BusinessWeek: ‘Expect a flash memory-based Apple iPod sometime next year’
Thursday, November 11, 2004 - 10:00 AM EST"Despite denials from Jobs & Co., the buzz is building that Apple is ready to launch a digital music player that uses a memory card," Alex Salkever writes for BusinessWeek. "Apple CEO Steve Jobs has always approached his job with the zeal and showmanship of a populist politician. Jobs has another attribute common to the political classes, namely that even when he says 'never,' you can never really be sure."
"Savvy Mac watchers immediately noted with irony that the new version of the iMac desktop computer is almost an exact description of what Jobs said he didn't want the previous generation of iMacs to be, namely, a grounded, monolithic, and less flexible piece of hardware. And don't forget his whopper about Apple never writing any software for Windows machines. That one went up in flames when Jobs unveiled a version of iTunes for the Microsoft hordes," Salkever writes.
MacDailyNews Note: Actually, long before they released iTunes for Windows, Apple made and continues to make software for Windows, such as FileMaker, AppleWorks, QuickTime, Airport Software, iDisk Utility, and other applications. So, Hell didn't really freeze over the day iTunes for Windows was announced.
"When Jobs introduced the iPod Mini in January, 2004, he explained it was designed to compete with high-end flash-based music players of comparable cost but that had far less capacity," Salkever writes. "That's still true, but the flash player market remains healthy and significantly larger than that of hard-drive music players on a global basis. And the strongest sales for flash players are in countries where Apple remains weak, namely in the Far East. At the same time, Apple is furiously working to build up a broader portfolio of consumer-electronics offerings to capitalize on its current dominance of digital music downloads. The upshot? Expect a flash iPod to hit shelves sometime next year."
"If Apple could sell just 5 million flash IPods in the next year at prices between $120 and $199, that would likely generate revenues of between $600 million and $1 billion. It would certainly push Apple closer to its goal of rejoining the $10 billion revenue club in the next two years. Add it all up, and the flash iPod hardly looks like a flash in the pan," Salkever writes.
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Merrill Lynch: Apple 'likely to intro two new iPod offshoots in first half 2005' - October 25, 2004
RUMOR: Apple Computer to launch new solid-state flash memory iPod this Christmas? - October 01, 2004
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The main advantage I can see to flash based music players is no moving parts so they are totally shock-proof and I believe maybe easier to make water proof/resistant. If they came up with a 1 GB model they would sell a boatload.