Thursday, December 25, 2003
Merry Christmas, everyone. And sorry about yesterday. I completely forgot to update, though if it makes things better I felt REALLY BAD about it. Honest.
The hot rumour doing the rounds now (ranging from super-reliable rumour site Think Secret to Reuters) is that Apple will unveil "mini" iPods at Macworld on January 6th. The new line of mini-iPods will only hold 2GB to 4GB of music (about 500 to 1000 songs), but will be half the size of the originals and come in a variety of colours. And they'll retail for as little as US$99.
This will be HUGE.
Now, this isn't just a shameless plug here, but if anyone scoped out the Geek Music Gadgets segment I did for CNN ("Unwrapping the gizmos"), you'll notice that I have a 1.5GB MP3 player that's half the size of an iPod from Creative, the Nomad MuVo2. And I thought -- and said right there -- that it had potential to fill a niche. iPods are good, iPods are great, yes, but there are some people who don't want them. Some people think they're too big, and prefer tiny flash-based MP3 players. Some people just don't want to carry thousands of songs with them, or don't have that many songs anyway and thus don't want to pay the iPod's premium price for a privledge they don't need. This is generally true around the world, but especially so in Asia (where those generic flash-based MP3 players are everywhere). But there's a space between the low-end players and the current iPods, where people can carry a few hundred songs in a small and affordable player. The fact that so many people have reacted positively to this rumour when I mentioned it (and by positively, I mean "So when can I buy one?" rather than "That's nice") adds strength to my conviction that this will be huge. Possibly bigger than the original iPod. The iPod was a revolution in design, but it wasn't the first hard disk MP3 player by a long shot and always suffered from the premium price tag. These new iPods have only the Creative MP3 player as competition, as well as over two years' worth of incredible buzz from the success of the original iPod.
Either way, I can't wait for Macworld on January 6th. It's also the 20th Birthday of the Macintosh in 2004, so I'm hoping Steve Jobs pulls something new and amazing out of the hat. I doubt it, since this iPod news will overshadow anything and everything, but Apple do have a history of surprising people.
Posted at 11:05 PM
