“The mini is the perfect iPod: sleek, easy to use and easy to carry around. And it plays music — beautiful, beautiful music — what could be better? On paper, to nerdy dweebs like me, the mini doesn’t look like much of a deal when compared with its bigger, 15-GB sibling, which costs just $50 more but holds four times the music,” Leander Kahney writes for Wired News.
“But as Wired News correctly divined at the mini’s launch at Macworld, Apple will sell boatloads of minis. Customers are buying it for its merits, and they couldn’t give a damn about its relative demerits,” Kahney writes. “Who cares if the 15-GB iPod costs just $50 more? Everyone interviewed at Macworld who had seen the mini had been charmed by its glamour. The specs didn’t matter; they had to have one, and the cost be damned.”
“That’s why competing players like Dell’s DJ, Archos’ Jukebox or Creative’s MuVo2 stand little chance of unseating the iPod as the top player on the market: None is as cool, as slick, as pleasurable to hold, use or listen to as the iPod mini,’ Kahney writes. “‘Undoubtedly the greatest strength — and arguably the greatest achievement — of Jonathan Ive and the Apple design team is that they are never, ever satisfied,’ said Alice Rawsthorn, director of London’s Design Museum, in an e-mail. ‘No sooner has one great new product been completed than, rather than rest on their laurels, they pick it apart and work out how to make it much, much better.'”
Full article here.
