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iPod Mini Sells Out
burgburgburg writes "According to USATODAY.com, the iPod mini is virtually sold out after two weeks. As we know, it had 100,000 on pre-order. It's the top seller at the Apple Store, where they advise people that there will be a one to three week wait. And it isn't a component shortage that's causing the delays. It's the huge demand amongst teens (for the colors) and athletes who like exercising with the ultralight device. While many here on /. felt that the mini was overpriced and pointed out that for $50 extra, you could buy a regular iPod with 15GB of storage instead of the 4 GB of the mini, Apple seems to have correctly identified the price point and the market they were going after. The space has become so hot that Creative's MuVo2 has also been selling well, but also for a slightly different reason. The MuVo2, which also has 4 GB of capacity, uses a CompactFlash card (which can be used in a digital camera). People have been buying the MP3 player and taking it apart for the card, which would cost more than the $200 dollars for the MuVo2."
While many here on /. felt that the mini was overpriced and pointed
out that for $50 extra, you could buy a regular iPod with 15GB of storage
instead of the 4 GB of the mini, Apple seems to have correctly identified
the price point and the market they were going after.
Which should tell /. readers a couple things:
/.'ers don't fit the target demographics (Ow! That hurts!)
/.'ers are apparently sedentary, they sit at their screens so much that weight isn't a consideration, for that matter, they can listen to stuff while sitting at the screen, so why bother?
/.'ers are more interested in pushing consumer technology to its more than whether there's a need. (It's all about the game!)
/.'ers must be colorblind (I'm R/G) so the colors aren't interesting, let along exciting.
/.'ers were wrong, and can't stand being wrong and are currently working on a strategy to change that rather than get a date for a Friday night. (Hey! This is important!)
So what's the average age of a slashdotter? Undoubtably there must be a few in the target demographic, now how many have kids in the group?
I identify more with Homer Simpson than Britney Spears and I'm cool with that, inspite of the tone of that post. Now if you'll excuse me I need to go buy some cargo pants, Justin Timberlake CD's, and iPod mini and a stone of oatmeal (because it's the right thing to do.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And it isn't a component shortage that's causing the delays. It's the huge demand amongst teens...
Huh? If there wasn't a component shortage, why aren't they able to fulfill the "huge demand?"
The space has become so hot that Creative's MuVo2 has also been selling well, but also for a slightly different reason. The MuVo2, which also has 4 GB of capacity, uses a CompactFlash card (which can be used in a digital camera). People have been buying the MP3 player and taking it apart for the card, which would cost more than the $200 dollars for the MuVo2
Some of their sales can be attributed to this, however I doubt that it is statistically significant. The majority of consumers are not doing this.
I know a lot of people complained about the price, but given the fact that they've now sold out, Apple would have been stupid to set a lower price.
Because this is the real world, even a company like Apple that delivers quality can fuck up (think iPod battery fiasco) but they are quick to fix the sitation. Much quicker than most any other company for sure.
Anyway, people who complain about expensive apple products should shut their mouth for several reasons. 1) Because you are cheap, does not mean others are not willing to pay for quality. We are. 2) Lots of good G5 rack comps from Apple give more power for lest $ than even Dell (the defacto standard for good'n'cheat).
To all the iPod owners out there, "Enjoy!"
Does this mean there's 100K kids who MS won't be able to sell their ipod clone to? If demand is that much greater than supply, does that mean by the time MS comes out with their lame version, they may already be 500K-1million ipod mini out there.
Just be careful about the negative feedback you'll get from calling them flash cards instead of minidrives with CF interfaces...
but fast enough it seems which is what matters in the end.
I'll put it this way: I have a lot more faith in Apple than I do in the rumor sites. Apple does their homework before they release something; they haven't really had a flop since the G4 Cube (which was a cool idea regardless, it kind of predated the SFF PCs with the same concept.) I guess their strategy now is to stay one step ahead of everyone who tries to copy them. It seems to be working, at least for now.
Little mixed up at your "I will never understand how people can be talked into spending enormous sums on an inferior product". I see from your web link that "Rio is also pricing the new Nitrus very aggressively. It will retail for $249.00 and will ship this month." Isn't that the same price as the mini?
I don't think I was ever worried about it not selling. My thought was (and is) that it's not going to make that much difference long-term to market share.
The thing that I saw Jobs hammer over and over agan was market share. He wanted the iPod to not just be the biggest seller, but to be the majority of the market. So... the question is, are these new iPod Mini sales new iPod sales, or are they existing iPod users trading "up"?
According to Jobs, there's three market segments. I thnk he was a bit deceptive about the details of the segments with his "$50 more" line, but the basic outlines seem to be pretty solid. There's the low end flash based devices, there's the midrange flash and maybe small disk, and there's the high end. The iPod owns the high end.
In terms of market size, the low end and the high end are the biggest. It seems to me that someone interested in market share would go for the wide open low end with a flash based $180 "iPod micro". Not dive in to the most competitive part of the market with a price that seems designed to cannibalise their own sales.
I guess their strategy now is to stay one step ahead of everyone who tries to copy them. It seems to be working, at least for now.
And it will continue to work. Apple has an R&D budget: most of the PC makers don't (or it is insignificant in size, or lacks any kind of vision). As long as this remains the case, Apple will always have something 'different'.
(And spare me the MS to F/OSS comparisons. It costs much less to code up a new driver or window manager widget than it does to tool up production on an actual, physical object.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I was hoping the mini was going to bomb and maybe the price would come down but if I was Steve I wouldn't bring the preice down till they stopped selling. I used to think M$ was the marketting king but I think His Royal Majesty Steve Jobs has surpassed them.
It's all Politics
Dude, yer sooooo coool. I wish I could rail against Apple/Jobs with all your self-righteousness.
I will never understand how people can be talked into spending enormous sums on an inferior product through a snazzy marketing campaign.
No kidding. For $170, I can get a 1.5 GB Nitrus. For only $80 more (less than 50% increase in price) I can get a product with about 240% more capacity (the iPod mini).
"Oh, but what about the Muvo2?" According to Amazon, it's not yet available.
So, for $50, I get a better looking unit (arguable, I agree) FireWire support, AAC support (you can tout WMA all you want, but when the vast, vast majority of online sales are AAC, I could care less about WMA) And I don't have to explain to the average person why I bought such a ghetto player.
Sorry, but there is nothing standout between the iPod and the Rio offerings from a purely objective standpoint. Judging by the sellout of the first run, $50 doesn't mean anything to people in this marketplace, so the choice of one over the other is purely subjective. Trying to pretend otherwise just makes you look like a whiner.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
All it really validates is that most consumers are fools and will fall for any hype the Apple marketing department throws at them. If people were intelligent enough to do a little research, they could find that buying a full-blown iPod for only 50 dollars more would be a much wiser decision, space wise, or another portable mp3 player entirely, rather than shelling out an insane amount of money for an Apple iPod that is shiny, pretty, and has "cool" commercials...
People can see themselves, rather easily, that the larger iPod is only $50 more.
But here's a mind-boggling concept - perhaps they know, but are basing choice on something other than $/MB!!!
A smaller device can be carried more often. I got one of the original palm pilots, but really didn't use it. Then I got a Palm V which has been in my pocket every day for the last few years. Similarily, the smaller size of the iPod mini makes it much more practical to carry about. For my use of an iPod the larger version is fine, but there are a lot of people that want as small a device as possible to work out with. Heck, one of the standard accessories you can buy with the iPod mini is a armband! Although a normal iPod is small, I would not want it bound to my arm for any length of time.
Now in addition consider a further possibility - perhaps, there are a lot of people that don't even have 4MB of music. Perhaps they only like boy bands and the collected greatest works fit into a few hundred k. For whatever reason, there are a lot of people that are not that in to music and do not have a huge variety, or a need for a large library on the go. For these people, the new iPod is simply $50 less for an even smaller product. In fact I have a 5GB iPod, not much larger, and have never really felt that much of a pull to go for a larger one as long as this works - it holds enough somgs for a ten hour roadtrip, and I can re-load when I want to switch it up. Again, if I were buying now I might go for a $50 less device just because I lived with 5MB for so long as was perfectly happy.
I'm not even going to go into fashion because I am pretty sure that's a minorty of what is making this device popular.
Last question - do you always supersize every fast food meal you buy? Why, it's only $0.20 more for a pound of frys!! Who would be stupid enough to not buy that!!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
are not reasonable, or mainstream. Perhaps Apple has figured out what most people's requirements really are. Marketing alone can carry a product only for so long, products with legs have more going for them than marketing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
To an economist, "demand is far greater than supply" is just another way of saying "the price is too low".
Can you imagine the Slashdot collective opinion, though, if Apple had priced it at $300? "You can get three times as much storage for the same price? Apple is insane!"
Goes to show that geeks are not Apple's target market, at least for consumer gear.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
The reason is, like a lot of slashdot readers, the media also does not think that something like the iPod mini will do well at all. So when they consistently do something surprising (like actually selling the devices at a tremendous rate) it's news because the news people are all astonished, and assume the rest of us are as well. They are basically saying "Can you believe this?".
And of course there's a bit of infiltration - not by the Apple diehards, but by the products themselves which convert confused people such as yourself to an Apple fan once they start using the product. The trick is that you assume it's all marketing fluff with no substance, and that's where the disconnect lies. I'm not even sure why people like you think the interest is from marketing as I do not see that much marketing from Apple compared to many other things.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's a 4GB drive so needs to be formatted as FAT32. Not all digital cameras support FAT32, so they're limited to 2GB. You can test this by creating, say, a 1GB partition on the drive and retrying it a camera that didn't recognise it previously.
Apple was hammered by their loyal customers quite a bit last year. Black Cider ripped them a new one for widespread problems with the logic boards in the iBook, and made even more bad press for them by exposing their attempt to convince everyone who complained that they were the only ones having problems. The "screw through the apple" Black Cider T-shirts at MacWorld received a lot of press attention.
Meanwhile, the Neistat brothers distributed a hilarious video protesting the 18 month life of the nonreplaceable battery in the original iPod, forcing Apple into emergency spin control mode which resulted in a $99 battery replacement policy to avoid bad press during the launch of the iPod Mini.
Overall, the past year has seen the devout Apple crowd stand up on their hind legs and protest for a change. I think that's a good thing, even though I also think Apple designs innovative and high quality products. If they were starting to slip a bit, vocal consumers put them back on track, and that's good for everyone. A lesser company would have remained in denial while trying to cling to their shrinking monopoly (and here I'm definitely thinking SCO, Microsoft, RIAA, etc.)
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
Whenever an item sells out, you have to wonder, was it a good product? or just good marketing? By orchestrating insufficient supplies, many news sources, ./ and USA today at least, are reporting the fact. That's free advertising for Apple, the kind traditional ads cannot buy. So when huge stockpiles of the things mysteriously turn up next week, we will all be more likely to pick them up because:
1. They are percieved as rare.
2. They are percieved as desired.
Perception is reality and marketers really know how to pull our consumer strings.
Apple's doing a great job of all three, and now the iPod is expanding their exposure for the rest of their products.
How to legally obtain music for your iPod.
Step Five: Sell all those CDs you just bought to another used CD shop.
See, the whole idea of making a backup is that only one copy will be in use at a time. As soon as you sell that CD, someone else could listen to at the same time as you, which now makes your copy illegal (since you no longer own the original).
Nice try though.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
They don't have identical audio quality. The SNR of the Nitrus is -4db higher than the mini iPod.
...
Weird. I believe you, but I'm sure you understand why I voiced my (apparently) uninformed opinion: Both devices have their audio components designed by portal player. My understanding was that they were practically identical in this regard.
Aesthetic appearance is a personal call.
Right, but it's still very important. It's wrong to denigrate iPod buyers for using it as a major part of their purchasing decision.
The iPod UI is, IMPO, overrated. Not only does it lack the ability...
You might not like its feature set, but... what about it's UI? (And your comment suggests you might not know about the iPod's on-the-go playlist feature.)
Argument already invalidated. The nitrus 1.5gb is $164 at computers4sure
Touche. But you have to buy it from some weird web company with a number in their name. You're still right.
Nothing. If I remember correctly your the dude who posted this flamebait. My initial post was just a comment on where all the Slashdot people are...
Um, what? Your post was self congratulatory horseshit.
the mini iPod is just a rip-off of the Rio Nitrus, and slashdotters are all hanging out on the Rio Karma and Nitrus boards laughing at the herd of iPod "individuals" buying minis with sub-par audio quality.
I will never understand how people can be talked into spending enormous sums on an inferior product through a snazzy marketing campaign. The species is doomed.
Why not accept that iPod purchasers have different desires than you? They don't want a product that appeals to your manly aesthetics. They want a product that is guaranteed to be easy to use, easy to purchase, and has already made a million people very happy. Leave them alone. Iduno, maybe you were joking, but you sounded like an asshole.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
MS's lock on the Office market made it impossible for Apple to pursue its lawsuit (which was a stone cold cinch) re: the theft of the QuickTime code that made up MS's media player solutions.
The $150M and the continuing support of Office Mac (which, by the way, is absurdly profitable for MS) were part of the settlement deal.
Had Microsoft not had the power to utterly destroy Apple (by stopping development of Office, and making a big stink about it) Apple would have been able to wring far, far, far more money out of MS.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Butt-ugly, web site is confusing to navigate, cites dimensions and weight that go far beyond the iPod, hard drive seems to be 2.5 inches which makes the whole thing clunky. Button arrangement is needlessly complicated; software said not to work on any Unix on the web site (the iPod works flawlessly even on various free Unixes out there). Doesn't play official successor to MP3, AAC.
The one interesting positive point is that it plays Ogg Vorbis, but I only see such files every few months...
Apple is still cautious about over-production because it still doesn't have the confidence of the public yet vis-a-vis survival. They produce too much, and flagging sales give rise to "Apple is dying" rumors. Produce too little (e.g. "sell through") and they get criticisms like yours. There is no middle ground. Apple gets no "slack." Every misstep is trumpeted as their last. It's still better to sell out than to have an over-hyped "flop" on its hands.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Gil Amelio couldn't market pussy in a prison. He doesn't know anything about the computer business to this day and, despite taking several measures that improved Apple's fiscal health (and I wouldn't ignore Fred Andersen's role in all that), he led the company into a death-spiral with a cluelessness that was maddening. Consumers weren't being given a reason to buy Macs. The machines then were utter crap (Performa series, anyone?) There were too many of them and they weren't innovative. Loyal customers and smart people within the company like Andersen were what got the company through that period. (Oh, and Amelio did buy NeXt and bring back the True Believers. Thanks, Gil).
Fortunately, Steve Jobs wrestled the wheel away from him and resumed level flight. Survival of the company is no longer an issue. Recent articles have intimated that the growth phase of the company's resuscitation has begun. And the timing is excellent; Microsoft is dead in the water, period. I'm a consultant for home and small business users; XP is the company's most exploitable system to-date (but it's still not ME, thank God). Next Generation/"Trusted" Computing is a non-starter. Apple is beginning to get mindshare in a lot of quarters solely on the basis of the "no virus/malware/spyware" issue. The "Slashdot Constituency" isn't deriding Apple about performance, stability, lack of software (except games, d00d) or "modern" operating system issues any more--as was the case during Amelio's tenure--and, frankly, Steve Jobs now has a product he can be proud to offer to business.
The point for Apple now is not to bite off more than it can chew. That's why you don't see the competitive ads challenging Microsoft on a heads-up basis--it's not time yet. A premature ramp-up in anticipation of the kind of demand you think they should have could be disastrous. And if Virginia Tech can get 1100 G5's on-demand, I wouldn't worry about three-hundred new hires at Podunk Insurance; Apple will take care of them.