Apple announced a bunch of new goodies today:
- iPod shuffles get new colors, $79
- iPod nano gets more colorful, wider and video - $149 for the 4GB version, $199 for the 8GB version. iPod nano also comes with 3 games.
- iPod Classic gets bigger. $249 for the 80GB, $349 for the 160GB.
- iPod Touch -- does everything the iPhone can do except take pictures, make calls and connect to AT&T's EDGE network. Yes, WiFi. Yes, websurfable. Yes, touchscreen. 8GB $299, 16GB - $399. Available at the end of the month.
- iTunes Music Stores in Starbucks.
- iPhone Ringtones - 99 cents to buy the song from iTunes, 99 cents to change it into a ringtone.
- iPhone price drop. 8GB iPhone $399, no more 4GB iPhone. (There's still some 4GB iPhones in their clearance inventory -- also discounted $200 down to $299)
When the iPod was announced in 2001 at $399 for a 5GB and $499 for a 10GB, I thought Apple was insane. The mp3 player market was 3 years old at that point, and many vendors were selling mp3 players for less money, and with far less capacity. The first iPod used a small form factor hard drive as its storage medium, which made it a brick compared to the mp3 players of the time, most of which utilized compact flash memory. It was also Mac only, which made the audience rather limited. While some companies would have given up, Apple did not, and here we are, 6 years later, into the sixth generation of iPods.
While the mini and shuffle were designed to lower the barrier for entry into the world of iPod, their latest release, the iPod Touch blurs the line between iPod and iPhone. When the cashiers at McDonald's offer to supersize your meal, they are doing what is known as an upsell. Apple has conveniently priced their iPods to make upsells easier.
At almost every fifty dollars, there's a new choice available:
- $79 iPod Shuffle
- $149 4GB iPod Nano
- $199 8GB iPod Nano
- $249 80GB iPod Classic
- $299 8GB iPod Touch
- $349 160GB iPod Classic
- $399 16GB iPod Touch OR 8GB iPhone
I've always thought of $300 +/- $50 being about what the average person is willing to spend on an iPod. More than that, and you're creeping into laptop/portable territory, and the justifications for a $400+ gadget becomes harder. The $399-499 iPods have never sold as well as the $249-$299 iPods that seem to be hitting the consumer sweet spot of perceived value. I feel there may be too many choices now -- too many sizes, too many colors, too many styles.
The iPod touch is what people have been asking for since the announcement of the iPhone: an touchscreen iPod with WiFi. While there were fears that the release of such a device would canabalize sales of the iPhone, Apple has brought down the price of the iPhone in line with the iPod touch. While the iPod touch features greater capacity at the expense of phone and camera functionality, I can see the iPod touch appealing to a lot of people who want to carry music and video with them, but not necessarily have need of the phone and camera capability of the iPhone. WiFi, I'm sure will prove useful for other things besides downloading music from Starbucks.
I find the look of the new iPod nano strange, resembling a mutant iPod shuffle that managed to evolve a click wheel and a screen. Something about it just doesn't look right.
The iPod Classic is relatively unexciting -- now with even more space that you won't be able to fill up. No WiFi, just more space.
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