Why iPod Mini is a smart move for Apple 730
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."
Yeah, I almost agree... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Fact is... (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:Still Don't like it (Score:5, Interesting)
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
This article is 100% right. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Why not a Flash iPod? (Score:0, Interesting)
And why it's not (Score:2, Interesting)
It's competetively priced (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
People seem to forget... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I got a 512mb player for $165 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Overpriced (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Really smart move (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Still Don't like it (Score:3, Interesting)
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"
Re:This article is 100% right. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Still Don't like it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:One point he misses (Score:2, Interesting)
I sure hope so. He says...
If they've got a decent margin on it, think how much more they could trounce the flash-based competition if they sold at that $199 or $149 price point. Personally, I don't know where anyone has that much disposable income lying around. I'd love to have our entire music collection accessible in a handy portable device, but can in no way justify the $259/$299 price tag.
Apple trumps all competitors on storage density (Score:3, Interesting)
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?)
Re:Why has slashdot become so apple finatic ? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:And why it's not (Score:5, Interesting)
Can you burn everything you buy with MS's music store to CD?
Old iPod with 4GB would have been cheaper... (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Wanted: Competition (Score:3, Interesting)
- 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 [apple.com], 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.Apple is a premium hardware manufacturer (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Give me a break. (Score:3, Interesting)
"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.
Re:Overpriced (Score:5, Interesting)
"...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 [theregister.com]. 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, [mercedes-benz.com] Giorgio Armani, [giorgioarmani.com] and Rolex [rolex.com] 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 [walmart.com] 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 [kia.com] 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 price seems cheap to me (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: About the extras... (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
Re:Still Don't like it (Score:3, Interesting)
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).
iPod Mini isn't bad, but iTunes Windows is (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:This article is 100% right. (Score:3, Interesting)
Article misses the point . . . (Score:1, Interesting)
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).
Re:Accessories: where the money is. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Can we get some examples please? (Score:1, Interesting)
rio nitrus $151 - $229 ($199-$249 msrp)
iRiver iGP-100 $196-$239 ($299 msrp)
Creative MuVo2 (4gb) $199-$218 ($299 msrp)
the cheapest price available for the iPod Mini is $244 ($249 msrp)
I think you get the picture.
The product differentiation (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Some people simply don't get it (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, about the Do you suppose you have you in your entire lifetime heard a thousand different songs that you could hum a few bars of now? Well, sort of. Using the above to judge (ie: I might not be able to hum it on cue, but start playing the song and I'll remember quite a lot of it), lets look at some breif numbers.
I have (approx.) 300 CDs
I'd guess they have around 12 songs each, on average (one only has 2, a number of them have 5 and a number of them have 18-20).
Do the math. That's around 3600 songs.
Okay, I don't know all of them *that* well, but there's probably only 10 of those albums that I couldn't name from playing a random song off of them and probably about 50 that I don't know all the songs. The rest of them I could probably name any song you played off the album (2880). Probably 1/2 of those I could sing/hum along with the song as well (1440). (Note: hum, since I own a number of instrumental or partially instrumental albums.)
I'm not willing to guess as to the upper limit of typical memory on this one... since I would like to buy a lot more (when I can afford more), and I doubt I'll be forgetting too much of the past music.
Re:Some people simply don't get it (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a non-professional musician (just for fun) and I delve deeply into all the music I purchase. I listen to tracks over and over listening for subtle techniques used by the musicians to make the song... musical.
Of course this means that I know almost every one of the 6GB worth of MP3's (ripped higher than 128, of course) that I currently have -- very well.
It also means I don't buy much pop crap.
But I can listen to (and know very well -- while still hearing new subtlety every time I listen to) Charlie Parker albums and tell you my favorite of his multiple renditions of the "same" song.
I can also tell you that there's a reason guys like Bill Mize [billmize.com] win the national fingerstyle guitar competitons year after year.
I can't even come close to playing a guitar as well as Mr. Mize, but I know every subtlety of his music, and could probably pick out his playing style from any recording I hadn't heard yet.
Different people listen for different reasons. That's the beauty of music.
Re:This article is 100% right. (Score:2, Interesting)