“Apple, with its iPod touch, appears a clear winner this holiday season as US consumers shop for smaller, cheaper, more versatile electronics,” Chris Nuttall and Richard Waters report for The FInancial Times.
“While the Consumer Electronics Association predicts flat fourth-quarter sales compared with a year ago, analysts report Apple stores have been the busiest among electronics retailer,” Nuttall and Waters report. “Google has reported the iPod touch is its most- searched-for product after Nintendo’s Wii games console and Wii Fit game, while the Lycos search engine has ‘iPod’ as its top search.”
“Amazon’s electronics bestseller list has six iPods in its top 20, including all three versions of the touch. The most popular is the lowest-priced 8Gb version. It still costs $230, but Michael Gartenberg, vice-president of Mobile Strategy at Jupitermedia, says this is not putting off cash-strapped consumers,” Nuttall and Waters report. “‘In a down economy, people can be willing to spend more on a premium product because they don’t want to make the mistake of buying something that doesn’t meet their expectations or provide long-term value,’ he says.”
Full article here.
So, good economy or bad, people are learning that cheap crap is crap. About time.
Doing my part to help Apple sales this season: bought the wife a 32GB iPod Touch for Christmas… which I will eventually receive when she gets an iPhone. Got about 4 iPods to give as gifts (and many iTunes gift cards).
Recently turned a former Windoze user into a Mac user (she bought a 24″ iMac 4 months ago and has bought about 6 iPods to give as gifts this year).
The thing is, when she was looking for a new computer, I told her that she could buy a PC and maybe use it for 3-5 years, have to constantly worry about security and viruses / trojans, buy a whole lot of extra crap she doesn’t need or, she could buy a computer that she’ll be able to use for the next 10 years (I still have, and am using, a 1999 Bondi Blue G3 Tower with matching LCD running Mac OS X 10.4), comes with everything she needs, and be done with it. Being a moderate technophobe, she chose the latter option and is thrilled with her Mac. Life is good when you’re able to help someone come out of the ‘Dark Age of Computing’.
Come February, we’ll be getting another Macbook Pro (our 4th Mac lappy).
So, to loosely quote M.X.N.T.4.1: ‘In any economy, don’t throw away money buying cheap crap.’
MaWo: ‘hear’. As in, ‘Let those with ears…’
Nicely said, Nutcracker!
Expensive crap is sill crap too.
A top of the line Dell laptop still uses Vista.
While I, too, recommend Macs all the time, I don’t believe that they have a 10 year useful life span. I have used friend’s Macs that are 4 – 5 year old and they seem SLOW. Maybe they are useful as a 2nd or 3rd system, but I can’t imagine using a 5+ year old Mac (or any platform) as my day to day system.
I would love to know how big the combined iPhone / iPod Touch user base is. It’s got to be huge.
The iPod Touch has no competition but the iPhone has plenty. The installed user base is a huge advantage.
@chefmitch
I have a MDD 1.25GHz Dual G4 that I bought in 2003. It works fine for me running Adobe CS3 apps as my day to day main system. I’m happy with it and for-see at least a couple more years of use before upgrading.
“‘In a down economy, people can be willing to spend more on a premium product because they don’t want to make the mistake of buying something that doesn’t meet their expectations or provide long-term value,’ he says.”
Don’t you love the way these guys just make stuff up?