“With no iPod Mini to dilute its impact, Apple’s new Nano is poised to become the company’s next best seller — and rivals’ biggest headache,” Peter Burrows writes for BusinessWeek in an article entitled, “Steve Jobs’s Tiny but Sure Bet.”
“Time and again, Apple CEO Steve Jobs gets grilled when he introduces digital-music products. When the iPod came out in October, 2001, critics complained the $400 unit was hopelessly overpriced. Many said the same thing when Apple unveiled the iPod Mini in early 2004, arguing that consumers would never fork over $250 for just a few gigabytes of storage. And a year later, some naysayers called the iPod Shuffle plain silly, given its lack of a screen to navigate through songs,” Burrows writes.
“Obviously, Jobs has had the last laugh — as some 22 million units sold altogether will attest. And now comes a product, the 1.5-ounce iPod Nano, that’s so smartly conceived and well-engineered, the skeptics are hard pressed to find anything to complain about,” Burrows writes. “Sure, consumers will have to pay $50 more to get the same song capacity as with the now-discontinued iPod Mini line. But get one of these gizmos in your hand, and such complaints will fade.”
“While Apple may choose to emphasize its designers’ genius, raw economics may be the biggest problem for rivals. Having purchased 40% of Samsung’s flash memory capacity (see BW Online, 8/26/05, “A Memorable Deal for Apple and Samsung?”), analysts figure Apple got discounts that rivals won’t come close to matching. That’s critical, because memory makes up by far the biggest portion of the bill of materials for a digital music player,” Burrows writes.
Full article here.
The iPod nano is the “thin lady,” and the iTune she’s “singing” (click here to hear a sample of it via Apple’s iTunes Music Store) certainly can’t be melodic to the ears of Microsoft, Sony, Creative, Napster, Real, etc. Apologies to Dan Cook et al.
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