Applelust.com: All Mac Considered - The Thinking Woman's Choice

All Mac Considered

The Thinking Woman's Choice

I have been reading the current commentary on the web about the new iPod mini and I have been getting this strange feeling of deja vu all over again. Although there has been some positive commentary about Apple's new iPod mini there has been an usually large number of negative postings from people who didn't get their wish... just like when Apple introduced the original iPod.

I would have thought the usual suspects would have learned their lesson from the mistake of dissing the first iPod, saying it was overpriced, no one would buy them, Apple would lose out to cheaper knock-offs already on the market... yadda-yadda. Considering the hard lock Apple has on the high end of the MP3 player market linked with a 70% market share in legal music downloads, it looks as if their predictions were somewhat inaccurate.

The problem for the critics about the new iPod mini is that it is not what they were expecting... a cheap iPod... a very cheap iPod. The conventional wisdom (i.e. commonly held beliefs that are usually wrong...) is that the market is desperate for a cheap product a la Dell from Apple. Since the junk end of the market is already crowded with a plethora of cheesy crud, why should Apple jump into that crowded pool? A cheap iPod would just get lost in the noise.

Everyone invented their own ridiculous price points at US$200, US$100 and one jerk (who shall remain unnamed) actually believed that US$50 was a good price. Puh-LEEZE! Criticizing the reality because it doesn't match your unrealistic fantasies is akin to choosing to have Alzheimer's voluntarily!

Apple wisely chose to produce the best product it could and targeted an area everyone else has missed... a small player with reasonable capacity. The nearest comparable product to the new iPod mini is a new $249 product from Rio that also holds 4 GB of data on a hard drive, but Rio uses cheap and relatively bulky components, (read: cheaply made!), cannot encode AAC, cannot use iTunes, cannot access the ITMS, has no cool accessories and is, well... cheap junk. Oh yes, Rio does make a cheaper flash player that holds a puny 256 MB of music for the silly price points the iPod mini critics wanted... $199... but what a piece of utterly useless crap!

What I noticed is that women writers on the web love this thing. Why? Believe it or not, it was not the pretty colors. Women are not as stupid as most men think. They really can and do make sensible purchases. The core reason was the high quality, the usual list of iTunes/ITMS access, cool accessories, etc. that makes the standard iPods a great buy, combined with the tiny form factor. It fits inside those humongous wallets women use. A standard iPod can't do that. Neither can any other hard drive based player.

The new iPod mini will not cannibalize standard iPod sales but open up a new sales demographic to Apple. Working women, joggers, men with shirt pockets, or anyone else with a limited personal space to hold a gadget will get the new iPod mini and hang the "high" price!

Lack space and want an iPod? Get the new mini! Have the space and want to hold up to 10,000 songs? Get a standard iPod. Apple will happily sell you either or both. Your choice.

In fact, that's the whole point: choice.

- Joe Carson

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