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iPod Mini Worldwide Rollout Delayed
falcon5768 writes "Apparently those 4-gig, $249 little buggers are selling faster than anyone expected.... So fast that the original April rollout worldwide has been delayed till July to keep up with the demand in the states and to get enough in production to meet worldwide sales. Given that there where 100,000 pre-orders alone, does this mean that yet again Apple hit on a niche that no one else (including me) thought would sell. I have been hearing a lot of rumors that the biggest buyer of the iPod mini has in fact been those female tech geeks out there. So much for the idea a $249 4-gig iPod was a mistake." Rob Glaser of RealNetworks, though, claims that not opening the iPod (big or small) to other formats is a real mistake; he wants to see iPod support other proprietary formats (like, say, Real's).
Uh huh...
So where is it that you buy a PocketPC and equip it with 4GB of memory for less than $250? Maybe you were thinking of the "big" iPod? Can you buy 40GB of RAM for your PocketPC for less than $500?
mp3 music can be imperfect, but it's better than the movies that you'll be playing on your pda...
This is why geeks have such a bad rap and a hard time in the real world. LOOKS MATTER. Say it with me again. APPEARANCES MATTER, LOOKS Matter.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
*sigh* do we have to go over this again and again? The iPod supports:
AAC (16 to 320 Kbps) with or without Fairplay DRM, MP3 (32 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible, AIFF and WAV
How many portable players support RealNetworks formats?
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
So the slashdot crowd was wrong. (Yet again) Good thing I did not short those SCO stocks before... However, I feel that most slashdotters don't really understand what marketing is.
Even though "marketing" is a dread-word around here, Apple seems to have a really good marketing department to me. They get it right quite often.
Remember, marketing does not just reffer to the selling process of a given item, but also the process by which you conduct research into a given area to determine if there really is a market after all. It is important to check to see if the market is there by research, because what you can divine just by intuition is often wrong for marketing.
A very interesting read (even if you are a computer only type geek) on marketing is:
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
It covers things like how Listerine was the market leader for mouthwash - because everyone wanted to keep their mouth free from germs - and the medicie taste was irrelevant... Enter Scope, with better tasting mouthwash for "fresh breath" not germ killing so much, and now Scope is #1 in the market - Listerine #2.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Actually, I've been using DVD to PocketPC to rip DVD's down to .wmv files and they look really good for such a small size (128MB or 256MB). It does take a long time to convert (about the realtime length of the movie), but framerate and audio sync are perfect on my Axim X3i. My friends are impressed when I show them a full movie on my PDA. Nothing like having 2 full movies on a 256MB card for when things get dull.
Not only that, since DVD to PocketPC uses Windows Media encoder to do the conversion, it turned me onto the usefulness of that software. I converted all my Red vs. Blue episodes to play well on my PDA and I could carry about 30 at a time on a 256MB card. The predefined PocketPC conversion setting does a great job.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
In Capitalist America, boob exposes YOU!
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
would have all of your heads. The correct usage is iPods Mini.
If I could make this sig kill you, I would.
Try to remember, when sony came out with the walkman eerone said that this is the stupidest idea ever. Who would buy a tape recoder that doesn't record? Turns out, everyone. Its not the ammount of features that matters, its the usefulness to the task at hand (and to some respect, the novelty).
At least on a Mac, it also has many other uses. Everything from being an external hard drive some basic PDA functions. For those who travel, you can also plug in a card reader to download images taken with your digital camera while you're still on the road.
So yes, its great for listening to music, but it can do more!
Should note I'm talking about the iPod, not iPod mini -don't know how it stacks up feature-wise.
The error is quite clear. Most people around here seem to see the iPod as basically a hard disk. So their reaction was, "A smaller capacity hard disk that's nearly as expensive as a large one? Who would want that?"
But what Apple knew that the pundits did not is that the iPod is only incidentally a hard disk--it's a music player. So to the average consumer, the reaction was, "A smaller, more convenient iPod, and cheaper to boot? Where do I sign up?" Lower capacity was for most a minor concern, because even the mini holds more than enough music for most activities.
As for support other formats, why bother? Just think of the support headache. When instead they could invest the same amount of effort into improving and promoting the iTunes store. Besides, once people start buying their tunes elsewhere, they might start thinking that they could just as well have one of those clone players. Apple already supports the most common open format, so if people don't want to go with Apple's store and format, they can always order the CDs used from Amazon and rip them to mp3.
I've done that with my original 5GB model and it survived just fine two. I haven't had the problem with the mini because I bought the armband. I highly recommend it for running. A few other companies are starting to make armbands that hold the mini if you think the Apple one is too pricey. I thought it was, but between the education discount and the fact that no one else was making them when I ordered mine, I got the Apple one.
If it's not on fire, it's a software problem.
I had a multimedia PDA before I got my iPod.
I sold it because:
1) PDA memory is slowww. And switching tracks was slowww. The interfaces were slowww. Copying to the memory card, even over USB 2.0, was so slowww I coudn't take it! Copying 30 gig to the iPod took less than ten minutes.
2) PDAs are hard to control one handed or while in motion. I kept screwing it up while running at the gym. Plus I looked stupid, tapping at a pda in a leather case with a plastic stick while running in a circle.
3) PDAs aren't very rugged. I dropped it a lot and would cringe every time. The iPod isn't much better, but there are a number of shock absorbing "skins" that really make it nice. Furthermore, sweating on the PDA can cause it to not work right. The iPod, being nearly seamless, is unaffected by sweat.
4) The PDA sound was awful...besides being hard to control, volume wise, there were noticable problems with the sound. And it wasn't loud enough. And the headset plugged in to a really inconvenient place. Mostly, it felt "tacked on."
Hey freaks: now you're ju
A related article over at The Register made this point rather effectively:
She seemed surprisingly disappointed when I said it only came in white.
Apple's done their market research on this one, folks.
"He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once." - Steve Jobs on Bill Gates
Bah, that'll get you a +5 insightful. ;)
-T
From TFA (which you presumably have not read): '"We're actually consuming just about all the 4GB, one-inch drives they make. As they make more, we'll get more," said Mr Joswiak.'
irb(main):001:0>
I'm a male geek and I bought a mini. I wasn't really sold on the whole iPod concept at least as far as liking it enough to spend money on. Then I used a mini for a while. The tilting scroll wheel is a HUGE improvement over the 3G ipod's buttons [I can use it without looking at it] and the size difference means that it's really pocket-sized now the construction feel 100% more sturdy as well. One of the other tipping points for me was that I didn't want to be carrying $400+ worth of music player on my person. If I get mugged or something I'd much rather absorb a $250 loss. Also, since I can't fit my whole collection on even a 40 gig iPod [at a decent bitrate] I figured I'd just go with the cheapest model since I'll have to manage everything by hand anyway.
I just wish the dock wasn't such a rip-off.
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2004/03/25.14 .shtml
Apple Computer confirmed to The Mac Observer Thursday that its announcement in delaying worldwide release of the iPod mini to July is due to a shortage of Hitachi-made hard drives.
"We're consuming almost all of those drives that are being made," Stan Ng, Director of iPod Worldwide Product Marketing, told The Mac Observer. "So we're putting them in iPod minis as quick as we can get them and trying to get them out as quickly as possible.
He decided to just watch the government, and kind of scale it down to size, and run his life that way. --Laurie Anderson
Spymac has the photo.
Yes, I had an extenstion cable and my headphones come with a very long cable. I make sure to have a long cable so that I don't break the headphones or the jack on the ipod. Also, the treadmill was about six inches from the wall behind it.
Karma: Meh (Mostly from meh.)
Yeah, but see, the problem with this is that Apple may not be able to SELL a 1 GB edition of the iPod with acceptable (Apple_acceptable, not rational_human acceptable).
...alas, I am just a poor boy, from a poor family...
Just because you quarter the capacity of the drive doesn't mean you can quarter the price; Hitachi (or whoever makes the drives) can make 40 or 80 GB drives cheaply, but that's because their mass manufacturing stuff is ALL geared towards that (or so I assume, from the rumor that they're run out of iPod drives...).
Odds are that Apple would have to special order a 1 GB drive from [rand(manufacturer)], which might not necessarily lower the price. Maybe 4GB was an optimum price? Who knows? All we know is that it sells. Big. If I had the spare money, I would so buy one.
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
I got an ipod mini the first day they came out and it wouldn't play AAC's without freezing entirely. They replaced it with a new one and it still has the problem they said they would fix.
Yeah, you do :)
:)
I'm 13 and I'm already reselling for a webhost (not joking, but only to geeky friends at the moment), not to mention the lead Jazilla developer + a whole lot of other stuff.
I refuse to disclose my financial status except to say that I'm in the black and don't have any debt to anybody
You can believe me or not believe me on this one..