In a recent Wall Street Journal article about how Apple iPod’s popularity forced Rio to quit the portable music player business, a chart displays the flash-based market share of various flash-based portable music players through June 2005.
The Wall Street Journal reports, “Later in September, Apple will pose an even greater challenge to other makers of flash-based music players when it is expected to change its iPod Mini products to flash chips from small hard drives. As a result, the new iPod Mini could be smaller, consume battery power at a slower rate and cost less than Apple’s current models.”
The WSJ’s graphic shows very clearly just how dominant Apple is in the flash-based market and, if the rumors of new iPod shuffle and iPod mini products come true, Apple’s market-dominance only looks to strengthen.
Full article (paid subscription required) here.
Related articles:
Analyst expects 3-6 million 4GB flash-based Apple iPod mini units to ship in second half 2005 – August 25, 2005
Apple to switch 4GB iPod mini from hard-drive to flash-based? – August 22, 2005
Apple’s iPod shuffle takes nearly 60 percent of US flash-player market in March – May 04, 2005
Stomp on Apple. Give ’em Apple Crush.
Frist post – err, sorry (crawls sheepishly back into hole)
MW: down
🙁 I shall never try again….
But that’s probably a good thing.
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Of course if the mini does go flash then their hard drive share will go down somewhat but no doubt will still trounce everyone else.
Sorry step, you can have it.
The iPod Juggernaut® continues to destroy all those that dare to oppose its might.
MaWo: ‘game’. As in: “Don’t hate the player …”
holy crap they leave all the others in the dust. Go Apple!
“Of course if the mini does go flash then their hard drive share will go down somewhat but no doubt will still trounce everyone else.”
Not necessarily. I predict that the 4GB mini will move to flash, while HHD-based minis will consist of 6GB and 8GB models. This should keep their HDD market share steady, while boosting the flash market share.
Watchamacallit thingy, flash based memory definately had some
good points. \@/
CT =====]——— No words can describe my pleasure, today
After having to watch windows dominate with a mediocre product, it is very refreshing to see the best product actually win for a change.
Kinda restores your faith in human intelligence.
Now if Apple can just get the word out effectively about OS X and dispel all the myths we should see Macs start to capture serious market share again. Especially since there is not much of a price differential anymore.
Quick question: Does anyone know whether or not Jack Miller (of ‘As the Apple Turns®’) is still breathing?
I know that he’s been busy lately, but damn, I think that there’s been one episode of ‘AtAT’ in about two months. Maybe he could shift to a bi-weekly episode that’s sort of a summary of ‘Mac Event Over the Last Two Weeks’ or something.
He just seems to randomly drop off the planet and then, when you least expect it, ‘Poof!’, he’ll magically post a new episode. <sniff> I miss AtAT <sniff, sniff>.
MaWo: ‘state’. As in: Maybe Jack is still in a narcoleptic hibernation from his tryptophan-laden turkey that he had last Thanksgiving. Quick, someone fetch a prince to release the Sleeping Beauty® from his glass internment.
What?!?! ONLY 46% of the market share?
Well, that’s not good enough. Give it a few more months (the shuffle was introduced in Jan).
We’ll see the kind of absolute dominance that the iPod sees. I’m looking for the 90-95% market share.
MW: Student. as in: Wait until the back to school numbers come in and every student gets a shuffle.
It would be nice to see figures from outside USA
To ‘surprized’:
Don’t worry, this doesn’t count the price drop Apple gave to the 1 GB iPod shuffle. That price drop came on June 28 and this chart is for the month of June. Wait until we see sales for July or August – I think you’ll get your wish then.
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SoundJam’s “Thumper” was cool occasionally.
iBow
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CT ====]———- Holy Rollers!
iPod ROCKS, we should be hearing about a lawsuit coming from Creative next, followed by a nice exit from the MP3 market.
Creative will still exist, they have other garbage they sell.
Makes sense. I’ve been guessing all along (since the mini came out) that some day they would switch to flash. SOME day in the future, I’m guessing hard drives will only be used for major backup and file storage operations, and flash memory will be dominant in consumer -level computing. The mini will be a basic music player (in a few years reaching the capacity to hold even the largest music collections) and the regular ipod will be a high end, early adopter, multi-purpose machine (as it is already becoming).
But who knows…maybe we’ll all need 100 TB in our ipods in ten years.
I wonder what happened to the other 34.3% of the market. Muskt be a lot of nickel and dimers out there trying to sell mp3 players. That’s still quite a number unaccounted.
MDN “local”
nickel and dimers… as in Sony? they didn’t even make the list.
That entire graph only accounts for less than 70% of the total market. Does this mean that there are 30 or more other brands out there with about 1% (or less)??? Thatsa lotta “players”.
That chart separates by model and RAM capacity. So there certainly could be another 30-40 models, including many from Sony, Samsung, and RCA.
But other than Apple and Sandisk, none of them show up on Amazon anymore.