6.
c-hack.com |
First of all, price point comparisons between other MP3 players doesn't really do the iPod any justice. It is over-priced for what you're given yes; but you're paying a premium for ease-of-use, style and of course the brand name. It's an Apple product, designed to work with other Apple products, and I'm sure that it works quite well. I own a 128 Muvo and that's all I need for an Mp3 player really. It's dual-function (128 Mb USB key acts as a USB drive as well), it's copy and paste in Windows for Mp3s and files (no need to install any extra software or drivers like some minidisc players I know of) and it's pretty sturdy. Granted, I got it for free so it's a bit better deal then a 4GB HD for $250 but hey, to each his own.
Secondly, maybe the Apple marketing team thought that a $50 difference was all that was really stopping them from taking hold of the lower market share. I also think that once people start buying more of the iPod minis, it will force Apple to bring down the price of the iPod Majors. I've yet to find 15Gb of music to fill up my player with, legal and quasi-legal. It really is a mind-game. $50 may put some people above what they wanted to spend on a player. If it stops 1000 people from buying other players, Apple just made $250,000 instead of $0.
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
"...but this article changed my mind"
ne, I'm a cheap guy, and still disappointed about the price
Secondly, the iPod is cool. Apple is cool. Is the iPod Mini cool? I too think the iMini iPod is iCool! I want iOne iNow! Just iLower the iPrice to i$199 or lower Steve.
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
not owning any mp3 type player, I would agree. this "market" that apple wants 20% more of, why does it exist? does it exist purely because people want a device that is smaller than the palm of their hand? Or is it that flash based players have fewer moving parts and less chance for damage? Quicker transfer times? It seems like the iPod and other large capacity players are a real market, where this "high-end flash-based market" is irrelevant. i mean, who would buy a Creative Muvo TX for $269 only to get 512MB?
While it's true that the iPod Mini compares well with the other players in the article, they didn't say why anyone would chose the Mini (4 GB) rather than pay the extra $50 and get a 15 GB iPod. Even at $299, the full iPod still compares favorably with most of the other players in the article. So why would anyone buy the Mini?
I've run with mine 3 times a week for the past 4 months and haven't seen any ill effects thus far. Or is there some problem I'm missing?
.sig: file not found
is that is positioned to sell as many as they can to people that will pay $249 for them. When those people run out they can drop the price to $199 and maybe even introduce a 2G at $149. And sell a shit load more.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
The original iPod had 5 GB of storage. The mini iPod has 4 GB for now, but in a year what will it have? This is a new form factor that will become more and more attractive over time. At some point (three years from now?) it won't matter that a mini holds 80 GB and a normal iPod holds 160 GB, the smaller size will be enough of an advantage to go for the mini. At some point the mini will simply be the iPod. Then the larger one will move on to video.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Oh, please. Not every man is design impaired, and color and styling may be among the criteria evaluated in a purchase. When you buy a car, or clothes or whatever do you completely eschew color and design? I doubt it. While the very few will take function completely over form most of us enjoy having something that is aesthecially pleasing besides being of great functional value.
Am I to assume from the tone of your post that if you were to be able to have a girlfriend/boyfriend you would completely ignore looks? :-)
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
The fact that Apple's product is too expensive isn't excused by the fact that all its competitors are too expensive too.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
One of the things I think most people don't consider is that most of the naysayers who point out the $50 difference between iPods are Slashdot/Apple types; people familiar with the tech industry, and most offerings by most major companies.
But consider the average Joe wandering around his local shop, who doesn't know much of about technology, and just knows that he wants a player that can hold lots of music, and isn't particularly large.
He is going to see many tiny music players, all with the ability to play the mp3's he downloads from Kazaa.
Being able to compare a 512MB player, and a 4GB player for the same price won't leave much decision making to be done.
Now me personally, I bought a 15GB iPod recently, because I feel $50 more is a pretty good investment for 11GB. But many people don't understand what a "gigabyte" or "megabyte" are. They see Apple's ad for "1,000 songs!", and think "Hmm, that's a lot of songs."
Vonal Declosion
iPods have always been over^H^H^H^Hpremium priced... welcome to Apple hardware. i would buy one if they cost less than doing a major upgrade (new proc and mobo) to my existing pc hardware
I'm not sure what you are basing this on. It doesn't skip - I run with mine (short distances: 2-3 miles) without any skipping issues. It is a little large/heavy to wear comfortably on a waistband or arm band, though. The iPod Mini ought to cover the size issue nicely.
Who says you can't? The iPod has a 32mb buffer to help avoid skips. That translates into about 20 minutes of music depending on your bitrate.
Teen age girls. They buy a lot of music.
Fashion is important. Small is important; their purses are full of stuff.
Think of it as technical jewelry.
I know girls who are buying all five colors to match their outfits and moods.
I was walking around Best Buy on Sunday and noticed the $200.00 MP3 players, and other their tiny size, I can't imagine someone not wanting to spend the other fifty bucks and get the real thing.
I'm convinced, too, that multiple colors will be more attractive to a broad consumer base than I previously thought. Look how well the colored iMacs have done.
And Apple offers nice discounts to people who attend or work at colleges and universities. If you're such a person, don't forget to check with your college bookstore or electronics store to see what the price is there before you buy an iPod or a Mini. At the school I work for, the 15GB iPod is discounted something like 10%.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
I'm assuming that you DIDN'T read the article? The iPod Mini is highly competitive, what else needs to be said? if you don't want one, don't buy one.
I don't so I won't, but it looks like a competitive product nonetheless.
That was classic intercourse!
>>So why would anyone buy the Mini?
Smaller form factor and colors. For a lot of people this stuff really really matters.
I run and I would much rather carry the Mini, than a full size ipod. Plus, I only have 3 gigs of music, so I really wound't get much more value out of a 40 gig player.
Jeff
30 GB MP3 player, $19 more than iPod mini.
The iPods, mini or otherwise, are overpriced. Plus they go to the form over function route to neglect important things like a door to change the battery.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
I mean, come on! I'd choose the skateboard over the apple branded over-sized suppository.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
It's all been said before, but I'm just one of perhaps many opportunities who were waiting for a $100 model, and simply forgot about it half a nanosecond after the price was announced.
Nobody cares about quality.
Well you're wrong since I do, and I'm certainly willing to the pay the premium if it's something that interests me. I wouldn't think of buying a $400.00 computer or a $9000.00 car since these are items which I use daily and depend upon.
The people who would buy Chinese knockoffs wouldn't have purchased an iPod in the first place so Apple really isn't loosing any sales. The cheap stuff is for the mass-market which is not who Apple caters to.
It doesn't matter how good, bad, or ugly your product is, so long as the public think it's the Next Great Thing (tm).
By pricing it so close to its big brother, Apple have invited criticism of the pricing model, rather than concentrated on the competition. There may be sound financial reasons for it, but given the relative desirability of the two, the larger one wins, *even* *if* it's more expensive.
The competition at this moment hardly matters. The initial comparison is done with the Big Brother, so by the time the competition are arrayed against it, you have 'the crap Apple one' vs 'the high-end' (remember, this is marketing, not reality) competition. Joe Schmoe goes for the 'high end' one, and Apple lose.
It may still be a fantastically successful product. Bet it would be even more so, if they'd docked $20-40 off the price...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Still waiting for the 60 GB iPod.
FrontierLabs Nex 'A ($239) 1Gb Microdrive CFlash USB MP3,WMA,OggVorbis 3.1"(80mm) X 2.5"(65mm) X 0.9"(22mm)
Apparently they're very active in releasing BIOS updates etc.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
The iPod Mini has also had an interesting side effect. Before Apple announced it, everybody thought that paying 300$ for the lower iPod was crazy, and that it was greatly overpriced. Today, most people believe that the 300$ iPod is the best option available, and that it is reasonably priced. Definitely, these Apple guys are marketing geniuses...
sorry, that was meant for grandparent
I do, of course, agree with parent wholeheartedly.
That was classic intercourse!
Asinine, considering that Apple's largest market is America. Also, price *is* half the value eqation.
Its not about the amount of storage. For example, I have a 5 gig iPod. I use it when I travel. It hold up to 1000 songs. I can't listen to 1000 songs anywhere I fly! It give me enough choice for the trips I take. I keep all my music on the desktop at home (10k songs) or on my laptop. I download what suits my mood for the trip and re-arrange things accordinly. Paying 249 for 4 gigs is reasonable if you don't intend to keep your entire music collection on the iPod, which unless you back it up, isn't that great of an idea..... just on man's opinion
# nohup
Right... I would also agree.
However, as Apple says, 20% of the market is people spending $250+ for a 512MB flash player.. and that's the market apple is after. They are not trying to sell this to those who otherwise would buy a normal iPod... because we sould say "50 bucks more for 10 times the space, that's a no brainer"
You can get the Rio Karma for $250. That's a 20gb player. So in fact you can get "a much larger capacity" for $0 extra.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Exactly. Apple made a big mistake by not going the flash route. The market for the regular iPod and the mini is exactly the same. The market for those that want a flash player and HD are completely different. If Apple would have come out with a flash player offering much like iRiver they would have absolutely killed the competition. I would have waited in line for days for one of these players. I was sooooo disappointed when I discovered that the mini was HD based for $250.
I'm surprised the article didn't emphasize the size difference as another factor. Miniaturizing hard-drives and batteries is a large reason both the iPod and iPod-mini cost what they do. If you compare them, you really have to say "you can get 15 gB more for only another $50 and having a larger mp3 player." Not that there is a huge difference size, nor would I consider the iPod to be inconveniently large, but I think Apple is correctly surmising that what difference there is may be enough to convince some people the iPod-mini is the way to go.
If Apple keeps selling iPods at a healthy rate, there will soon be more iPod users than Mac OS X users.
Today, the bulk of new iPod customers run Windows, not Mac OS X.
With the iPod mini opening up iPod sales to more buyers, the balance towards Windows will shift even more. There is no fighting "the great multiplier".
As most Windows users don't seem to be all that fond of Apple's "medical computing" white motif, making iPods in different colors was simply a "must do" business decision.
Very soon now we will see a fundamental shift at Apple. Numerically, they will have more Microsoft Windows customers than Mac customers. Apple will then have to decide what to do with them. Most of them will be early adopters, buying the iPod/mini because it is the established portable music player.
Apple will have to make the choice of whether to port their music/media software to Windows or will face losing most of those customers... who do not want to switch platforms (at a very high cost) just because of a music player.
When there are many "good" music players available in a year or two, these customers will be making the decision to get a new iPod or one of the many newer/cheaper/just-as-good winPods (which will work with many music stores, not just one).
All in all, the digital music market promises to be full of interesting developments over the next 1-2 years as companies jockey for position. Unless Apple opens up their products, ports their products and makes them cheaper, I would think their chances of being the ultimate winner are low. My bet is that most people will not switch computing platforms over a music player.
Without answering the battery/moving parts problem, it then says "However, if your budget is keeping you from snapping up a larger player, or you do not have much of a digital music library to speak of, then a smaller-capacity hard drive player like the MuVo2 or iPod Mini is a better deal than a flash player." But it doesn't explain why. Batteries would be cheaper in a flash player. If you don't have a big library, small capacity flash players are cheaper than the iPod Mini. How is it a better deal?
Bringing this back to Apple, it's not a loss leader because they're making a profit on the player, and then *obscene* profit on the accessories. It's their business model, so good luck to them, but I simply refuse to pay that much for a player. When all is said and done, you'll end up paying probably $350-$400 to make the iPod mini really usable.
What is wrong with selling things with a little more dash and flash? Color beeps? The new beetle? Reminds me of the old story that Motorola enginner were atonished how their beepers starting selling only cuz they offerent different colors. Not some new whiz bang feature.
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I'd still rather pay $50 more for a 15GB iPod
Could you people just put on your marketing hat for a few seconds?
Joe and Jane Consumer do not have more than a few gigs of MP3s, at most. Once you hit a certain point, they aren't looking at the capacity anymore - they are looking at style and price. With the mini-iPod, they are saving $50 and getting better style.
Style = Smaller (until things become choking hazzards)
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
So by your "logic", no one is buying BMW or Jaguar automobiles, instead, they are buying Yugos.
Because, as you say, "Nobody cares about quality."
You're a Windows luser, aren't you?
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
"i realize that some people will be interested in them because of dumb things like color (women)"
Thus speaks a truly socially retarded nerd.
That was classic intercourse!
as a student you get one for 229.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
There is one lesson Apple seems not to learn: people want much and they want it cheaply. Nobody cares about quality.
If that were true, every computer would be an eMachine, every car would be a Kia, and every DVD player would be an Apex.
But no, people buy Alienware computes, cars from BMW, Lexus, Mercedes, Audi, ect, and hi end DVD players from Denon, ect.
Apple is not the only company that concentrates on selling a smaller number of items to people who want quality, and they are not the only company that is good at it.
I have blog like everyone else
I think a lot of people would rather pay $50 more. That doesn't hurt apple at all--in fact, I imagine it is part of the plan. Consider that you are looking at players in the range of $250 and considering the rio, iRiver, ipod mini or one of the many others. Then you have an epiphany and realize the $50 more gets you a 15MB ipod and you go for it. What apple has just done is convinced you not only to buy from it rather than it's competition, but to buy it's more expensive model. Apple changes the environment from 'which brand should I buy' to 'which apple product should I buy'. I think it is very smart. Those extra $50 start adding up pretty quickly even if the minis aren't selling particularly well and the competition--well they've got trouble.
That's one reason I've been eyeing the 20GB one. I'd also like to store all my CDs on there and then box them away. The fact that I can then connect the iPod to my stereo, car, computer, etc... to use as a jukebox is also a major plus. But of course, it's still a bit much for those of us on a student's budget.
Maybe the market's priorities have changed, but the only reason I ever bought my mp3 player a few years back was because it was solid-state and therefore didn't skip - even if you banged it off the walls. I can accept the iPod as cool with a 20-40GB capacity, because it serves a different purpose, but to use the same tech to compete with the solid-state players is to me a little bit of a con.
Maybe "THAT sounds ok!!" was intended...
...A very nice computer for what an iPod costs. I'll never buy one. It seems like a colossal waste of money to me. $300 for what amounts to a walkman? Geez. I'll stick to my $50 CD/MP3 player. 700MB of MP3s per CD. Stick that on your pricing chart. And I can jog with it too.
I like the Jobs quote about Macintosh towards the bottom of the article. "At the critical juncture in the late '80s, when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits." Looks like they're taking profits over market share right now. These prices are obscene.
How many CDs do you think can be squeezed into 4G? Everyone, geek, non geek, wahtever has at LEAST 100 CDs in their collection. Pft.
Blar.
No, rumors were that the mini would be 2GB, and they already had a 20GB model on the market for a while.
- You think the iPod is too big, and the mini is just right
- 4 gigs of music at 192 kbps gives you ~2 days of continuous music. (Calculated here.) That's enough to last a week or so, and with firewire transfer speeds, changing playlists isn't that big of a deal
- You want the newest, coolest thing
- You're an Apple fan-kid
I'm sure I've left off some potential reasons, but those are the ones that came to mind right away.It seems to be basically saying that Apple have a clever pricing system. It has nothing to do with value for money.It does mention that the 15gb iPod Maxi, is only an extra 50 dollars (for an aditional 11gb). Its really quite a pointless article for me in terms of product. Its not going to convince me to buy an iPod mini either just because Apple have an inventive pricing scheme, cunningly designed to encourage would be buyers of flash based players to opt for the iPod mini version.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
If you are using your iPod with a Mac, you can:
Other mp3 players will never do most of that.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
you get much larger capacity in a much larger form factor and a much crappier interface, a much larger weight, and no system integration.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
And I'd rather pay $100 more for a 30GB Creative Zen.
Below you'll find the analysis. First column is number of gigabytes, second column is the size of the device in cubic inches. The third column is the ratio, "storage density". Notice that the Rio Nitrus is the only unit which comes close to Apple.(Anyone know of a way of making columns show up in slashdot posts?)
Forgot to mention that it also has an FM radio and will also act as a voice-recorder and can record off the radio.
A friend has the previous model (Nex IIe) and says that the major problem is that the ability to arrange the songs in different subfolders or to select subsets of them easily is not as handy as in other players (unspecified) that he's looked at.
This is exactly what I thought when I saw Jobs give the keynote. It's only $50 more for another 11 GB in the low end full size iPod. What a rip off.
Then I looked at the size of the mini. It's smaller than a Sony Ericsson T610 phone. "Way too little" *is* what costs more cash in tech. The 1.8" Toshiba drives in a normal iPod aren't exactly going to be cheap. The iPod mini is using a 4 GB 1" *microdrive*. Yet it's not much more expensive than comparable flash memory players.
I think expectations were raised far too high by rumours before the keynote of $99 2 GB iPods. In the UK, we're seeing it priced at 199 pounds "subject to change." I reckon it'll come down in price a bit fairly soon anyway, maybe to $200. Then people might realise what a good deal it really is.
Huh? I have never gotten my iPods (first a 5Gig, now a 10 Gig) to skip while jogging or commuting by 25 year old European (read poor suspension) motorcycle. That is what the 32 Meg of buffer RAM is for.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
Most of the other high-end mini players are just as little, or less, for just as much, or more, cash:
Manufacturer | Model | Price(USD) | Capacity
Apple | iPod Mini | 249 | 4.0 GB
Creative | MuVo2 | 299/199 | 4.0 GB
Rio | Nitrus | 249 | 4.0 GB
iRiver | iGP-100 | 249 | 1.5 GB
Rio | Nitrus | 199 | 1.5 GB
Sony | NW-MS70D Network Walkman | 299 | 256MB
iRiver | iFP-195T | 299 | 512 MB
Creative | Muvo TX | 269 | 512 MB
DigitalWay | MPIO FY-200 | 249 | 512 MB
Rio | Chiba | 199 | 256 MB
iRock! | iRock! 860 | 149 | 256 MB
The iPod Mini gives you sixteen times the storage of a Rio Chiba, for $50 more. Or eight times the storage of the Network Walkman, for $50 LESS. Of course, a chintzy no-name player is gonna be a lot cheaper, but you get what you pay for, and in its class, the MiPod is a pretty freakin' good deal - sort of the Phaeton of small players.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
There are other cheaper hd based players out there.. best bang for buck i have seen is the Classic 10gb player for 120 bucks! Can't verify the quality of it, though.
Because:
A) Like it or not, they're a major industry player.
B) They're a competitor to Microsoft. Possibly the most significant competitor.
C) We need more competition in this market.
D) MacOS is Unix-based, and Slashdot has a Unix-centric userbase.
I thought those were pretty good reasons, personally.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
You can still only (in a normal market) lower your price... So Apple has also given themselves room to add new models at this opening price, while lowering the price on the 'older' models to compete further down the offering--further increasing their market share. One thing that will allow them to do this is increased volume and production improvements. They will be able to lower their own costs as they sell more Minis, thereby opening a place for a lower priced model.
/.--Apple is a hardware company. iTMS is a mechanism for selling iPods. I think this was a very shrewd move. I should think in time for the next Christmas season we'll see a new Mini and the current ones selling for $50 less, cutting further into that flash market share.
Had they started selling the iPod Mini for say $149.99 US, they would not have been able to lower their price without hitting their margins. And--as people remind us regularly on
When the next Minis come out, maybe I'll get a first generation one at the reduced price.... until then, I'll probably upgrade my original iPod (5G) to one of the large ones. But that's because I use my iPod as a way to carry a large percentage of my music Library. My runner friends are already converting to Minis.
And it is cute...
You're thinking like a geek. Extra space? Removable what? These are the responses you'll get from an iPod mini customer. If you show them the larger, white box, they'll point at the mini and say "this one is cuter and smaller". And if you get a savvy ipod mini shopper, they'll say "1700 songs...more than I have or plan on getting".
cat
There are lots of reasons why this will sell. It's in a niche, whether that's because of aesthetics, light weight (e.g. for joggers), or because some people don't have enough music that they would want to listen to at one time to fill any more.
It might not fit into your niche, but that doesn't change anything.
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
In that case, the 512MB USB Flash drive players are WAY out of your reach since the cheapest of them costs about the same as the Mini iPod, but they have a fraction of the capacity (read the article). In the price range in which the Mini sits it is the best deal for your buck by a long shot.
I don't see you making a point beyond "I wouldn't spend $250 for an MP3 player". Don't know how that modded up "Insightful". The fact that YOU aren't that interested doesn't strike me as particularly "insightful", especially coming from an "Anonymous Coward"...
Life is short: void the warranty.
You Wintards are always wanting bigger/faster/more.
How about "better"? How about being willing to pay for it?
For once, the best product is also the most popular product. Suck on that.
Tech manufacturing understands this, "always charge the same price, but improve the product" For the past 20 years you could by an adequate PC for about the same price, the capability simply changed for that price. Notice how a 17" monitor used to cost ~$700 for a top of the line CRT, now ~$700 is top of the line 17" LCD, next it'll probably be a 17" 3D monitor for about the same price. (Granted the price varies and depending upon add-ons or sacrifices, you can do as you like, the rule pretty much holds up. Don't bother to point out a $300 PC can kick the a$$ of a 1984 PC, that wasn't the point.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They'd sell a zillion but then loose a zillion dollars because it's not profitable.
if your budget is keeping you from snapping up a larger player
Any article that uses the phrase "snapping up" triggers the hip-trendy bullshit alarm so loud that it cracks the sidewalk. The same goes for hyphenated phrases like "consumer-savvy" and "memory-hungry."
People "snap up" Tic-Tacs. Not $400 music players.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
umm...Pickups are useful...so whats your point?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I bought into the hype of the cheap mini ipod and I was wanting to get one. I was so sold on the idea of getting an ipod, I dropped $300 on a 15GB model. Oh well :)
My sig can beat up your sig.
What exactly do you mean by : Apple will have to make the choice of whether to port their music/media software to Windows... Apple has done this already unless you mean something else. You use the same music software with your ipod with your mac that you use with your pc.
and no iTMS, either...
To a great many people, 4GB (if they even understand the concept of a gigabyte, some people actually don't bother themselves with such things!) is a number sufficiently high that a higher number is needless. For someone that isn't going to fill 4GB, buying a 15GB player is spending money on features they don't need/want.
However, for many of these same people, small form factor is desirable, as are colors.
It's funny how many geeks don't get that not every potential iPod customer thinks in terms of data storage.
The 2GB model, according to the rumor sites, was suppose to be priced between $99-$129 while the 4GB model was suppose to be $149-$179.
Concerned Onlooker wrote:
Not every man is design impaired, and color and styling may be among the criteria evaluated in a purchase.
While this is true, the small minority of men that aren't design impaired embarrass the hell out of the rest of us.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
You will always find the other MP3 players at less than MSRP and you will never be able to purchase the iPod at anything other than MSRP. Barring farfegnugen freebies, of course. iPod minis are purely fashionable.
would you believe me if i say i have never bought a music cd? i am just not that big into music. however, i did "inherit" my wife's collection when we got married, so we probably have about 5 gigs of mp3s now. not that i like listening to air supply, though.
If you had nuts on your chin, would they be chin nuts?
True. And not only that, they'll just be like, "With the extra $50 I save, I'll just spend it at the iTMS and get the songs I don't already have."
What you (and others) are describing may be exactly the reason to price the mini at $250. If they hold production on the mini down below the levels of the main line, they could make out like bandits in the following scenario: Customer walks in the store looking to spend $250 max on an MP3 player and sees the mini 4-gig as the best deal at that price; they then see the 15-gig iPod at $300 and decide "what the heck" and spend the extra $50.
Not a very original insight. I certainly wouldn't buy one. However, RTFA - there is a market at that price level, and Apple wasn't quite reaching it with the 15 GB iPod. This market apparently doesn't have a use for 15 GB. We could fill up three 40 GB iPods, but I suppose (I hope) we're not typical.
Helium balloons want to be free.
Honestly, I don't think apple really cares which of their models you decide to buy. If they only sell a handfull of minis because people decide to buy the 15 gig model instead, they're still getting your money...
"Secondly, there is apple.slashdot.org It even uses Apple's disgusting aqua theme."
Wow. A catagory of Slashdot devoted to Apple. I mean, they don't have enough users to warrent a whole section with a theme! Next thing you know, there'll be a section for BSD. I mean, it's dead!
Slashdot should really allow you to only look at the sections you want to, like in the settings or something.
"Yarrgh! I be just a paintin' of a head..."
But you were comparing the new mini iPod to the regular iPod. If you compare Karma to regular iPod, the weight and size are the same or smaller. Interface is a personal thing, I prefer the Karma one simply because it gives me many more options to tweak, such as full 5-band parametric EQ, on-the-fly playlist editing, etc etc. It's actually quite similar to the iPod one apart from that.
"System Integration" is vague at best, and meaningless at worst (for instance it means nothing to a Windows user). The simple fact that you can use a Karma with Linux should push it up in most slashdotters' eyes. Plus you have a choice of ethernet port. And it plays vorbis, flac and a bunch of other stuff. You can keep your "system integration" thanks. Karma integrates with _my_ system in ways an iPod never will.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Why buy a 256MB memory module when, for just $50 more, you could buy a 512MB module? Because you don't need the extra 256MB? Because the 256MB module is higher performance, meets your needs better? So it's not just about specs, is it? No, it's about what fits your needs.
For electronics enthusiasts (read: geeks like me), the iPod is our ulitmate music player. The iPod Mini is just the bastard son of our great idol, and lots of people feel compelled to point out "for $50 more, you can..."
Yeah, you can get 15GB for $50 more. 11GB for $50. The next step, 5GB more for $100 isn't so appealing, until you realize that there's a $40 dock (if purchased separately) in that package. Hmmm, but for yet ANOTHER $100 you can go to 40GB! Wow! The biggest, the best, the maximum spec! for only $500!
Perhaps Apple is targeting people who don't check "the specs." Maybe they're targeting people who don't care for white/metal cases. I already have a 30GB iPod, and my girlfriend has a "4th gen" 20GB iPod. They're all we need, and we won't be buying any Mini's. But that doesn't mean that we wouldn't have gotten one, if they had been available when we bought our iPods.
If the iPod Mini had been out last Christmas, my girlfriend probably would've asked for the Mini, because she doesn't care for the white/metal appearance. Blue, I think, would have been her preference. The smaller size would also make it easier to fit into her purse.
The point wasn't to have a 20GB player, but since the 10GB and 20GB were the same size, I decided to splurge. I think she has about 5GB of music on it, and I'm sure she could trim it if she only had 4GB of space. Apple was just a few months late for me, but I doubt they'll complain since they got our business anyway.
...always accurate, never correct.
iPod Mini : $249 / 4GB : MP3,WMA iHP-120 : $340ish / 20GB : MP3,WMA,OGG, Optical In/Out, PNP drive w/ no software in Windows (probably Linux and Apple too), analog and *optical* line in and outs, recording, lyric support, oh, 8+ hour battery life, and FM radio.
Isn't the hard drive in the iPod mini a Compact Flash minidrive?
A 4GB CF minidrive is NOT under $249. Drop that on an iPod, gut it, and you've got the ability to store hundreds upon hundreds of pictures (even at higher megapixels, even in RAW format) for about half the price.
Why aren't more photographers gutting these things?
You probably aren't the target audience for a $250 mp3 player, though, are you?
Apple is all about music these days...
Apple is more about art and the creative side of everyone. Look at their latest product releases. They see gold in people's creative needs and urges. Garage Band, iPhoto, iMovie, etc...all art-related goods. And iTunes of course.
They're going after a niche market, which makes sense since Mac is a niche product (so far.) What makes this space "niche" to date, however, is that is has been largely ignored. Until now.
I'm of the opinion that Apple would really like to have a player like the mini at $99 - they'd more than make up for the price difference in volume, with the added side effect of iTMS and Mac revenue. I think they couldn't do it because of the component costs.
That is pefectly correct. The mainstream public that like pretty things, don't think like geeks.
Best Community for Gaming and Gadgets!
I went to MacWorld to check out the new Minis. I was totally crestfallen at announcement, because I had heard about the lower possible price. I really expected it to be a disappointment when I saw it in person.
In fact, it blew me away. Maybe becuase I had such low expectations, I was very impressed with the look, the very small size, and the feeling of quality that comes from the design as well as the hard drive (which gives it a weight that makes it feel sturdy, however misleading that is). Think of a very small and sleek cellphone and you're starting to get the picture
I do think that style-conscious folks will only want one of these. But I also think that others have many reasons to want one. I have had a 10 GB iPod for a few years, and it currently only holds about 2 GB of music. I've gotten good about creating "Smart Playlists" in iTunes, so that my iPod always has all my top rated tunes, everything that's under two months old, any strange playlist I feel like keeping around, etc.). I don't want "all" my music all the time, and even when using the iPod as a backup for data, that is only another 2 GB or so for the truly critical stuff (I have DVD backup for the rest).
The iPod Mini won't be for everyone, but I can see many people (even geeks who know everything about specs) thinking that this makes good sense for them.
Most of them will be early adopters, buying ... the established portable music player.
Last I checked, early adopters were early adopters because they bought brand new, unproven products, not because they bought established products.
And Apple's plan is not to make people switch platforms just for a music player, it's to give them a taste of the "it just works" Macintosh experience, which may entice them to check it out when (not if) they get fed up with Windows.
If you break it all down like the Ars Technica article does you can kind of rationalize that it's a good value, but nothing stands up to the fact that if they just took the current iPod and dropped a 4GB drive in it, it would have been much cheaper. The iPod is already perfectly designed and plenty small for 99% of people. I bet with the saving in R&D they could have sold the 4GB full size iPod for $149. Hell, they could have even added colors to it. It would have killed ALL competition including portable CD players. Complete market dominance.
I love Apple but they are still going for the margins and the bleeding edge design. When are they going to realize that when you already have far superior design you don't have to keep going. Rest on your laurels and innovate OVER TIME instead of killing the markets you're leading in up front.
- Lightweight, metallic case
- Teeny form factor
- USB2 or FireWire interface
- Backlit LCD
- Easy navigation/interface
And so on. It seems like every player on the market gets maybe four of the five, except for Apple, which nails all of them. And Apple crushes the market. I ran into the exact same thing last month when I was shopping for a laptop: want one that has the best 3D graphics card (ATI MR 9600 Pro), thin profile, light weight, beautiful LCD widescreen, WiFi, bluetooth, metallic case, etc? You have but one choice, my friend. I realize maybe Apple has a brilliant, one-of-a-kind group of innovators dreawming up all these great products. But it shouldn't take a world-class engineering team, or even a particularly brilliant one, to simply knock off all their products and give Apple a little healthy competition.I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
cmdrtaco now runs OS X. :)
Will Stokes Album Shaper http://albumshaper.sf.net
it has a 32 MB buffer so that encoded music just gets loaded (mabye 20 seconds) and the drive spins down. that is how the battery life stays up.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Apple will have to make the choice of whether to port their music/media software to Windows or will face losing most of those customers... who do not want to switch platforms (at a very high cost) just because of a music player.
Yeah they really should port iTunes, oh wait! They did! iTunes for windows
And why should they all the sudden make a change in their business from being a niche player to something that's doomed to fail?
I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
Fact is, the hulking, plaid-wearing, sports-hat-doffing lot of you are far more embarassing to us than we could ever be to you. Still you've all lowered the Lady's expectations, so its easy to please, when we show up with well manicured hands and a clean shirt on. I suppose we should thank you for that.
In all reality, your response is more insipid and insulting than I'd expected when I clicked downstream. Next time you roll your eyes at a well groomed, aesthetically sensitive male just remember... maybe we're not the over-sensitive, shallow ones.
Could you people just put on your marketing hat for a few seconds?
That wasn't the point, though. Sure, someone that's been looking at flash-based players might see the Mini iPod as a good deal, or any of the other devices using 1" 4GB drives, for that matter. To the tech people, though, it looks like a rip-off when you can have a 15GB drive for $50 more. Of course, 6-12 months ago the same people were saying the iPod was a rip-off anyway, because you could get hard drive-based players from other companies for less.
It doesn't really matter what market they're going for, it's obviously not those people. It's not me, either, because I'm not going to spend $500 for a player that can't hold all of my music (40GB? Not nearly enough). I wouldn't even spend $500 for a player that *could* hold all of my music, yet at one time I was considering spending much more for a player that could hold all of my music and fit in my car, but now I could probably get a CD-based player for my car that reads MP3s from CD-Rs, which would be perfectly fine for my car if it had good enough skip protection.
Marketing hats are fine, but everyone (including the people commenting they don't want one, which also includes myself) needs to realize that Apple's aiming at 20% of the market they don't already have, and that still leaves ~40% of the market that Apple's not reaching for one reason or another. In another year or two Apple may look towards picking up another 20%, but for each chunk of the market they bring in, they have to spend more to bring in another chunk of the same size, so eventually they'll stop trying to bring in more of the market and continue to ignore some percentage of possible users.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
I can never think of anything sufficiently scathing to say when somebody busts out a generalization like the OP. He had a decent point, too, so it's a pity it got lost behind the idiocy.
-Carolyn
Like Daddy always said: if you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit.
I received a 20GB iPOD as a gift from work. I work on Windows Linux and MAC. I use it for Music but also have used the drive as a transfer disk. I can connect to the windows machine and the Mac using Firewire and USB 2.0. I have 15GB (beyond the music I have) to use for transferrs and storage. Also I like the ability of using MP3 and AAC and still be able to record to CD's without having to figure out how to get around the WMF file format that will not play on other players not locked to Windows. It is somewhat expensive but it is alot smaller than a external HD and has more capacity than a flash device.
There I said it, dont hate me for being Handsom and Rich
I can't use my sig - my computer can't read my handwriting.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
*ahem* It occured to me that 'doffing' might mean "to remove". I meant "wearing"... or some equally witty synonym.
I'll say it again. Apple is a premium hardware company, like BMW or Mercedes in the auto industry. All do a good job of marketing and selling a premium product. If Apple's marketshare of portable music players falls, which it will, that's fine because they know how to operate with low market share.
Sure BMW could sell more cars if they dropped their price, but that's not their business model. Market share is not Apple's core business model. The are many comments in this thread that would sound odd if you replace Apple with BMW, because we all accept that BMW sells a premium product. You should accept the same with Apple. Note here that premium does not mean high end or better. It just means premium, something consumers are willing to pay more for.
Yes. The iPods minis are overpriced, and they have their limitations. It would be foolish to argue otherwise. However BMW stills sells cars, and apple will sell iPod minis. Is it a catagory killer, like Jobs suggested in his Keynote? No. Are they horrible products? No. They will sell and make Apple money.
"Oh, come on, please. Who really has more than 4 gigs of music?"
"Uh, me, and any of my friends who listen to mp3s."
"Well, you're all egotistical freaks with abnormally large music collections!"
It's like this: the mp3 landscape is changing rapidly. As much as it's become hackneyed to say it, iTunes, the iPod, and the iTMS have had an explosive effect on digital music. Heck, without either of the other two items, iTunes alone is among the most intuitive and easy mp3 ripping software currently available, if it doesn't actually have the top spot. Once people with laptops discover how easy it is to rip mp3s, they all have the same reaction: to sit down with a big stack of their CDs, and rip the whole thing to mp3.
But, just for the sake of argument, let's look at some numbers. I have 2140 songs currently ripped to mp3, for a total of 10.26 gigs. Let's round the numbers down a bit, and say that averages to 4.5 megs per song.
Assuming a dozen songs per album (pretty safe, if my collection is any indication), you're looking at less than 75 albums ripped before running out of space. 75 albums is nice, but it doesn't come close to the collections of anyone I know. So, in other words. 4 gigs is easily enough to store your favorite stuff... but for most people, it's not going to work for everything.
"...in the long term they will be failing." Long term here being what, 5 years? How many portable audio players, CD, Tape, MP3, etc, have a product life cycle of 5 years? Zero. Sure, the Walkman has been around forever but it certainly hasn't remaind the same product for the past 25 years, or even the last 5 years. Portable CD players 5 years ago didn't know what MP3's were. Now, even the inexpensive ones play MP3 encoded discs.
USD30 mp3 players? Maybe eventually and at that point, Apple and all the other device manufacturers will have a new product with new features that people will gladly pay a premium price for. 10 cent downloads? Riiiight, that will happen....maybe with indie music, but never with mainstream, RIAA endorsed/encoded, DRM'd music. If you've ever read any type of financial article about iTMS, you'd know that it is a loss leader to sell iPods, cited here. Those songs will not be less than $0.99 for a long time, maybe $0.69 on sale, or something to that effect. Yeah, yeah, $0.79 at some of the other sites, that's got them where in market share and profitability? $0.10/song gets you what? In legal trouble with the music industry, and a real quick sucking sound of your VC funds because for ever song you sell, you lose $1.00 or so.
Apparently Mercedes-Benz, Giorgio Armani, and Rolex have never learned your lesson about "Nobody cares about quality." I know I do, which is why I bought an Apple Powerbook G4 instead of some POS HP/Compaq. Does this make me biased toward Apple? No. I bought the better product for my needs and the comparable Dells, which I do not believe have better quality or service, were several hundred dollars more and did less than my PB. I also don't shop at Walmart because of the low quality of much of the items they stock. Obviously, Walmart is doing something right to become the number one retailer in the world, but I still refuse to shop there and a completely separate discussion. I don't buy Kia's because I believe that they are lousy automobiles. My point here is that many people, including myself, care about quality.
I'm not quite sure what universal law of economics you are talking about, unless you have some odd perception of the supply and demand curves. If there was an economic law that stated that the cheapest product wins the most market share, we'd all be driving Kia's (or taking public transportation), doing all of our shopping at the dollar stores, buying clothes at the salvation army, and buying old computers off eBay as "upgrades."
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
Well I do live in Florida, and I see plenty of SUVs out there. However, I've found an interesting and annoying shift in the population SUV drivers.
Initially, all SUV drivers were male and complete assholes on the road. They certified this before allowing them to buy, it seemed. They were even REQUIRED to pass you under all circumstances, regardless of whether or not they actually wanted to go any faster after passing.
These days, I see a very large portion of SUV drivers being middle-aged women, who frankly act like road obstructions on the fast highways. As any large vehicle inhibits your view in a car, you either want them easily passable or just simply out of the way. These newer SUV drivers are just too annoying.
In any case, I see SUVs as a vehicle whose sole purpose is showing off or being a prick on the road. Think about it... If you need to carry lots of people, there are minivans. If you need to haul or tow crap, just buy a damn pickup truck. If you absolutely must do off-road, just get a damn Jeep or HumVee.
The price seems cheap to me, A 4gig 1" hard drive costs more at retail than the whole Ipod does. People with high end digital cameras are buying the Creative Nomad Muvo2 4gb at $299 just to take out the hard drive and either tossing the player, or replacing the 4gig drive with a one gig drive.
Although I admit: I'm glad Aston Martins exist, even if I can't afford one.
perhaps if you went by suggested retail prices you could come up with a chart of competitors that looks like the one the author has at the beginning of his article. however, unlike apple devices its fairly easy to find mp3 players that sell for drastically less than the MSRP which, when comparing store prices, could then be added to the list to (then) point out why apples prices are ridiculous. to wit:
RCA Lyra Jukebox (40gb) : $260
Rio Karma (20Gb, ogg support, ethernet) : $267
Samsung Napster (20GB,line-in,fm transmitter) : $260
Dell Digital Jukebox (15gb) : $249
(source: cnet.com)
and of course we could go on and on. 4GB for $250 that *actually sells* for $250 is absurd. competitors are judged by the price at which it can be purchased *and* features. going by MSRP alone is pointless, especially in apples case.
If we're not supposed to compare the iPod Mini to the iPod, perhaps it shouldn't be named, you know, the "iPod Mini."
-W
All unfair meta-mods are now being meta-meta-modded as retarded.
My wife and I have *maybe* 80 CDs. But I sure as heck don't listen to her musicals, and she doesn't listen to my classic rock.
/shrug
With 4-5 years of patient work, we also have a good MP3 collection that covers almost everything we want but is only about 3 gig. That includes 160 kbps rips of the CDs that we want to listen to any more. We've switched now to iTunes for MP3s (via burn and rip) when they carry what we want, and we're quite happy.
All that said, my wife wants the full-sized iPod for her birthday this week anyway.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
The issue is not skip protection. The issue is damage to the unit. No hard drive that I am aware of was meant to be bounced up and down for an hour or more.
I am frankly surprised at all the people who have responded to this, "D00D I RUN ALL TEH TIME WITH IT NO PROB". You can use a stack of running ThinkPads as a Reebok Step replacement, too... for a while.
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
The added cost of the cable doesn't actually add that much, but it does push the price past a significant psychological barrier. There are some people for whom $300 (or more) is simply too much for an MP3 player, no matter how much better the deal (in terms of price/storage ratio) than a $250 player.
You would be talking a major loss leader then.
Your scenario assumes that Apple makes more profit on the 15G than the 4G. Which is possible, but not likely. If Apple were making a large profit on the 15G, why not just drop the price $50 and make it back through quantity? Now they've spent a lot of engineering time, manufacturing time, ad space, and patience of Apple fans to sell a product that noone will buy in favor of something more expensive with a (possibly) smaller profit margin.
There's more to the iPod than it's storage capacity and physical size.
And I don't mean the intangible things like the "cool" factor.
The interface works well for the task at hand and is intuitive enough
that it all of it's features can be easily learned and enjoyed without
a great deal of study, by the majority of it's customers.
It also feels good. Smooth and solid with your hand falling to the
controls almost perfectly.
The rest of the total package, iTunes and the Music Store also are
well integrated, reliable and intuitive to the majority of customers.
You're saying that all of that has no value?
The smaller size does not appeal to me, although i realize that some people will be interested in them because of dumb things like color (women)
Yeah. All those cars on the road that aren't white must be driven by dumb women too! Guys would never fall for that crap. Heck, some colors even cost MORE than others and they still sell! It must be the women....
hahaha. Nice troll.
That must be why Apple went out of business in the early 80s instead of successfully selling expensive, high-quality products for the past 20 years.
Which means that the only logical conclusion is that the iPod Mini is heavily over-priced for its specifications.
If they actually set it to a price that didn't have such a high profit margin, they'd not only compete with the flash based players, but actually thrash them to the point that anyone who did buy a flash one would either be wasting their money or have a very specific need.
This has nothing to do with trying to set a price point in line with another market. It's about getting a massive margin on a new product. Nothing more.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Just because I have a few hundred CDs doesn't mean I've ripped them all!
:P
I have like 6gb of MP3s myself... I don't like every single track on every CD I own, so I keep things pared down I guess.
Call me simple.
What percentage of iPod customers would want ethernet, or know what to do with it?
that would be the integration part ;-)
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Well wait a minute, how do you know it never will? All they need is a software upgrade...
there is no 1 inch 20 gig hard drive, so the form factor is larger.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Exactly:
m.m.
Why pay $250 for a mini iPod when you can pay as low as $239 for a Creative Zen Xtra with 30GB of storage capacity! Plus the Zen comes with a longer battery life, interchageable battery and better sound quality. Style over substance?
Look at the transcript of Apple's latest conference call. The sales of iPods are in the millions, far outselling Mac OS X.
And this is without the iPod mini factored into the product line.
At the time it was a 10GB model. They upped it to 15GB to make the difference greater. Otherwise nobody would have bought the 4GB at $249 when 10GB was $299. Marketing is a strange beast. Ick.
Not a very original insight.
Sorry, I'll try to be more insightfull next time. Your post though is just dripping with insight!
However, RTFA - there is a market at that price level
Unlike 90% of other slashdotters, I DO RTFM. And it didn't convince me at all. It seemed to be more of a "no really...there's a market...guys? Fellas? Come on, there's a market..." kind of piece.
But let's face it, if I personally were going to buy something that for only 50 lousy bucks more I could get almost 4 times the storage...guess what I'm going for? Even if I don't have a use for the extra 11 gigs, I "may" some day.
But hey, what do I know. I don't have any original insight.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Except that if Apple had priced their product competitivily against their own models, rather than again the solid state devices (which themselves are equally over-priced) then Joe and Jane could have saved 100-125 bucks.
I'm sorry but the excuse "but we're pitching this product at this market" isn't a valid excuse for the fact that their profit margins on the iPod Mini are excessivily high.
Jo and Jane may not need or spend the extra 50 bucks, but at the same time, that isn't a reason to screw them with the lower end model.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I have heard the $50 price differential - to the downside when compared with the flash MP3 players and to the upside when compared with the 15GB iPod - argued to death. (Personally, I side with the argument that being able to buy an additional 11GB of memory for only $50 more makes it a no-brainer to go with the 15GB iPod. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I have the 40GB 3G iPod, which I love.) In my opinion, the problem with the Mini iPod is not the price, it is the design. First, the look itself is, in my opinion, very staid and ho-hum. When I first saw the iPod, or the silver G4, or the Cube, or the flat panel iMac, I was completely blown away because each design was so different and better than anything else out there (even if the products themselves, such as the Cube, left something to be desired). I don't feel that in the slightest with the Mini iPod. It doesn't even look as good as the original iPod - as if Apple has taken a step backward rather than forward. There is nothing really novel or unique about its design other than its size - and it is really not that much smaller than the 3G iPod (especially the 15GB and 20GB models). Second, the brushed aluminum looks dated to me, especially in the colors they offer it in. Why not offer a Mini iPod in the same-colored white enclosure as the original iPod? You know you have a huge market for the original iPod, why not exploit those in that market who love the original iPod but would prefer the smaller form factor? Second, does anyone remember the infamous "black iPod" that was actually a photo of the white iPod in the dark to show the backlighting? Personally, I would love to have a black iPod. Apple had to be aware of the rumors about that black iPod and the excitement about it. Why no black Mini iPod? Third, as others have pointed out, you're not really talking about spending $250, you're talking about spending $350 or $400 to get the armband, dock, remote, and case you really need to get the most out of the Mini iPod. Maybe that's not technically a design issue and more of a packaging issue, but if they had included all of that stuff it would be a more complete "design" or "package" - whatever you want to call it. Some people will prefer the Mini iPod just because of the smaller form factor. However, if they had simply made it cooler looking and an clear forward design evolution from the original iPod, they probably would have had a huge hit on their hands. These things may still sell well due to the Apple market's loyalty and the disposable income of people who will want a Mini iPod in addition to their larger original iPods, but I think Apple missed a golden opportunity here. Either improve the design and sell it at $250 or put out a lackluster design like this one and sell it at the $100 or $150 the rumor sites were talking about. Add support for other music compression formats and you are talking domination of the MP3 market for the foreseeable future. Hell, Apple has never gotten it 100% right in the past, why should anyone expect them to now?
I do agree it'd be great if they all came with all the accessories, though. It's not just the mini; the 15 GB doesn't come with the dock, remote or case.
Here's the really interesting "hidden outrage": A few months ago, when the iPod line was 10 / 15 / 30 and the 15 was the $399 midrange instead of the $299 low end, the 15 did have all those extras (since Apple includes them with the midrange and high end, while making them optional for the low end). Apple sells each of those items for $39 (overpriced, but there you go). That means that a few months ago one could have bought a 15 GB that included all the extras for $399; now it would cost you $416, or $17 more, to get the same stuff (!), since you buy the extras separately - yet remarkably, they achieved this not by actually raising the price of anything, but by simply improving everything - they just replaced the midrange 15 with a 20, and then the low end 10 with a 15, while keeping all the other specs (prices and included extras) the same. Pretty damn clever of them, if you ask me...
Why would someone spend $250 for 4 gigs in a iPod Mini, when I can by a brand new Dell Dimension 2400 with 40 gigs of space on it for only $400! That's only $150 more dollars for 36 more gigs of memory!
It's ridiculous that they could charge that much for something with no storage in it at all. I don't care if it's a little smaller. It's absolutely a crime that they should even insult us like this.
the mini is not really intended for people with mini collections of songs.... the IDEAL purchaser of the mini is someone who already loves their iPod and wants a smaller one for the gym or some use that doesnt require a month straight of music without repeating it. Apple has said that. they are going after the flash players with the mini. most flash players are used by people who only need their device for short times or don't carry much music. the same people that carry 10 CDs in their car. with USB2/Firewire you can swap songs/playlists REALLY fast. you can make your gym /running mix for the day/week/month and swap it fast.
when you read the article they explain all that.... and they show that the price is on target with flash players. when you see it as having 8x the capacity for an equally priced mini player from someone else, as opposed to "$50 for 11 more gigs" then it makes sense.
I definitely agree with your points, but I'd like to point out that in recent years Slashdot has moved mainly toward a Windows-centric user base. It started out as heavily Linux biased (CmdrTaco frequented IRC channel #linux96 and #linuxos on EFNet). But as soon as it got popular, it started attracting the general computergeek crowd, which as we all know, is Windows users.
UNIX users may be a very vocal minority, but the vast majority of people use Windows around here.
As an aside, I'm a "born-again" Macintosh user, having ditched Mac OS after being sucked into the x86 world during the early 90s. After using Linux and BSD exclusively as desktop machines for the better part of a decade, I moved to OS X and couldn't be happier.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
They don't actually have to make more profit to make the prospect attractive - they just have to make around the same profit and produce fewer minis.
Then again, I could be completely wrong. I'm open to that concept as well. :)
...But you were comparing the new mini iPod to the regular iPod. If you compare Karma to regular iPod, the weight and size are the same or smaller...
Please try to keep up. I was comparing the Karma with the REGULAR iPod, not the mini. That's because the parent (or grandparent or whatever it is now) was comparing the mini iPod to the REGULAR iPod.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Very refreshing concept. Why can't other Slashdotters do the same?
True story.
Maybe the G2 of the mini iPod will be an improvement. So far each generation of the iPod has gotten better. I am waiting to see one in person before passing judgement.
P.S. How could you leave the G5 tower out of that list?
Lasers Controlled Games!
RTFA. This iPod mini is not in competition with the iPod, stop comparing them. Just because you don't see an added value doesn't mean nobody does. It is competing with flash players, which are approx. at the same price!
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Haha. Of course the iPod Windows customers are using iTunes for Windows. Do they have any choice?
When I said "music/media" software, I was referring to the other pieces of the "what do I do with my music?" puzzle.
You know that thing called GarageBand. Soundtrack. iMovie. etc.
If Apple is going to the "digital hub" company and most of Apple's customers are using Windows, then it forces them to make more decisions and choices than if they simply offer iTunes. Just iTunes alone on Windows is a very meager digital hub and likely will be non-competitive with offerings from Microsoft and other vendors.
i agree that the average consumer would have little or no use for the ethernet capabilities of a rio, i was just highlighting a nerdy nice to have...
my main point was in the link, suggesting that the "internal, non-replacable battery of an iPod has a lifetime of only a year and a half..."
and before anyone asks, no, i cannot validate that claim, and i have not checked myself as to how true it is that the battery cannot be replaced...
but if that allegation is true, then that just sucks... and when the time comes for me to buy one of these players (and that time is soon with tax returns coming), that fact and that fact alone would dissuade me from even considering an iPod...
(2 cents)
****--- A fortune cookie once told me the meaning of life...so I ate it. ---****
Maybe they were expecting a 2gb drive at a low price, and when they heard it had a 4gb drive, realised that this was going to cost a little more than they thought...
The strategy of the iPodmini makes perfect sense.
.vs price;
Currently, the iPod owns the mp3 market in the $300 to $500 range.
Apple wants to at least retain, better yet to grow, that share.
They see the market and consumer perception as features
"If I pay a little more, I can get this! -or- If I pay a little less, I can still get that."
If Apple announced a player in $125 to $200 space, they would now be
fighting the market on several fronts. $125 on down, $200 on up.
Plus the current battle of $300 on down. (there's not much competition
in $500 space).
By moving their front down slowly, now iPods are in $250 to $500,
they limit the number of competitors. Look at what many of these
discussions are about; "For only $50 more, I can get different, better iPod!"
(which is fine as far as Apple is concerned).
As long as they were bothering with moving down to $250 space, they
might as well have offered a new, but similar design instead of just selling
the current iPod design with a 4Gb drive. More market potential that way.
After the iPodmini establishes itself as the leader in $250 space, Apple will
make the next move down to $200, and attempt to take that market. If they
can't meet expectations in units shipped and profits earned, that's where
they will stop. If they do well in the $200 market, maybe then we'll see a
$150 iPodmicro.
I predict that they'll sell all of the mini's they can make and in number of
units shipped, it will be Apple's most popular product ever.
I am referring to Apple's strategy of becoming a "digital hub". iTunes alone makes for a rather meager digital hub.
If the bulk of Apple's customers are Windows users, then it would make sense for Apple to make their "digital hub" available to Windows users.
I would expect there to be considerable interest from the Windows customer base in "doing stuff with music". GarageBand, iMovie, Soundtrack, and other Apple "digital hub" apps are likely to be wanted by Windows users. This will especially be true if Apple-style DRM is needed to utilize Apple content outside of iTunes.
The problem I have with the analysis and with Apples decision is that it looks at the market as a static thing. "we dominate the 30% of the market that is high capacity hard drives... lets go after the 20% that is small form-factor flash memory". Sure, that makes some sense as far as it goes but it doesn't recognize the revolutionary potential in this market that would grow the market as a whole exponentially and make all those market-share numbers completely irrelevant.
Right now MP3 players are a cool gadget for geeks. I think the market and the technology is getting ripe for the equivalent of the sony walkman to explode onto the scene. The person that comes out with the right product (easy to use reasonably high capacity MP3 player), in the right form factor (iPod sized is good, doesn't have to be smaller) at the right price (no more than $150 IMO) is going to blow away all the competitors and enter the true mass market. Steve Jobs should have figured out that magic price-point and told his engineers that meeting it was the absolute #1 priority.
Whoever this "winner" is that first gets the right product at the right price will also set the standard that the rest of the market will have to adopt. Since Apple has chosen their own standard (m4p) and all the others have chosen another (WMA) they HAVE to win to stay in this game over the long haul.
I'm hoping Apple sees this and that the only reason they didn't go for that lower mass-market appeal price-point is that it is still impossible to meet and they are just trying to marginally grow their market and secure their position in the meanwhile with the mini. I hope they have this magic product already mostly figured out and are just waiting for the components to come down in price.
and thats just for the battery!
This Sig for rent.
I was also disappointed that the mini was priced - in my opinion - so high. I love Apple's ease of use, and for 150 or less, I would have bought one.
Sure, I can see why Apple prices their products so high, but it would be nice to see them look at the low-end buyers sometimes.
For example: I've dealt with a lot of companies (newspapers mostly) who would switch to a Mac office if they could only purchase cheap terminals. Since the cheapest option from Apple is the eMac, they decide to go with Win machines instead and save a bunch of money.
If Apple could skip the fancy casing and just crank out some super-cheap beige boxes (maybe sell them only to businesses or in bulk), they could make a killing in the business world and bring their market share up.
Well, the other side of the "accessories sold seperately" coin is - you could get stuck paying for items you don't want or need, if it's all bundled in at one price.
I'd never use an armband with a portable music player, for example. I tend to put them in my inner coat pocket in the winter, and other times, just leave them in my car, on my desk at work, or wherever I want to use them.
Even the remote, which I thought was a "must have" option for my iPod at first, is little more than a toy to me now. (As often as not, I use my iPod to listen to music in my car - so I can't make use of their wired remote in that scenario anyway. I just have a Griffin iTrip plugged into the top of my iPod.) It's fine for when you're actually using the earbud headphones -- but I don't find it that much more of a problem to just reach down and use the iPod's controls themselves for volume or to skip tracks.
As they say, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." When you buy something with "free bonus accessories" in the box, you can be sure you paid for them in the price of the item.
Once again, a public service announcement for the Slashdot crowd:
Not everyone is a geek!!!!
Thank you, and have a nice day.
Mpuls3 CF MP3 Player & USB 39.00
Compact Flash 1 GB 262.00
__________________________________
301.00
So 1 GB or 1/4 the memory on the Apple except as removable memory based on the most widely used standard.This for 50 bucks more. Or you get twice the memory of the competing Flash based players.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
There are well over a billion PC's out there. Pretty much everything in the portable digital music player market (which is only a few million units so far), is "early adopter". Mainstream people do not have a portable MP3/AAC/OGG/etc player. Mainstream people do have a PC. To mainstream people, "pay digital music" is just at the beginning. It is not something well understood and used by the bulk of PC owners.
Currently the iPod is the "established early adopter product". It is established because it's been out a while and has a lot of marketing behind it. It's still early adopter because of what I just mentioned above.
As Apple sells more iPods and iPod minis to Windows users, there will be more pressure on Apple to make their "digital hub" available to Windows users. I don't think many Windows users are going to pony up the big bucks just to switch to Mac. Most of them probably can't afford a Mac. So they are more likely to dump the iPod/mini/iTunes and switch to platform that works will all the Windows software for working with content. It will be interesting to see what happens when Windows users realize they are locked into iTunes forever (without cheating the DRM system) for the music they buy from the iTunes music store. There's a lot yet to be discovered which is why this whole market is "early adopter".
Only tangentally related, but it seems silly to spend $19 on a cable for USB2 when you could add Firewire to your computer for $8 including the cable, and have it be useful for so much more....
After it came out, I heard many people suggesting that Apple wouldn't merely sell a lot of them, but it would sell a lot of miniPods to people who already have iPods - people who want something small to take jogging or to the gym or something.
The world is full of people with different needs and requirements. Apple's targetting a different niche (people and function) with the miniPod to that of the iPod's. That's quite reasonable.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I see SUVs as a vehicle whose sole purpose is showing off or being a prick on the road.
... damn near perfect.
That's because you don't do anything fun with your vehicle. Let us consider for instance paragliding, where generally we'll be shuttling five-seven people up to launch, each with 50-75 pounds of gear between wing, harness, etc.
Minivan? No minivan will make it up to launch without leaving a trail of parts carved out from underneath behind it. And very few have the horsepower to get that load past steeper sections without people getting out and walking, anyway.
Pickup? Not enough seating room, and your gear will get pretty damn dusty in the back, which damages the UV coating on a paraglider right quick, which makes it porous, which makes you a lot more likely to die.
Jeep? Not enough space. Three people with gear, tops, and that's pushing it.
HumVee? Too big for mountain trails with sharp switchbacks, H1 and H2 both.
Midsize SUV, like for instance my Isuzu Trooper
Mercedes is a luxury brand that currently ranks 26th in the world for quality manufacturing (based on defect rate etc).
You can get a Neuros 20gig for $200. That's an upgradable 20gig player with built in FM transmitter.
And open source firmware / software.
So in fact you can get a 'much larger capacity' for $50 less.
Not to mention when the Li-Ion battery dies, it's $12 to replace, as opposed to the iPod, which costs about $106 to replace.
And Apple got your money either way. Oddly enough, they're not really worried about losing mini sales to themselves!
No it wouldn't make any sense because there is no profit in that for them. What would be the benefit of giving windows users iphoto, imovie, ect. all for free? Sure you could say they could charge for it but that would defeat their whole marketing attempt to motivate people to buy Macs. ITunes sells iPods and online music, none of the other programs add to the purchase of additional Apple products.
I am sure there are many people who switched over because they were influenced by the ease of price tag of the iLife package. Keeping their award wining programs on the Mac side gives them weight to point a finger at the Windows world and go, "well, why not switch over to a Mac and make your life easier."
But surely for runners, what is more important is the removal of moving parts, *not* that you need something smaller than a standard iPod?
I mean, that is what I see as the reason why people still buy the solid state devices, when you can get reasonably small, not much more expensive drive based units anyway.
Just as the battery issue has been (over) hyped recently, if the iPod Mini sells significant numbers to runners, what are the chances of complaints about skips, or damaged hard drives?
And there are other issues that don't get touched on. Ergonomics for one - I haven't tried it, but I fail to see how the combined button / scroll wheel offers good ergonomics. (Note that the touch buttons of the current iPods are *far* worse than the original button configuration).
And what about the fact that it uses a different dock connector? So all the existing peripherals don't work with the iPod mini. Media reader anyone? OK, the iPod mini is a bit short on space for photos, but with the increasing importance in digital photography, even if you don't need such a device now, wouldn't you rather spend a little bit more to have that flexibility in the future? (and that's not to mention the voice recorder and other dock based addons that are currently available for the iPod).
What an absolutely absurd thing to say. There are few people who would reduce a legitimate appreciation for aesthetics combined with high tech gadgets into a non-point like women are interested in dumb things like color (i.e. boys).
You've just carved out a market of about 800 vehicles tops.
Perhaps the other guy is dead on with the other 44,999,200 SUV's out there?
I don't much agree with $500 jackets and $200 jeans, as I am not a fan of fashion, but buying a nice computer isn't exactly the same thing as looking good for the sake of looking good, especially when one's livelihood depends on the amount of productivity (and least headache) one can get out of one's main workstation. And having something that looks nice never hurt anyone, either. Basically everything you buy these days short of toilet paper is designed to look aesthetically appealing (humans are visual animals... you don't prefer looking at ugly stuff, do you?), and the retail price reflects the development put into that.
Going by your logic, everyone should buy marginally acceptable computers that are *just able* to run the critical applications needed on a day to day basis, like the $10 T-Shirt and $20 jeans. That drop in demand would prevent new development, slowing the pace of technological advance in the computer industry. This principle is basically applicable to every other tech-influenced industry, as well.
If people never bought Apple (or other "luxury", as you put it, brands), the consumer adoption of GUIs, mice, "office" productivity suites, large-capacity mp3 players, laser printers, (I could go on...) would have been much slower than it was. And you could argue that these things would have been developed and adopted anyway, but that's neither here nor there, and total conjecture. There's always the cheaper alternative.
Furthermore, anyone who's ever studied economics knows that revenue and profits do not scale directly with price. "Budget" goods produced and sold in quantity routinely outpace luxury items in terms of sales, revenues, and profit. Who's worth more - Toyota or Ferrari? Toyota - by an order of magnitude or two, I'd imagine. But Ferrari makes a badass machine that can be yours for six figures. WORTH is the amount of money that a commodity can be sold for on the open market. It has nothing to do with your personal financial situation and your personal tastes and preferences. You're basically inconsequential. The market determines worth, NOT you.
It seems as if you have a fundamental problem with the principles of capitalism and how differences in price & economies of scale drive innovation and adoption. I suggest you check out a isolated economy that produces nothing but common goods for general consumption. Something like... North Korea.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Umm... iTunes for Windows is already out. What other "music/media" software do Windows iPod users need from Apple?
Apple has never been a particularly efficient manufacturer or distributor and they have a very limited channel. Although the HP deal opens up a few more retailers, they still have a very limited distribution channel. I suspect that in 3 or 4 years some efficient, low-cost manufacturer will be knocking off "iPod" players and moving them through Wal-Mart, CVS, Costco and every other discounter. Perhaps they will not be quite as cool as a real "iPod", but at half the price and twice as convenient to buy they will quickly command a significant market share. Retailers like Wal-Mart and much more efficient at purchasing, distributing and selling than Apple. Although Apple claims to be a "music" leader, I suspect that just Wal-Marts music & video sales are larger than Apples total revenue. Wal-Mart certainly makes more profit in music sales than Apples total profit. Although Steve J. may have all the right connections in the music world, the Wal-Marts (and other discounters) still move the goods and have tremendous leverage over everything in the music business except the top egos.
For those of you who aren't too young to remember, when the first Walkmans and CD players came out, they were "way cool" and Sony could command hefty profits on them. Now CD players are in the check-out lane at your local grocery store for under $15. Not a hell of a lot of margin left in that item. I suspect that in 3 to 4 years iPods will be in the $150 and sold everywhere. All that Apple will have left is the generic name iPod. (Does anyone remember that walkman was a Sony product, and not any portable cassette player?)
The controls... they brought back tactile feedback. I thought it was phenomenally poor from a usability standpoint to move the iPod to using "buttons" you can't press with gloves on, can't press through the outside of your pocket, and can't even tell if you've pressed unless you have the clicker on or are looking at the device. I'm sticking to my old iPod with the mechanical buttons for now, and I'm hoping by the time I need a new one they will have fixed the regular iPod's interface.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
I am pretty sure you could have bought Pure Energy/Rayovak Renewals, and a bunch of CD-RWs for a heck of a lot less the the iRiver.
I am glad to see you did by the iRiver vs. the iPod. Since the iPod, IMHO is a sign of a person who is unknowlagable in electronics, like seeing someone with BOSE, or Sony. Since all 3 are well advertised, but at their price points, poor performers. This is exceptionaly true at the prices in Canada $400=15G, $550=20G, and $700=40G, and seen in stores at HIGHER prices, which is about twice that of the Xtra prices.
Free AAC codecs on the web, free converters, convert to wav, or mp3, or WMA (why?!), and you are ready to go.
If you can use AOL, you can convert your stuff.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Size does matter. A lot of people on this forum are only concerned with utility. There is a large number of people, myself included, to whom form factor is of consequence. Like the grandparent, I run. I have an original 5GB iPod, and I would appreciate the much smaller size.
If it's not on fire, it's a software problem.
Try going jogging with a Karma strapped to your arm.
;-) to your ankles, which can get you arrested.
Riiiiiiiight.
The iPod Mini is not all about price per gigabyte. It's about a good amount of storage (WAY more than a flash player) in a very light package. The iPod itself is a bit heavy still for jogging. Best you can do is put it on your belt and it flops around enough to pull nylon jogging shorts (hello, Dolphin
is an MP3 CD player.. just pop in a different CD-R each day, and you're gold. Sure, it's bigger than an iPod, or even a creative jukebox 3 if you lug 10 CD-Rs along with it, but it's dirt cheap. Did I say cheap? And dirt?
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
iPods don't skip from the small shocks of running. At least neither mine, nor my fathers. We both have original iPods and run several times a week.
The only complaint I have for running is that I have to set the hold. I have the original one with the mechanical wheel and it tends to turn and change the volume as I run.
If it's not on fire, it's a software problem.
Wow, and if all you care about is how much GB you can get for your $$$, according to PriceWatch, for $259 you can get a whole 300GB space! Thanks Maxtor! that Rio Karma was a real rip off!
it's no good. i, like many, was unpleasantly surprised by the seemingly high price point of the ipod mini. and after having read (or at least skimmed) the article at ars, i see their point. however, the fact that it had to be explained to me before i saw apple's logic still indicates that there's a problem afoot. how many people are going to read something like this and have an 'aha' moment saying, "oh, i see - apple is going against the flash based market". not many, i'd wager. most will still focus only on the $50 difference to get the 11 extra gigs of storage.
And then, I won't have any space on my iPod Mini to put them!
The strategic competitive advantage iPod and iPod mini bot have that affords Apple the opportunity to charge a premium for their product, not including capacity, design, ease of use, and interfaceability with Itunes Music Stores, is also the fact that they appear to be the only digital music player that uses the AAC MPEG-4 format. MPEG-4 with Dolby AAC is discernably superior to MP3, and was rated by the Audio Engineering Society (AES) to be perceptibly indistinguishable from uncompressed CD audio. As an audio engineer with experience mastering professional audio CDs, I have to say that this is a huge selling point which will also help push internet music distribution beyond the RIAA monopoly of traditional retail distribution.
Careful. He might shoot you.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
You're point was expensive stuff is of questionable value,
but you can solve that by buying a Lexus?
A $35,000 Toyota is somehow immune to your argument?
***********
Those that have drunk deeply from the Apple Kool-Aid well, with its RDF laced waters, argue that the iPod Mini is a compelling alternative to cheaper flash players.
Those that have actually looked at the specs and have done the price-per-capabiility math agree that the iPod Mini may be a better deal than the low end devices, but the high end iPod is a far better deal.
The Apple Kool-Aid Kids don't like that other group very much. They say that the iPod Mini is meant to compete only with Flash players, just like Steve told us.
The skeptics then ask why the iPod Mini has a hard drive in it, and the Kool-Aid Kids spiral into an impenetrable field of distorted reality from which no cogent explanations can escape. :-)
***********
The thing is, you have to look at the full spectrum of available devices, balancing the functionality you want against the price you want to pay (or could be convinced to pay for more features).
Apple is being a bit two-faced here to suggest that the iPod Mini is "only" fifty bucks more than the competition they want you to consider, but then discourage you from comparing it to their other product line, which offers far more for, again, "only" another fifty bucks. From their point of view, this isn't that big a deal, since if you switch up to the iPod Mini or iPod Maxi, you're still buying in to their product line.
That's okay for them, but it's more than a little silly for their fanboys to be trying to defend this kind of marketing sleight of hand, because when you look at the full spectrum of available devices, the iPod Mini is in a weird position:it is indeed a modest steep up capability wise from the low end devices, but it's a pretty steep price jump for what you get, when compared to the much larger capability jump you find when you move up to the full iPod.
I kind of think that bumping the low end iPod to 15gb was a tactical mistake here. If you're comparing the $250/4gb iPod Mini to a $300/10gb iPod, the Mini version doesn't look as bad. But that's not what we're looking at: you have to compare the $250/4gb Mini to a $300/15gb maxi, and at that point the entry model iPod looks a lot better.
***********
The thing is, I like Apple. I'm typing this on my iBook, I love using OSX, and if I had the spare cash laying around, I would have bought an iPod a long time ago. So I'm not skeptical because I dislike the company or its products or anything like that. I want them to do well. But the iPod Mini just doesn't make any sense to me, and the Received Marketing Wisdom -- that the device is supposed to be an alternative to flash players -- just doesn't make sense to me.
I'm trying to give Apple the benefit of the doubt, and I'm willing to accept that heavy sales of this player may prove me wrong, but looking at the full spectrum of available devices and their prices & capabilities, I'm just not convinced that the iPod Mini currently manages to hit the sweet spot. For what you get, for what they're charging, I just can't see who would want this thing.
For well under $100, a lot of people would just get a semi-traditional Discman that can play MP3 discs. With one of those, and half a dozen or so CDs, you've got the same functionality as the iPod Mini for perhaps a third of the price, and in a format that has been familiar to people for 10 or 20 years now. That is, to me, the real competition here. If the iPod Mini had been $150 or $200, it would have wiped out the competition that it claims to be running against, and would have been a real threat to the low end co
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I visited Macworld this year and spent some hands on time with both the iPod and iPod Mini. Even though the previously separate control keys from the original iPod were consolidated with the "wheel", I greatly preferred the user experience of the Mini. The latest (3rd generation?) big iPod has a sort of virtual dial, and the "buttons" have no tactile feedback. The Mini overloads the functions on the dial, but does it with a tiny click which I found much easier to use.
So, even though I see the 15GB iPod is much more compelling from a value standpoint, I sort of suffer from the reverse problem - I'd rather have a Mini with an even larger drive but the same operating controls. That market is defintely going to be the last one served here!
Both iPods seem inferior at a glance to the very original iPod. It was too expensive and (now) not a good story on space, but the wheel (an actual physical control) was just awesome.
I think iTunes is pretty good too, but one of the things you rarely see mentioned here is that there's a huge gap in feature set between the Mac and Windows versions. No, it's not in the app or music libraries, it's in the support of players. The Mac version of iTunes supports any mp3 player capable of playing MP3 or AAC which is pretty much everybody if you don't want to play the music you bought at the iTMS (they're all AAC).
The Windows version of iTunes is identical in functionality to the Mac version if you have an iPod. But it appears that iTunes Windows won't sync with anything other than iPods.
Sadly, Apple is shooting itself in the foot here. Given a choice between iTunes and anything else, iTunes would clobber all comers. iTunes is well thought out and implemented, while the alternatives seem thrown together or hacky. But, if I can't organize my world on my PC and sync to my non-iPod, I just won't use iTunes no matter how good it is.
This protects Apple's iPod sales vs. the competition (on Macs, you've already paid your tribute to Apple when you got your Mac!) but at great cost. If iTunes in visibly better designed software than it's competitors, it's only a matter of time (and short time, I think) before the desirable interface aspects are ripped off. And just like productivity apps, you reach a point where adding more features and innovation has a diminishing return.
iPod profits pay for iTunes, so there's really no other way this can be. But I feel bad to see Apple miss a chance to really lock up their domination of the iTunes-like app world because of this business model. As an ex-Apple employee and Apple watcher, I hard to see this mistake being repeated - they really are poised to achieve a Windows-like stranglehold on the computer end of the formula, but by closing off the other players (that the cited article shows they can beat anyway!) they're marking themselves for death.
One day I am going to integrate my flash played and a cheap pair of headphones into my bike helmet. That way I can go mountain biking and listen to Led Zeppelin at the same time. Of course, this will probably make my helmet less effective. Also note that I wouldn't be covering my ears with the headphones, merely placing the speakers close to my ears, so I can still hear things. Now if I could only come up with a fancy name for my USB enabled helmet.... maybe "Musical Bell"...
Lasers Controlled Games!
the price-point for the mini makes a whole lot of sense to me, especially after looking at the article.
it seems that apple is trying to play a fine line between tempting customers away from their competition and tempting customers from buying higher-priced versions of the iPod.
apple is making good money with the high-margined iPods right now, and giving away too much performance for too little cost will do more damage to their own business than to their competitors. that's why the mini is only a bit cheaper than the low-end iPod... if you were at all tempted by the iPod you'll probably end up shelling out the extra fifty bucks for the huge leap in storage capacity alone. a pure entry-level-priced machine would inevitably make people question their iPod lust, which can only hurt high-end sales.
still, they'd love to capture the people who wouldn't have bought the pricey iPod in the first place but aren't looking for the cheapest mp3 player on the block either. that's what the article shows quite clearly... the mini is still pretty good within its price range, and may attract some customers who otherwise would be taking their money elsewhere.
I read the fscking article you twit.
iPod mini does not compete with the flash based players. No way, no how. You can not compare a hdd based player to a solid state player. Different technology, different pricing, different reliability, and different markets.
That is why the mini iPod compares so well against the regular iPod, and why everyone with a brain has done that to death already.
Those that are truly in the market for a solid state player (bike riders for one) would never even consider a hdd player.
Just because the pricing is similar has nothing to do with it. Competitive markets aren't based on prices, they are based on competing products. Apples versus Apples. Not Apples versus Oranges.
Just a warning about that...
I used my 20GB original iPod with the touch wheel (you know the one I mean) for just about everything for a while. I used it in the car, in the living room, in my bedroom and on the move. It's very sturdy in terms of taking knocks, sure, and especially so with a carry case. However, the constant inserting and removing of headphones and various 3.5mm-to-whatever cables took its toll in about 6 months. It developed some serious noise in the left channel, and eventually went quiet altogether. To be fair this isn't Apple's fault, but a design flaw common to 3.5mm headphone sockets.
On a more positive note, I found it didn't do badly against a CD player twice its price in my main hifi, which was a pleasant surprise. For most of the time it was working, I rarely touched a CD. And having a huge amount of music while walking around was great.
If I can't fix my iPod at some point, I'll probably end up buying one of those baby iPods. I have about 12 gigs of mp3s at the moment. I'd be quite happy to have, say 2gb of playlists of music that I can't live without, and often want to listen to on a whim, and the rest be a floating list of randomness. I can't say I gain a whole lot from being able to walk around with track 8 of some godawful CD I bought 6 years ago around with me.
not_cub
q='echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"';s=\';b=\\;echo "q=$s$q$s;s=$b$s;b=$b$b;$q"
Your argument is a non-sequitur. The iPod is popular with Windows users, so Apple will be pressured to port iMovie to Windows? Huh? The iPod has no connection to iMovie, Garageband, or any of the rest of iLife. It would seem that it will place the same amount of pressure on them as it would to port OS X to Intel.
How will not porting the iApps negatively affect their iPod sales? I can't see any reason it would. People won't be able to buy iPhoto for Windows so they won't get an iPod out of spite?
How would porting them over positively affect their iPod sales? Again, it wouldn't (except for perhaps a miniscule bounce because of greater brand recognition amongst PC users).
And who can afford a > $300 music player but can't afford a Mac? I can afford a Mac, but I can't afford an iPod. I guess it is a matter of priorities.
It is interesting that Apple is developing a customer base of Windows users, but that puts no pressure on them to change what they have been doing. If the bulk of Ford's tiny car sales come from Japan, should they start selling F150s and their entire product line over there? The fact is, iPod sales are a tiny percentage of Apple's revenues and always will be. Taking away a major reason for buying a Mac just to sell a couple more iPods would be a colossally dumb move, and probably why they haven't done it.
I think I'd get sick of listening to the same 3G of MP3 over and over again for years. But hey, if it works for you...
Blar.
You know, I'm totally into Apple. I think their hardware, combined with the soft, is actually an incredibly good deal. I've been buying Apple's since before the macintosh and never felt cheated.
... we're talking about commodities, appliances, walkman thingies, gadgets.
But, but
And if all's said and done, I won't buy one for $250 - and that's btw only the price in the USA, the rest of the world pays more. It's just not worth that kind of money TO ME.
I don't care about the intrinsic value, the clever positioning, the great looks. All true, all beautiful, but still too much money. I heard Jobs explaining the price position and even then I knew he wasn't talking to me.
I hope they will move beyond this strategic thinking and go back to the basic marketing tantra: "what is it that people want."
I mean, who is going to say "hey, I don't have $300 for 15GB, but for $250 I can either buy this 4GB mini or this 15GB Rio, Dell or whatever... Hey, the mini is so cleverly priced, only $50 more than a 1GB flashplayer, I think I'll go for the mini"
People want an iPod for less than $200. And given the nature of this market, I really really hope they will provide before someone else does.
Disclaimer: I realize I'm for once not Apple's target audience, so I might be totally off base here, but I can't keep from wondering if they have rightly assessed THEIR target audience. For their sake, I hope they have, but more importantly, for my sake, I hope they'll soon target ME ME ME and make a say 2GB mini for $100 (hey double the capacity of a flash player and 50% of the price, wow, whatever) and a say 10GB ipod for $250. (and inbetween I guess there's a nice price-point for the 4GB mini).
Because in the end, what's so strategically bad about playing THE WHOLE market?
I think, therefore I am...I think.
The article states that it is made to attack other players around the same price. however, i must point out that the most of the other players are flash based players with NO moving parts.
--vrwarp
Of course for that price, you can get the logic board or the hdd, but not both at the same time.
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
If this isn't an intel apple, then I don't know what is!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Its very simple. Like all other technology before it, the portable MP3 will get a lot cheaper and a lot better. You just have to wait. The longer the better. The first DVD-R writer was $1000 only 3 years ago. Now they could be had for a measly $125 on pricewatch and with more and better features. Unless you absolutely have to have one at this exact moment (which most of us really don't), just give it a little time.
> I'm sorry but the excuse "but we're pitching this product at this market" isn't a valid excuse for the fact that their
> profit margins on the iPod Mini are excessivily high.
You have literally no idea what their profit margins are on the iPod Mini. In fact, I suspect that they are probably lower than those of the iPod 15 gig.
The smaller drives are more expensive. The smaller form factor means the guts are more expensive.
All of the competing systems that are hard-drive-based are larger (less expensive to build) and cost the same or more, or very slightly less. And Apple's are almost certainly slightly better made (and no I don't want to hear about the batteries) which does, in fact, cost more, believe it or not.
So, basically, I suspect that if they had more than $1 margin at $199 they would have released it at that price point. And I think that the only reason you imagine some sort of large margins here is because this is Apple, and because you're comparing Apples to Oranges. Again.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
The difference is that many of us AREN'T into lovingly caressing our electronic components.
Only the truly shameless shill their blog in a Slashdot sig
Hello!!! If you don't like the price, don't buy one! Now, how difficult is that? Seems to me that Apple has a great reason for pricing it a $249.00 -- they want to make a profit! A business that wants to make a profit? Interesting concept.
Thankfully, Apple chooses quality over quantity and then prices accordingly. Better components and superior design cost money.
Just think of what a wonderful world it would be if we all used cheapo eMachines, drove Yugos and listened to crappy WMA files our flimsy off-brand MP3 players.
Karma Schmarma
I think you're very confused.
The "digital hub" strategy refers to the Mac as a digital hub.
iTunes for Mac/PC (free) exists to sell more iPods. iLife for Mac (free with new Macs, $49 to upgrade) exists to sell more Macs.
Apple has stated that they have no plans to port anything else over to PC for now. There's no Apple "digital hub" strategy for the PC.
> In all reality, your response is more insipid and insulting than I'd expected when I clicked downstream.
Funny, though.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Shaved heads are cool. What is this enduring USian fascination with Big Hair?
Da Blog
This would depend on whether, as in your example, I was purchasing one... a better comparison with computer hardware might be a vibrator. In which sales area I'd suggest function wins out over neat colour schemes...
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
And to an entire swath of the population, a "nice computer" and "nice clothes" swap priorities. For these people, not wearing such clothes will see your social reputation fall and your career suffer (yes, entire industries work on that principle). Frivolous, but having a very real utility at the same time. That does not make it any less of a rip-off, however.
I would also add that the 'market' sees great value in psuedo-pyramid schemes, SCOish stock manipulation, prision-building, and other fun stuff. So I guess that is all okay, too, if they do not affect me directly....
========
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Hm. On some of this I agree, on others I flat out disagree.
A) My underwear has 'TOMMY HILFIGER' scrawled across it. I hate advertising something unless it was given to me (like my IBM Shirt I'm wearing) but my wife bought it for me and she thought it was neat because I have the same first name as some goofy designer. I was irritated for my money being spent until she showed me what she liked about the underwear - that it was 'out of style' and at some outlet mall - so I was semi-ok with it.
B) I like Audi's. They're not overpriced VWs, they're a different class of car. Example is: Car broke, called dealership, tow truck at house 20 min later and car was fixed by Tuesday morning (broke friday night). I used to have an oldsmobile. Alternator blew out 1000 miles outside of warranty, they said 'yeah that's a problem with that car, give me $1000 please'. My previous Audi had a fuel guage break 1000 miles outside of warranty, they replaced it, cleaned the car and hand waxed it and gave it back to me and apologized that it took so long to get it repaired. I'll pay more for that any day, that's not just useless markup.
My powerbook cost me $1599. not much of a trappings of the rich to me, considering what else was in it's price range.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Are you stupid?
Not that I don't believe you, because Apple historically has a pretty tight hold on prices, but before you make such bold statements, if you could at least put up an example or two I think it would lend weight to your argument.
Otherwise you just pulled that statement out of your ass and you didn't confirm that it is indeed the case that the Rio has a fluctuating price based on the retailer selling it.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I imagine he spends the time listening to stories about how much harder running was in the Old Days, what with all of the nitrogen snow, the rabid wolf-dogs, and the more intense gravity.
I can see it now:
Next up on TechTV, "Queer Eye for the Geek Guy!"
People are complaining about the pricing of the iPod mini, not because they were hoping for a way to save money over buying a Rio or iRiver mp3 player, but because they wanted to make *their first purchase* into mp3 players with the iPod mini alone.
I was part of that group. I do not want to buy an mp3 player. I do not need an mp3 player. I did not plan on getting one.
However, if the iPod mini had come out at a low price (less than $150), I would have bought one. That price, coupled with the iPod reputation and quality and everything else I knew about Apple, meant that the benefits would have far exceeded the costs.
At no point was I considering seriously another player. I was (and still am) not a part of the mp3 player audience.
However, if Apple had provided a suitable product for cheap enough (which they failed to do), I would have entered into that realm.
I believe this attitude is the same one shared by many people complaining about the iPod mini's price. The article simply addresses the other mp3 player purchasers, who are buying an mp3 player regardless. They aren't complaining nearly as much as people like me, who wanted to become mp3 player owners but can't now (due to the high price).
Egads. Think different for a moment, please.
Pretty soon there will be more iPod users on Windows than there are Mac OS X users. If Apple iPod sales continue to climb, this difference will grow to the point where there will be millions of iPod/Windows users stuck with only iTunes.
Music is only one aspect of a "digital hub". If you build one leg of a digital hub on Windows, people of course are going to wonder "where's the rest?". Windows users do not share the Mac view that "Windows is bad".
For example, the iPod can be used today for storing digital pictures from your digital camera. It is braindead for Apple to think that a Windows user is going to switch his or her entire PC platform just to run iPhoto to work with those pictures. PC users are not stupid. They will want Apple software to work with Apple hardware as nothing else will work right. So there will be expectations. Apple certainly could charge money for iLife or include iLife/Windows with the iPod/Windows.
You may not like it, but Mac is failing in the market place. The market share drops every day. People are not "switching". If anything people are switching to Linux, not Mac. The iPod is doing well for Apple, but only because Windows users are buying it. That's a big change to swallow for a company that prides itself on how much it hates the PC.
So when iPod/Windows is Apple's #1 customer base, things will change. All those Windows customers will hammer on Apple for a better solution than just iTunes. They will not want to buy a Mac, but will want Apple to port more software to Windows. Otherwise they are left with a half-ass multimedia solution. Just wait and see...
"I don't buy Kia's [kia.com] because I believe that they are lousy automobiles."
I drive a 2001 Kia Rio with 42,000 miles on it so far. It has been a fantastic car. Only regularly scheduled maintenance and a brake job at 38,000 miles.
By comparison, one of my best friends drives a 2001 Jaguar X-Type. It has been in the shop countless times. As a matter of fact, he's on his second X-Type. Jaguar bought back his first one due to the number of problems. His second one is only slightly better.
I think your definition of a quality vehicle might be lacking a bit.
You've found out your daughter is illegally downloading.
You've heard on the news that she'll be drowned in a tar pit if caught.
Are you going to sever her internet connection?
No you couldn't live with the whining.
The solution?
It's small, comes in a range of colours...
What price peace of mind.
Genius.
iPod mini does not compete with the flash based players
Hmmm, and why?
Those that are truly in the market for a solid state player (bike riders for one) would never even consider a hdd player.
Maybe you should try a new experience then: Open your mind and consider them.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
You really don't understand anything about Apple do you? You act like ipod sales are anywhere near as profitable as their hardware sales. So by your logic they are going to go, "we have more ipods sold than copies of os x so lets port everything to windows!" Where is the logic in that? I'm not sure what your basing your static's on but Apple is not in trouble selling Hardware, if anything, people are pretty pro Mac these days than they have been. The bottom line is Apple does not care about PC users having a great user experience; they want all of you using Macs. There is no way they would just give away one of their biggest selling points because they can use used with music.
I was just regurgitating the Ars chart for the parent, who obviously didn't read it in the first place. I'm very happy with my 15gig iPod, thanks.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Apple is number 1 in a tiny segment of the market. Sony was number 1 in the walkman business, where are they now? Almost no low-cost, high-volume manufacturing-centric company has entered the business yet.
Apple can't lose. Either way you will buy an iPod. The excuse to not buy one in favor of a smaller flash player has been eliminated.
If you buy a mini because you were originally going to buy a $200 high-end flash player, then Apple wins. If you decide then to buy a higher margin iPod 15GB, guess what Apple still wins.
Genius.
I'd gladly go for a silver 'mini. My girlfriend seems to prefer the pink one, though... There's something here.
Who cares? Apple still sells an MP3 player either way.
One bit of advice that might save you some money: get some contact cleaner (that really spendy stuff you get in hi-fi and electronic repair stores.) It is very likely that a thin layer of crud and/or oxydization has developed at the exact point on the headphone jack where it comes in contact with the plug. you might not even see it easilly if it's only big enough to hold the channel barely far enough to prevent a solid connection.
Brush some of that cleaning solvent on the jack contacts (you may need take it apart to do this, but it's obviously out of warranty anyway or you could have this fixed for free), and while you are at it, clean the plugs that you usually use with it.
9 times out of 10 a good cleaning is all that really needs to be done to repair unreliable headphone jacks, noisy volume control knobs, unresponsive VU meters, etc.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The tradeoff there is size and weight. The Nomad Zen uses 2.5" laptop drives that are much cheaper for their capacity than the 1.8" drives in the Ipod and 1" drives in the Ipod Mini. And forget about build quality and UI. Creative quality is not even in the same universe as Apple or Rio.
And dont call bullshit on me. It was a honest response to a reader question in Mac Addict who noticed and asked. They admitted it!
I guess PC's are not so Maximum at desktop publishing.
The world changes. When there are more iPod/Windows users than all Mac users combined, Apple the company will not be the same as the past. Apple will hard time telling millions of iPod/Windows users that Apple will not port any (more) software to Windows. To the millions of iPod/Windows cystomers, Apple will have a uncompelling "digital hub" story if they only have one iApp (iTunes) that runs on Windows.
It may not be anything like what I am talking about. Maybe Apple will do something different like release OS X on x86. Or maybe Apple will reduce prices on Mac when they have a large number of more qualified candidates that are interested in Mac.
As Apple is rapidly losing global market share (currently at 1.8% total, Mac OS X is about 30% of the total), it will be interesting to see what happens. I see Apple putting more and more work into making their hardware run Windows and look like Windows. I would be surprised if the one button mouse is going to last much longer if Apple wants to get people to switch from PC to Mac. Apple should also license ClearType from Microsoft and get some good quality font rendering on their system. Or perhaps FreeType 2.0 -- and I hope Apple will keep the code they take from the open source community open, not hide it away.
Anyhow, it will be fun as the story unfolds.
You will always find the other MP3 players at less than MSRP and you will never be able to purchase the iPod at anything other than MSRP. Barring farfegnugen freebies, of course. iPod minis are purely fashionable.
There are only two other players that have the capacity of the miniPod, so price comparisons are still plenty relevant. Even if some of those flashed players halfed their price in responce, you'd still have 4 times the storage for the money with the Mini.
And as the other poster said: either put up or STFU about these supposed markdowns on the other players.
Do we really want to have MaxiPods?
fs
Yes it is. Anyone who chooses to buy the mini one is perfectly capable if they choose of instead buying the large one. It may not be apple's intent to compete with the ipod here, but given that the two do similar things in a similar price range, they are competing with each other, even if there are some differences between them.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Don't forget too, one of the key ways that Ford's competitors in the early days of the auto industry won sales was by offering a choice of colors when Ford was still offering "any color [you] want, as long as its black."
Music. That was their first answer. They only have 2 gigs of music each after questioning. I can imagine having 4 gigs. Now think some more. How much of that music do you listen to? Not more than the same 10-15 songs.
The next answer I got was "data". How many essays fill up in 26 gigs of data? 1,040,000 at 25 kb per essay. Powerpoints? 5200 at 5mb each (inculding pictures). I know the homework is a bit much, but really? So needing "data" is a load of crap. And so is needing to keep "backups". One little drop can cause some problems. And if you really have 26 gigs of data, can you just plug it in and have it work? As far as I know, NO. (I do not have an iPod) So that reason is a load of sh*t.
So what is the core reason for owning a 30 gig iPod?
PORN.
How do you keep you parents from finding out where it is, if you are to stupid to take away your parent's admin powers? Take it with you. One of my friends just got busted for having a 200gig hardrive full of porn. He lost his girlfriend the next day. He didn't want to give up his "routine." So he put it on his iPod. If you want to keep something where your parents can't find it, put it somewhere you can always watch.
And when the iVideo attachment for you iPod comes out, I think it should be renamed to the "iPorn" or "iWack". Remember Steve, screen cleaner will be a big seller! No one wants evidence.
Mod Wisely.
They introduced it after Christmas. I would be very surprised if the price doesn't come down to at least $199 by this Christmas. I would imagine that they are selling all they can at the higher price and then drop it down for the Christmas gift buying season.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
"Your right to fist ends at my anus!"
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
And for what you pay, it's a ridiculously good deal - I valeted for awhile recently; I was looking at a Phaeton just last week and it compared favorably (IMHO) to the Mercedes-Benz S-classes and BMW 7-serieses I used to park, which has an MSRP about thirty thousand higher. Neither car is cheap, but one is a lot better deal.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Don't get me wrong here, when Steve Jobs first announced the iPod Mini at $249 my first reaction was just like most others (ridiculous price for such a player). The Muvo2 at $199 should in principle be a good comparison for the price point of the Mini.
However, in my opinion, the point of buying one Apple's MP3 players is NOT only the player itself -- it is the combination of iTunes and the iPod itself that makes the iPod worth buying for me. As long as it is not possible to sync any other player as easily as the iPod, the other player will never ever be on my shopping list.
Besides the smaller size, lighter weight, and consumer appeal of colors, newness, etc, one other point to consider with the iPod mini vs. 15GB iPod argument is the accessories. iPod mini comes with a belt clip, arm band, and remote. To get a belt clip and remote for a 15GB iPod will set you back $80 (if you get it from Apple), so then "why not jump another $20 to get the 20GB?" as the 20GB comes with the accessories (plus a dock) and 5GB more space. Then you've jumped in price from $249 to $399, which is significant to most anyone. For their target market, I think Apple did a great job with the iPodmini, and I wouldn't rule out a price drop in a few months after the price of the components has dropped a bit.
Thanks. You did a much better job that the article at the diffences between the iPod Mini and the 15GB iPod. The article implied it was mostly just the storage and a few appearance changes. It sounds like you do get a fair number of accesories with the Mini that you otherwise wouldn't get.
And if only people like you who needed them bought them, the world would be a better place. But 99.9% at least are wankers who do it for poseur value or because they've been convinced that it's safer for them (and who cares who they kill?).
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Then you must not run. Holding it in a hand is unwieldy (not something I want to do for 8 miles), and no one runs in shirts/shorts with pockets. Even if I did, it would be *guaranteed* to fall out.
That's why they sell the armband. I've still not seen a real alternative aside from duct tape.
when i said "ideal" i meant in Apple's mind..... in post MacWorld interviews Steve Jobs has talked about the mini as a complement to an existing iPod and the iTunes app. i am sure some people will only buy a mini if it's all they need. 4 gigs is a LOT of music. it might not be a majority of your MP3 files, but it is still a lot. i don't own any iPod right now, so either is a major upgrade to the minidisc player i use (it's not MDLP).
as for the cube, that's a whole different cult. the cube's made sense to me, just they cost too much, and really had to be paired with an LCD display to shine. people said the lack of upgradability killed the cube, but in the age of USB and Firewire, how many average users really upgrade their machines (Mac or Windows)? there are video card and CPU upgrades for the cube.
if that was what REALLY killed the cube then how come the CRT and LCD iMac did so well? i know quite a few people with G4 towers that never added more than RAM. they could have bought cubes. i suppose i could have too since that soundblaster card i have won't really work till they make those OS X drivers the Creative salesjerk promised me.
grrr i'm all over the place today.
anyway the article compares the price if the mini to flash based and other small HD music players and compared to them (in the same price range) it has many times the storage.
I recently got a 20 Gb iPod and I was considering getting a firewire card for my PC, but I have 3 computers in the house that I store music on and many friends I like to grab music off, only one of the lot has firewire in there PC. So the best solution was to get the USB 2 cable so I could update my music wherever I go and still have the option of using firewire when available.
I think the difference is the geek factor. The Karma attempts to do too much for someone who simply wants to listen to music. The iPod is stylish (personal opinion, it is more so, by far, than the Karma) than the Karma and more simple to use.
Leela to Amy: "Did you swallow your phone again?"
You must think in Russian.
The point is that Apple is making more money with 1.8% of the "global market share" than they could ever possibly make porting their software over to Windows and increasing their (software, iPod, everything-but-Mac-desktop-hardware) market share.
That's why they'll never port their stuff over. Not because they wouldn't get vastly more market share (they probably would), but because that increased market share in software, iPods, or whatever, would translate into less money, not more.
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
No, Apple will say, "Hey, if you want to use the rest of our iLife suite, you should buy a Mac."
And you go, "Well, I used to think Macs suck, but the iPod and iTunes kick major ass on my Windows PC."
Then you start looking for low-cost Macs -- maybe an eMac or an iBook -- to add to your stable.
And then you get hooked...
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
I own an iPod. Anyone who plays with it says the same thing, it is beautiful and works great and nothing else on the market touches it. But what I really thought was interesting was a comment that an industry analyst made about iPod Mini. Considering Apple's position in the market and a $250 price tag, a competitive product would need to be at least $50 cheaper. I think that is an interesting perspective of a strictly 'business' analysis. Just not the kind of thoughts technical people have.
LOL...
I cant wait until I can run windows on my Mac and we will all live in one big windows world!
Quality Font Rendering? lol. You better hurry up and tell all those graphic designers that they need to stop using Macs, not to mention all the asian characters it supports. And one more thing, my two button mouse is working just fine.
I can't wait to get a mini so that I can use it when truly mobile: on my bike, hiking, at the gym. While the iPod's is a much better form factor than any of the other players in it's class, wearing it on my belt all the time is way too dilbert for me.
People tend to accuse Apple of form over function. Wrong. Apple is about form and function. That's why I like their stuff so much.
I really wish they'd come up with a two-button trackpad for the laptops, though...
- learn to swim.
Sure, I like running with my desktop strapped to my back and a really long extension cord.
I think it would tremendously good for Apple to make as much money as possible. Somehow I think having 20 times as many customers is a good thing. People who have the money and want the prestige of a luxury computer will still buy a Mac.
It seems like a great win for Apple to have as many customers as possible.
Like I said, TROLL. Nice try, you almost had me there.
Here's a hint: Trollspotters are the worst kind of biters. Trollspotters that take the time to rebut the trolls too? Comedy gold.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
This information is so well-known as to be generally accepted. Your failure to recognize this fact indicates one of the following:
1. You're delusional.
2. You're stupid.
3. You're Steve Ballmer.
4. All of the above.
Pick one.
- learn to swim.
[i]Secondly, the iPod is cool. Apple is cool.[/i]
There you have it. Don't bother to read the rest, because if you're honest that's the only think the IPod has going for it compared to other technically a featurewise superiors players. You might not even think the IPod is cool, but everyone else does, which is what counts. I know a guy who doesn't even have a computer but just bought an IPod for its fashion value. I kid you not.
keep it simple.
I rest my case with this fathead
I own a 2nd gen 10GB iPod dude. For my needs it is quite good (28 yrs old and not much play time anymore).
Nice try though.
There ARE a number of players out there that support AAC(MP4)... just check google. Though most of them are iPod, just know that there are other players out there that support the AAC format.
while we're at it, we might as well compare those accessories with the iPod mini, shall we? Here's what comes with the iPod mini:
Earbud headphones, belt clip, AC adapter, FireWire cable, USB 2.0 cable
The whole package costs $250.00.
From the iRiver website:
* Backlit remote control with 4-line display
* iRiver earphones
* Carrying case
* Installation software CD
* AC adapter
* USB 2.0 cable
* Line-in cable
* External microphone
* Printed user manual
Furthermore, iRiver iHP-120 costs $399.99! *ahem*...
Either way, apple is going to profit from this. Yet another shinny object where geeks with cash can buy, and have the cat take it after you just polished it.
-Kids in the back seat causes accidents.- -Accidents in the back seat causes kids.-
hmmm...I buy a house, and I need a family vehical (Mini Van) but I also need a vehical to haul my land scapeing supplies, building supplies tool rentals, and large peices of crap around.
if you live in a rental or an apartment, I agree, it is pointless, but don't pretend that they are pointless unless you are a farmer or construction worker, any home owner who does all their home improovments themself needs one.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
agreed. my experiences with other devices have been the same (but haven't bought an ipod yet).
* Sony MD Player -- came with a remote, didn't use it. Ended up replacing it with better headphones for better sound (the earphones weren't unpluggable from the remote -- stupid design).
* Rio Volt MP3 CD Player -- came with a belt clip (which iPod mini comes with, btw), never used it, period. Just not my style! I'll probably have even less of a use for an arm band. Probably a life-saver for nudists though! lol.
* NTT DoCoMo cell phone -- came with the dock, but I ended up plugging wires directly into it. It was just more clunk to me.
Of course, this is all a matter of personal taste. I'd be a bit mad if I had to pay for these. If you're looking for an iPod pre-bundled with plenty of accessories, the 20GB iPod at $400 may seem just about right and it still has a way smaller form than its competition.
A lot of people who buy flash MP3 players jog with them. I wouldn't jog with my ipod. What makes the IPod mini different, such that I would jog with it? It's likely to be equally fragile-feeling.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world - those that know binary, and those that don't.
I think iPods are dandy. But try to playback a live CD or continuous mix. There is no "geek factor" related to gapless playback. All music lovers can appreciate not hearing a second of silence between two tracks on a live CD. (Oh yeah, Karma supports crossfades too - it's like having a cheesy wedding dj in a small package!)
Yes, the iPod is stylish (and the GUI is fantastic), but it also says "steal me". As far as anyone knows, the Karma could be some cheapie 64mb flash player or fm tuner. Does not look as desirable to a thief compared to an iPod, and I like it that way.
Up to 15 hours per charge is not a geek factor issue either. You can fly on a long flight overseas and listen to music the entire trip without recharging.
I have a Karma and I don't use it for geek purposes - I encode to Mp3, not Ogg Vorbis or FLAC. I don't stream or do fancy smart playlists. I just play back my music. The GUI's not as nice as the iPod, but to me, the GUI wasn't worth an extra 150CDN.
Apple is doing what they've done many times before: release a nice new product that is indeed overpriced. Then time will go on, the price will drop, and quality will go up. Remember when the iPod came out just a couple years ago? First of all, it was a bit underwhelming--$500 for a 5 GB player. Other HD-based players were larger and cheaper and remember, there was no iTMS adding value to it at the time. But time marched on, the price fell, and capacity went up. Now the same $500 gets you 8x more storage. And compare the original iPod to the new mini: one was $500 for 5 GB, the other is $250 for 4 GB.
Apple is going to make hay while the sun shines and plenty of people are going to pony up the bucks for the first gen player. These should be $199 by summer and maybe $149 by fall or XMas. And maybe Apple will drop a $99 1 or 2 GB bomb, at which popint they will totally 0wn the mp3 player market.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
This is in no way uncommon, and doesn't necessarily mean you're getting a bad deal. Basically, it comes down to whether you want all the superfluous stuff - like the dock and whatever - that, in the final summation, is not really needed for the iPod to do it's job. If you don't, then you're getting the iPod cheaper and less crap to clutter up your desk.
Where this has a basis in another commercial area is the automotive industry. It's not uncommon for the "next model up" in a luxury car (generally same shape but bigger engine) to be cheaper once you add in all the options to the cheaper model. I know BMW do it.
There's also a distribution cost in selling the additional iPod accessories, because no longer are they all in the one iPod box, instead they come with their own packaging and must be distributed separately. of course that's going to make it more expensive.
-- james
Another reason: placing the button on the scroll wheel, instead of in a separate row at the top, is a better user-interface. I know apple moved the buttons on the iPod up into a separate row because having those touch-sensitive next to the scroll wheel would cause problems, but that interface is not as good as the 1st and 2nd generation ones, or now the iPod Mini.
Then you have not been reading up on these hard drives. From one of the suppliers of tiny hard drives, Cornice.
You can read on their spec sheet:
The skip protection IS related to that as well. When you have 32 megabytes of buffer space, you only need to spin the drive up every 25 minutes or so to read the data. Then you spin down again. The specs above relate to when the drive is spinning.
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
OK, your other points aside....
What on EARTH possessed you to put a Creative Labs soundcard in a Mac?
The only useful analog I can think of is stuffing an extra engine into your Ferrari, disconnecting the beautiful V-12, and making it front-wheel drive.
My mind boggles.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
No, they're not.
People always seem to have a hard time figuring it out when you mention to them that Apple even with its measly market share is a PROFITABLE business turning out some of the neatest hardware designs (from an asthetic standpoint definitely, from a technical standpoint -- they're okay) ever created to date.
From a business standpoint, Apple is very successful. They don't give a damn about porting all of their software to Windows, they just knew there are people out there who would buy quite a few more iPods in return for having to do a relatively "simple" port of iTunes to Windows.
Bringing along the rest of the applications would be suicidal from a support and cost-benefit standpoint.
It's called "running a profitable business".
+++OK ATH
I don't really have any complaint, except that their pricing for the individual accessories (notably the dock and the case) seems exorbitant. Still, one can easily see a market for the availability of the add-ons separately, for those people who get the low-end iPod and want just one of the extras.
I think vegans are a subset of vegetarians. All vegans are (strict) vegetarians, but not vice versa.
Apple knows that there are a great bunch who will deride the iPod mini and say "but I can get 11GB more for just $50 more". In fact they count on it. Either way Apple wins.
(happy with my 40GB iPod)
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
I personnally have thousands of MP3, but I listen to these 512MB at once using my Sharp Zaurus : I think an iPod drive will never be big enough for all, that's why I prefer compiling my weekly 8-9-hour long list and keep being surprised by stuff I would not listen too otherwise : this has to be a little difficult to remain interesting !
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Thats a tad more then 30 songs.. So 100$ would be more then that.
Oh wait, you were a troll.. nevermind.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Only if you threaten me or my family. Few legal gun owners are weirdoes. Most are rather responsible.
Back on topic, you can buy a 256mb unit now for 75 bucks or less.. So discussing a 100$ 1 gb unit was NOT out of the question....
Perhaps a bit wishful thinking, but still not totally ludicrous.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I certainly wouldn't take a hdd based mp3 player jogging or to the gym. Can't imagine how much life you'd be removing from them in the long term.
Personally I'm waiting for a player which accepts CF cards at a reasonable price for the gym so I can just chuck in one of the many 1gb cf cards I have lying about.
Working for the (other) man
Apple will have to make the choice of whether to port their music/media software to Windows or will face losing most of those customers...
Since they have already ported iTunes to the PC I will assume you are talking about GarageBand, iMovie, iDVD etc. I don't see any reason why they would have to port these products because there is a fundamental difference. iTunes & iPod are about consuming digital media, the others are about creating digital media. To engage in a bit of stereotyping with more than a kernel of truth PC users == consumers/Mac users == creators. As long as windows users can consume Apples digital media Apple will do fine with the mass market. Keeping all the software for creating such media on the Mac will help Apple to keep (and perhaps even make gains in) their small, but highly profitable niche market of "creators".
Right now the iPod line-up is $300 - big 15 G, $400 - big 20 G, $500 - big 40 G, and now the new $250 - mini 4 G. To expand the line and continue to make money on it, they need new and exciting products; they can't just cut the price as their costs fall, because that will inevitably cut their profit margins down to nothing.
Ogg support aside, the first obvious answer is to keep doing what they've been doing for the past couple years, and introduce a $800 iPod with 80 gigs or something. Keep prices up, and just increase the sizes. This is even more pointless than the $250 4 gig iPod. 40 gigs is already so much music that no one really has any need for more than that, and no one would buy the new product. Result: Apple loses the mp3 player market to cheap generics.
Second, better answer: make it smaller, see how much more people will pay for a smaller unit. At $250, Apple can probably make a profit on each 4 gig unit. But more importantly, they can test the waters and see what the market for smaller-than-an-iPod players is. It's quite possible that the mini iPod will be a complete failure, but Apple needs to find that out. If it's simply priced too high for people, in 6-10 months they'll cut the price to $199 and see if there's a big increase in sales - in the mean time they'll sell a few at $250 to early adopters and Apple fanboys to recover development costs. But that's not the only variable. It could be that the original iPod was already small enough and no one cares about having anything smaller. It could be the the UI controls are unusably small for a lot of people. It could be people want a smaller product, but the mini iPod really isn't that much smaller. In which case they'll cube the product and tell their suppliers that they need an even smaller drive. Or maybe 4 gigs actually isn't enough space for enough people.
Assuming the mini iPod can be made a success (I have no doubt this will happen, but it may take price cuts before it does), in 2 years we'll see Apple with an iPod lineup something more like $200 - mini 8 G, $300 - mini 16 G, $400 - big 40 G. Result: Apple will have held on to prices, and therefore held on to their margin, and they'll have a profitable product line.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
-- I speak only for myself
*note that I think translucent plastic looks like crap no matter which fruit it happens to resemble, and same goes for any case mod involving neon lights
agreed...
You said:
Interface is a personal thing, I prefer the Karma one simply because it gives me many more options to tweak, such as full 5-band parametric EQ, on-the-fly playlist editing, etc etc. It's actually quite similar to the iPod one apart from that.
iPod has on-the-fly playlists, and the interface for that is much better than the Karma's (just hold down middle button). EQ presets are available too.. you can't create EQ sets right in the iPod but it ships with 25 or so and custom EQs sync from iTunes like everything else.
The Karma rules for the Linux support though, absolutely.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Follow the thread AC
Hmm, yes. Ok, You're right. Absolutely.
learn how to write in English
I believe "learn how to type on a keyboard" to be more appropriate.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
That's why I think you're silly, because you don't understand Apple's strategy.
The iPod is a trojan horse product to attract people to Apple.
To answer your "where is the digital hub?" question, it's all there, on the Mac. The iPod is just the trail of bread crumbs that lead PC users to the Apple platform. That's how users switch.
It's not too different from advertising, really, where you pay money to put your logo somewhere prominent. Only in iPod's case, customers are paying an arm and a leg to showcase the Apple product and Apple logo.
honestly.... MiniDiscs....
i have a G4 400 AGP and at the time the SoundBlaster card was the easiest (cheapest i knew of) way to get a digital out from my Mac to make minidiscs. it seems like overkill to buy a $129 card (yeah THE Mac one was that expensive) to make minidiscs, but i knew using a digital output was a better way to get tracks to split up. i hate having MDs that are 70 minutes of punk songs (about 2 minutes each) and show up as 4 tracks.
this was MacWorld... hrmm... it was the MacWorld they were showing off 10.1 and the sales guy at the show told me that by the time 10.1 shipped they would have OS X drivers. since 10.0 was sketchy i was booting into OS 9 for some stuff as is and i didn't mind that much at the time. I knew a lot of M$ windows people used their cards, as well as *NIX people and they seemed adequate.
Fair enough, but aren't there scads of USB dongles that a) cost less and b) have digital out? Or am I crazy?
Not poking fun, just curious.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Until they break the $180 price barrier, I'm not buying.
The mini is so much less cost effective. Why did they bother?