Is Apple devaluing itself by selling dirt-cheap iPod shuffles?

“In the race to be the best, and capture the masses, cool firms often make one crucial mistake – lowering their standards so far that eventually it backfires. Apple’s decision this week to make an iPod shuffle available for just £32 [US$49] strikes me as being one of those,” Jonathan Weinberg writes for Tech Digest.

MacDailyNews Take: Apple didn’t lower their standards, they just lowered their price by passing lower component costs [flash memory] along to the consumer. The iPod shuffle is the same quality as before: excellent.

“There’s no doubt the US giant is one of the coolest companies in the tech sphere. It makes products that look good and have you salivating over them,” Weinberg writes. “Who else could have produced the ultra-thin MacBook Air?”

Weinberg asks, “But by pricing the 1GB Shuffle so cheap, are Apple not in danger of making themselves far too popular for their own good?”

“Why would anyone want a 1GB Shuffle anyway, when you can buy a 2GB for just £10 [US$20] more? The simple solution would have been to discontinue the one-gig and replace it with the affordable two-gig [US$69], thus retaining the premium price around the Apple brand,” Weinberg writes.

More in the full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]