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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 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.
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.
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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
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.)
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?
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)
Did you bother to read the article? The whole point is that the device is not expensive at all when compared to what else you can get in the smaller storage capacity market for that price.
At the very least, it's competatively priced, and given the iTunes support and the superior UI, it's probably a no-brainer for anyone looking in that general price range.
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?
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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 $149. And sell a shit load more.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
The original iPod had 5 GB of storage. The mini iPod has 4 GB for now, but in a year what will it have? This is a new form factor that will become more and more attractive over time. At some point (three years from now?) it won't matter that a mini holds 80 GB and a normal iPod holds 160 GB, the smaller size will be enough of an advantage to go for the mini. At some point the mini will simply be the iPod. Then the larger one will move on to video.
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Oh, please. Not every man is design impaired, and color and styling may be among the criteria evaluated in a purchase. When you buy a car, or clothes or whatever do you completely eschew color and design? I doubt it. While the very few will take function completely over form most of us enjoy having something that is aesthecially pleasing besides being of great functional value.
Am I to assume from the tone of your post that if you were to be able to have a girlfriend/boyfriend you would completely ignore looks? :-)
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Teen age girls. They buy a lot of music.
Fashion is important. Small is important; their purses are full of stuff.
Think of it as technical jewelry.
I know girls who are buying all five colors to match their outfits and moods.
>>So why would anyone buy the Mini?
Smaller form factor and colors. For a lot of people this stuff really really matters.
I run and I would much rather carry the Mini, than a full size ipod. Plus, I only have 3 gigs of music, so I really wound't get much more value out of a 40 gig player.
Jeff
The iPod Mini has also had an interesting side effect. Before Apple announced it, everybody thought that paying 300$ 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...
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.
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
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.
- 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.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
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.
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
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.
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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
Can you burn everything you buy with MS's music store to CD?
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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.
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.
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.
Size:
Zen: 4.4 by 3 by 0.86 inches
iPod: 4.1 by 2.4 by 0.62 inches
iPod Mini: 3.6 by 2.0 by 0.5 inches
Weight:
Zen: 7.9 ounces
iPod: 5.6 ounces
iPod Mini: 3.6 ounces
Yes, you might be able to find more storage in the Zen, but size is the issue here. Further, I think anyone can see that the iPod's design is far more intuitive. The Zen is a great product, and I drool over the price tag. However, the iPod can not be discarded as an overpriced player. Expensive, perhaps, but there are reasons.
The Political Programmer
That is pefectly correct. The mainstream public that like pretty things, don't think like geeks.
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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.
"...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
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.
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.
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.