Mini Me
When I initially heard that Apple was making a mini iPod I was most curious as to why they would bother to do this. Apple is the clear leader at this moment in the portable digital music arena. It seemed that the only thing a smaller, sleaker, cheaper product could really offer would be competition for its bigger brother. So why bother?
The rumors predicted that the device would be priced near $100 dollars and that it would offer a significantly smaller amount of memory, possibly using a flash memory device to power the new device. Steve Job naturally said there were no plans to release a smaller version of the iPod and that they were not working on any type of Flash memory device.
So MacWorld has come and gone, and naturally, that liar :) came out with a miniPod. Of course, it seems that it's probably one of the least impressive releases in my opinion. I know I am not alone. Alex Salkever has written a quick writeup about just how unspectacular it is. Here he states:
Macheads witnessed a Cube moment the other day at MacWorld San Francisco when Jobs trotted out the new iPod mini as a highlight of his much anticipated keynote speech.
...
Even Jobs's Jedi-esque powers of reality dispersion can't alter the unfavorable math behind Apple's new offering. Here are the hard numbers. The new miniPod will cost $249. That's about $100 more than the rumor sites had posited. It will offer 4 gigabytes of capacity on its hard drive. By comparison, the entry-level iPod now costs $299 and has 15 gigabytes of disk space. The miniPod's cost per gigabyte is $62.50. In the entry-level iPod, it's about $20.
So Apple is asking customers to pay three times as much per gigabyte. I have one word for that. Ouch.
So what's the reasoning for this post? Well I'm always taken aback somewhat by the sheer fanatacism that Apple diehards have for their hardware. Despite the many rumblings and grumblings related to this somewhat disappointing new device, or even the addition of charges previously trumpeted as free it seems that the Apple fans still end up buying this stuff.
I certainly don't mean to pass judgement, but I'm very curious what makes people so religious about things. Is it marketing? Is it charm and charisma? Who knows.