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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
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.
More is right... a lot more! I was just pricing cards for my new digital camera (the $12 Ritz model got me hooked), and found out that the going price for 4GB is a whopping $1,130! Yikes!
After dividing out, that came to 28c/meg -- about a penny more per meg than the Lexar-brand 256 MB cards ($70). So I figured a kilobuck must not be bad, if you need that kind of storage.
But 4096 meg for $200 is less than 5c/meg!
How on earth did MuVo get such a low price on their components?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
For the inevitable ridiculous battery questions:
iPod Battery FAQ
You knew it the moment that it became popular. The iPod totally sold out. Those of us who supported it back in the old days when it was little more than a cassette player in a garage are left wincing at how they've totally gone mainstream.
White case. Headphones. LED screen. Fucking sellouts.
I have been pwned because my
Andy Mack deserves credit for that compact flash card hack. I saw it published on his website many weeks ago.
The quality of the photos on his website always amazes me.
Yea. I know.
Was I the only one that was thinking "The iPod sold out? What a poser! Down with conformity! Sold out luser!"
SCO.com uses Linux
SIZE DOES MATTER!
-Adam C. Greenfield
Wow. Seeing as how 4 GB flash cards seem to be going for a great deal more than that on eBay, I think I just found myself a new work-at-home job.
True story.
With whatever manufacturing capability they have, they can only be built so fast. Demand currently outstrips supply.
Maybe they could sell the parts in a box and let consumers put them together? It takes time to assemble them, hence the shortage.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
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.
...always listen to the most vocal people after macworld. Remember the iPod mini sucks, it won't sell, it's too expensive, nobody will like it, it'll flop. As read on Spymac! Macnn! macworld! Slashdot!.
:)
And look how right they were!. pfft.
Congrats Apple. One more insanely succesful product
I think the point is that the components aren't hard to come by, they've just not slapped enough of them together to meet the demand. Assembly time is the bottle neck not component availablity.
CharlesP
wordtrip.com
It seems the 4GB storage isn't flash memory... it's a hard drive that can interface with a compactflash port.
It seemed unreasonable to think they could possibly sell 4GB of flash memory at that price.
Since it's just a hard drive with a CF interface, it will be much slower than actual flash memory.
Remember this about the original iPod?
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
And now their criticisms of the iPod Mini before it even came out are biting them in the ass.Bottom line, the editors and most of the readers are out of touch with reality sometimes.
SIG:Slashdot: indymedia for nerds.
1) I was firmly in the "it costs too much for too little" (no pun intended) crowd. Then I saw one in person, and held it in my hand. The thing is light as a feather, and still feels more "solid", largely thanks to the all aluminum body. I have a 20GB 2nd-gen iPod, but as soon as the iPod mini has at least 12GB of capacity (size of my current music collection), I'm buying one. It's just incredible.
2) Don't forget that even though the iPod is only $50 more, this sets the entry level iPod price even lower. Before to get any iPod you had to spend $300. Now it's $250, and will probably get lower with future generations of the mini line.
3) Just to clarify, the iPod mini also uses a Compact Flash compatible drive - the Hitachi 4GB Microdrive. I'd bet all you have to do is format it as FAT32 and then stick it in your camera.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Perhaps you should skip the battery and get your sense of humor replaced. It seems to be faulty.
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'm glad Apple remains a contender and a nagging thorn in the sleep of Billy Gates' mind. The fact that Apple is still around and won't go away has to bug him on some level.
In fact, my next purchase will be an Apple laptop.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Before you do anything else, visit this link:
http://www.nomadworld.com/downloads/firmware/wma-m uvo_2_4.asp
And upgrade the firmware of the unit. This is VITAL. If you do not upgrade ahead of time, you will have serious issues later on. Upgrade the firmware FIRST. It has some auto-recovery features that will prove necessary in later steps. Remove the battery when you are done. Now ground yourself.
2. At the top of the Muvo2 there are two small screws. With a very small philips screwdriver, remove these screws.
3. Open the battery compartment. At the bottom, there are two very small screws. Remove these as well.
4. Remove the back of the unit.
5. Lift the circuit board carefully. It was held in place by the previous 4 screws.
6. Underneath the top circuit board, there is a plate holding down the microdrive. At the top, there are two screws. Remove them. On the side, there is a very very small silver screw. It is smaller than the two black ones. Remove it.
7. There is a piece of black tape in the lower corner. Underneath that tape is the last screw holding down the MD plate. Remove the tape carefully, and unscrew the screw.
8. Lift the plate out. Now, CAREFULLY pry the pin-array from the microdrive. Very gently use a small flat screwdriver to work your way down the black plastic strip. DO NOT FORCE ANYTHING. It should come out easily.
9. Take the 4gb MD and format it in your camera. You should have a 4gb MD now.
10. Put the 1gb MD back into the array. Carefully press it down. Again, do not force anything, it should slide in very easily. 11. Replace the screws, place the tape over the black screw where you found it, and reassemble the Nomad. 12. Turn it on. It will report that there is a media error and go into recovery mode. 13. Select Reload firmware from the recovery menu. It will take a few seconds, reload the firmware, and then report a media error. 14. Select Connect to PC. Now, connect the USB connector to your PC. 15. Run the Firmware upgrade again, and allow it to upgrade the firmware. 16. Power it down. Then back up. 17. When it turns on, it will report a scansearch error, or a media error then throw you into recovery mode. Select Format. It should take a few seconds to format. 18. Power it off, power it back on, and you should have a working 1gb Muvo2, a working 4gb MD in your camera, and a big smile on your face.
I know it is easy to find on the web, but after reading some of the questions (many of the mod +5) on /. I wonder if some people even know google exists. ;)
Open Source Sushi
The iPod mini drive is reportedly NOT working in digital cameras, something to do with formatting..
Wired News has more on this whole thing about the MuVo2..
Guess I'll have to use this damn iPod mini for listening to music, instead of.. um.. tolkien ring??
I hate spyware and spies
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.
Well, if you have the White Album on CD, you can still use iTunes to rip it into MP3 and sync it with your iPod.
That's legal and with a fast CPU/drive probably takes less time than typing in a credit card number.
After all, iTunes started out with "Rip, Mix, Burn." The Store is just a new thing that builds on the old.
It's called "sales." I think it must be new, because nobody on slashdot seems to understand it. Maybe there's a FAQ somewhere.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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
I was at the local Apple Store Yesterday picking up an iTrip for the 10gb iPod I got on clearance from amazon. In my 10 minutes there, I saw three mini sales and the following conversation between two stereotypical female blonde mallrats:
bmr1: "Man, I really WANT one of these things"
bmr2: "So BUY it, what color would you get?"
bmr1: "Blue-no-pink, I like the pink, but my credit card bill already sucks."
bmr2: "Girlfriend, untill your visa's got three grand on it, I don't even wanna hear you bitch about your credit card bill."
I'm thinking 'Bravo for managing your debt' and 'Good god, I thought bmr's only existed in movies'. Shows what happens when you got to a mall less than twice a year, I guess.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Now if you could just legally obtain music for it, you'd be all set!
If you don't like the iTunes Music Store, you can always buy CDs or borrow them from friends, rip them, and put them on your iPod.
Hell, even iTunes can't offer The Beatles.
The Beatles' record label is once again being stubborn about adopting a new method of distribution. They also took a long time to allow Beatles albums to be released on CD. They haven't made a deal with any music download service, and it's anyone's guess when they will choose to make the Beatles' music available electronically.
As noted above, however, you can still buy the CDs.
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
iPod is the best selling portable mp3 player. They own 2/3 of the market. Maybe you don't care how stylish your mp3 player, car, clothes, or girlfriend is, but many people do.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
"Raise your hand if you have iTunes ...
...
...
...
Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port
Raise your hand if you have both
Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device
There is Apple's market. Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future of iPod.
~LoudMusic"
This was modded up, 4 insightful.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
How to legally obtain music for your iPod.
Step One: Buy used CDs of the music you want on your iPod
Step Two: Rip to MP3 or AAC.
Step Four: Transfer files to iPod
Step Five: Sell all those CDs you just bought to another used CD shop
And as a plus, you've thumbed your nose at the RIAA by buying used CDs.
Of course, if you're a really cheap sod, you just borrow CDs from your local library and rip them.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
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
Saw one of these at an Apple Store. By then I had already determined that it WAS in fact quite competitive with the 256mb players price wise, was about the same size, and of course had much more space to boot. And therefore, the price was appropriate and I thought it would sell well.
Anyway, after seeing it in person I realized something important - it's better designed than the regular iPod too! Firstly it's lighter and smaller - in fact I'd say the mini's size is probably optimal and they won't go smaller in the future. The rounded aluminum case feels and looks a lot nicer and more durable. The colors are a nice touch. And most importantly, the new scroll wheel and button layout is much better than the current white pods. You no longer have to move your thumb out of the wheel area to hit any of the buttons, as the scroll wheel itself now operates kind of like a d-pad for button operation in addition to the touch-sensitive scrolling, producing some nice tactile feedback. Try it for yourself to see what I mean. The (patented) iPod scroll wheel is the critical feature that makes the iPod's design worlds better than the alternatives, and they've improved it.
So to sum up, the mini is wonderful from the design area, especially in the tactile sense. They really hit the sweet spot this time.
I must admit, after handling it I was tempted to buy, but I've been waiting for an iPod to go under $200 and I'll wait longer if I have to. I don't listen to music enough to justify more than that.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I'm sick of this "Microsoft saved/bought Apple" crap that I keep hearing from uninformed retards.
*After* it was totally apparent that Steve Jobs had saved Apple, Microsoft took the opportunity to buy a real small amount of Apple's stock at at an artificially low price (they made a killing on it as the stock went up 10x in value from that over the next year).
Microsoft also got some good PR for their Mac Office product which had long been a cash cow for Microsoft. In the year leading up to the release of Office 98 and the announcement, Microsoft's sales of Office for Mac had been surpased by Nissus Writer. After they got their big PR boost thanks to Steve they were back raking in the dough from selling Office for Mac.
The amount of stock they bought was $150 million. At the time, Apple had a $7 Billion price cap and $2 Billion in cash on hand. The quarter that MS made their "investment", Apple's profits were more than $150 million.
Also Apple was forced to cross license patents with Microsoft and ship Microsoft's crappy IE browser as the default on Mac systems.
Did Microsoft "prop up" Apple. Hardly. They took advantage of a weak moment and robbed Apple blind.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
It looks like the anodized finish on the silver minis is flaking off already.
;-)
It's the TI book all over again. Apple hasn't posted anything about it on their forums yet.
You're a pathetic liar! I mean that in both senses--that you're pathetic and that you're not a good liar!!
You see "anodized" means that the surface of the aluminum has been chemically altered to become an extremely hard and durable surface. "Anodization" is not something that is spread onto the surface, it is part of the metal itself, it does not "flake off"; about the only way to damage it is to scratch it, and that's not easy to do. The TiBook was painted, and paint, if not done well, can flake off under various circumstances.
OK, I suppose you could always have been making an attempt at humor... If so, you got me good
This has been beaten to death in thousands of /. threads before. No one has ever heard of an iPod dying for this reason... it is just due to your general sense of unease about hard drives and head crashes. However, it doesnt happen with the iPod, and no, the iPod doesnt skip on active use either. Anyway, I digress...
I have no problem having Windows iTunes manage my 64 GB collection over the network. Of course, I have a dedicated Win 2k3 server and gigabit ethernet. Whatever. SMB on NT is great for filesystem access (fuck Apple's Rendezvous, it sucks... use SMB).
The only gripe I have with iTunes (and this holds for Winamp 5 as well) is that files without ID3 tags are "lost" in the library, as a rule. Dont know how that would be solved, though. For instance, my .aiff's and .wav's cannot be ID3 tagged.
"Well, shit."
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.
I've used an iPod mini a fair bit, and from the first moment I picked it up, I knew it was a superior design.
Now, my purpose in owning an iPod is not to carry around a handy collection of music; it's to carry around all the music I might want to hear at any time, so I got a regular iPod (10GB, US$209 at Target) and I've loaded it (so far) to nearly twice the capacity of a mini.
I deeply wish my iPod had the mini's click wheel instead of the touch buttons, because the tactile feedback on the mini is worlds better -- try pausing or skipping just by feel when you're driving, and you'll really appreciate the click wheel. I don't like having to hover my finger over a button in order to touch it at the right moment -- I prefer to be able to lightly rest on the button and click it when needed. (Yes, I'm a touch typist.) I hope Apple incorporates a larger click wheel into the 4G standard-size iPods. I'll be first in line for one of those.
Wouldn't mind if they used the brushed-aluminum finish on all the iPods, since it has better grip and isn't hyper-fingerprinty like the plastic/polished-steel case. But hey, the click wheel's the most important improvement, and the 3G iPod does look undeniably cool if you keep it reasonably clean in some sort of case or bag (mine's in a dice bag, works great), so...whatever. Just give me a click wheel and a good-sized hard drive, and I'll be happy.
Maybe if I was some trendy yuppie with a high paying job who has his car changed every 6 months just so he can get the new numberplate, I would consider buying an iPod, but for those of us in this country who are not earning 6 figures or winning the lottery, value for money is a far higher priority than how "cool" it is. You can get a Creative Labs player with 5Gb more storage for GBP69.00 less than the iPod.
(On a completely unrelated note, why doesn't Slashdot reproduce the "pound" symbol, even when I use an HTML entity for it?)
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...