Fact or fiction: Apple iPhone? |
It does makes sense thinking that the iPod’s days are numbered. I was reading (sorry, don’t have the links) that iPod Photo sales have not been as good as expected, though the standard iPods are selling like hotcakes. Apple should be thanking in a financial way Adam Curry, Dave Winer and the rest of the podcasting clan. I just came across this from mobilewhack:
With micro hard drives like the one in the iPod mini making their way into phones, Apple’s fantastic product — which has single-handedly turned the company into a darling on Wall Street — will soon be as obsolete as a QWERTY keyboard in South Korea. Given the choice between carrying two devices or just one, consumers will choose one, and it won’t be the iPod.
I chose to carry fewer devices and took my Apple iPod Photo 60 GB back to the store, unopened. Some people are going to say, are you crazy?!?! but I started thinking about how little I’d actually use it and decided that it wasn’t worth the $710 (bought it with the Apple Care Plan too). I’d rather have that money in the bank working for me than sitting on a shelf collecting dust (most of the time) in the form of an iPod. None of this takes away from my feeling that the iPods are cool. Just not $710 for me cool.




Definitely not $710 cool, but $350 cool for my 40gb Ipod (non-photo, however.) Other than the color screen and the size, I really don’t see the point of the Ipod Photo . . . if I can’t load my photos into it directly from my camera, why bother? And even if it could do that, I still don’t think it’s worth the price. Apple can’t possibly have expected this model to sell much - the price alone takes it way outside of their target-market’s affordability range. I think the Ipod Photo line was just a way to garner a lot of press quickly while the competitors launched similar products that don’t have the glamorous sheen of the Ipod. It might be more expensive, but based on the lack of reliability I’ve seen among the non-Apple products, you get what you pay for. If I have to pay extra to make sure I have a hard drive that’s not known to randomly fail, it’s probably worth the peace of mind.
Comment by Tom — December 29, 2004 @ 12:24 am PST