Mini iPods
I was excited about the prospect of a mini iPod from Apple, especially because I’ve become such a fan of iTunes for Windows. I love the iPod, but they’re way too expensive for the amount of use I would give such a device. So when I heard the new minis would be flash-memory-based and start around $100, I was stoked.
Sadly, Apple decided to pull the rug out from under me (and I’m sure a lot of other people) by announcing their iPod mini at $249, only $50 less than the lowest-priced traditional iPod. That’s just not enough of a price difference to make it attractive.
If they had come out with something more similar to the flash-memory MP3 players from other manufacturers, with, say, 1.5 GB of storage for $150, I would have been all over it. But $250 for 4 GB of hard drive storage, when 15 GB is only $50 more? I think they missed the boat on this one.
Plus, the colors are sorta girly. But that’s just me.
I was also bummed, having expected something around 100 bucks. The silver one is ok, the rest are very “hello ipod” kind of colors.
I have something called the MPIO DMK (from Digitalway) that cost around $100 CDN. It’s very small — fits on your keychain. I love it — I use it when I jog and it clips on to an armband.
You have all the cool tech stuff, don’t you, Miss A? I’m jealous.
Oops, the reason why I mention it is, it comes with an iTunes plugin or something like that.
Ummm, isn’t it Gigs of space, not MB? i.e. the ipods now are 10 to 40 gigs, and the new ones are 4GB. Silver isn’t girly.
Mr. Mosey: You’re right. I screwed up MB and GB. It’s fixed now. The silver is the best of the lot, but it’s still not an attractive silver, in my estimation.
Ick, girls.
I’m becoming more immune to the Apple hype with each product announcement. The iPod has been too expensive for me to consider. The iPod mini maybe a bargain compared to other mp3 players, but it’s only a smidgen less expensive than a model with nearly 4 times the power. What a deal!
I’m underwhelmed by iLife as well. GarageBand is the kind of sequencer that I remember using as early as 1988. Add in virtual instruments that have been available for at least five years. Big whoop. $49 is the only thing that’s revolutionary about it. On closer look, though, it’s worth nothing to me, since the top-of-the-line iBook model I bought new this May doesn’t have the specs to use the virtual instruments. The real price for me isn’t $49 but $1,549 – not a bargain.
Someone on Metafilter mentioned that the real revolutionary move would have been to have a function to encode a GarageBand song directly onto the AppleMusic store. That would be fun.