Decius wrote:
] Apple has missed the boat.

maybe. or maybe the boat wasn't quite close enough to jump onto yet, pricewise.

i had a stewardess come up to me on my flight to NY over XMAS and point at the iPod and say "So how many songs does yours hold?" I told her i didn't really know, but it was probly in the vicinity of 3000 or so (3213 for the record). Her reply was, "Hmph, i could never keep track of that much music... what's the point? How do you know what's even on there?" This is foreign thinking to me, because we have something like 20,000 songs on the home network, most of which i am familiar with. But i'm not normal people in this arena. I think there's some sense in making a device that gives more than Flash reasonably can, an give it some style, for a bit less than the high-end hard disk based players. Would it be better if they set their price point at $150? Of course it would. But, for people who look at a 15 gig ipod and see "3000 songs! i only *HAVE* 600 mp3s total", but who like the style and cache of the ipod, it's not a bad option. when the ipod first came out i heard tons of people say "300 dollars for the smallest capacity? who the fuck is gonna spend that for an mp3 player?" well, as it turns out, somewhere around 2 million people have spent that much or more for their iPods.

I expect the price to drop when the components commoditize a bit more (i'm pretty sure the 4gb drive in there was around $150 by itself, in volume).

also, be careful with your paris hilton reference... if this really is the paris hilton of mp3 players, they'll sell a few million of them, given how popular she is right now. it's not useful for me, but some people like pink and think more than a few hundred songs is overkill... let's see how many.

RE: Apple - iPod mini - Smaller, Dumber, but not Cheaper