iPod Mini: Failure.

Since this forum seems to be filled with Mac/Apple related threads and discussions as of late, I'll start one as well.

As some of you know the iPod Mini is released. A 4GB trinket, slightly smaller than the enduring iPod.

However, will it sell? No. The size difference according to the chart found here are so minimal, that buying one just because it's that much smaller doesn't make sense. For only $50 more, one can purchase a 15GB iPod. 11GB for $50? Yes.

This product has been deemed as a future failure according to me.

Edit:

Ok, I read the whole "Mini isn't competing against the iPod" deal. Well, for their differences in price/GB it does become a competition within one brand. Not really competition - but the Mini will still fail.

50 dollars will get you approx. 3.7 times more space. I agree, mini=crap.

Um, have you not read the whole Macworld Announcements thread? We've already been over all of this. Also, it's clearly too early to deem the entire venture a 'failure' having only been on the market for under a day. They may very well sell in numbers rivaling that of the full size iPod. I'm sure that they're aiming at a market that doesn't really mind the price, over the aesthetics of the product, namely the fact that it now comes in colors, as well as the fact that it's smaller than any MP3 player on the market.

The iPod Mini, is clearly for those who would drop $250 on something, because they like the color. It's an image item, as the first iPod was, and still is. I'm sure the price will drop, and if they intend to sell any of them to people like us, who know what a salesman is talking about when he says 4 gigabytes

I just read the other thread, brings up some very good points. To me, I still think it should've been at most, $199, just seems a little overpriced right now.

When has something from Apple not been a failure in your opinion, MJ? Yes, I would buy the 15gb instead of the mini, and you obviously would, but that doesn't mean everyone would. Some people have well under 1,000 songs, and I've read articles that mentioned Apple retail employees actually have trouble selling the 10 - 40gb models because people are intimidated by them and think they will never fill them up or use the space. So there is obviously a market for a tiny player that holds 1,000 songs. Just because you wouldn't buy something doesn't mean an entire product line is going to fail. Think objectively for just a second and you might see that. The entire mp3 player market is not made up of biased Windows geeks that only care about how big the numbers are on their hardware, whether they be gigabytes or gigahertz.

I never said I wasn't going to buy one, and never said that because of that it was going to fail. I just said that I predict that it will fail, meaning it won't sell well.

That is all. It's an opinion.

And, no, I DID NOT read the whole Mac thread. I might though, later tonight, when I'm done with homework.

Actually, i think APple is trying to grab a market that it has a shot at grabbing - compact music players. They're succeeding, and by releasing more and more products they are taking a stronger hold on the market.

Nos.

Originally posted by Deker
When has something from Apple not been a failure in your opinion, MJ? Yes, I would buy the 15gb instead of the mini, and you obviously would, but that doesn't mean everyone would. Some people have well under 1,000 songs, and I've read articles that mentioned Apple retail employees actually have trouble selling the 10 - 40gb models because people are intimidated by them and think they will never fill them up or use the space. So there is obviously a market for a tiny player that holds 1,000 songs. Just because you wouldn't buy something doesn't mean an entire product line is going to fail. Think objectively for just a second and you might see that. The entire mp3 player market is not made up of biased Windows geeks that only care about how big the numbers are on their hardware, whether they be gigabytes or gigahertz.

That's the smartest thing I've heard all day. I've got a friend who just got an iMac because it "Looked cool" and his parents were paying for most of it. For christmas, his parents also bought him a 20 gig iPod, because, hey, he's got a mac? Why not? Mind you, he has no idea what he's doing with any of the hardware. furthermore, he only has some 125 songs in his entire iTunes library, and this is after 5+ months of ownership. He asked me about a week ago, how he could get his songs onto his iPod. Knowing he was a moron, but me being a nice guy, I asked him if any cables came with his iPod. He replied "I think so". Finally, when I asked him if he had hooked his iPod up, he said, "Oh, I think so", then asking which cable he used he said "The main one" which of course means nothing.

You can clearly see where this is all going.

So, long story short, I suppose that this is the type of guy who'd buy a 4 gig iPod, those who have no knowledge of what 'gigabyte' means, and thinks "What color do I want?" before they think "What size do I need?". This is more or less the type of people Apple is going for, the people who don't know a IEEE port from a USB, and who don't know how many Bytes are in a KB, and how many of those are in GB, let alone what each of those mean as it is.

Yup... My sister in law just got a 20GB iPod for Christmas from her dad, so she immediately called me and said, "Hey, guess what, I got an iPod! ... ... Can you tell me how to use it?" She had been using Real Jukebox on her computer and PalmPilot (another device her dad bought her that she doesn't use for anything other than playing songs through the terrible little speaker), so she had to re-rip all of her CD's into iTunes on her PC. And of course her laptop didn't have a Firewire port so she couldn't even hook up the iPod at first, and he had to go either buy the adapter or a Firewire PC Card, I don't know which he did.

But anyway, in that first phone call she actually said, "Sorry to copy off of you (because I have all this Apple stuff), but I just wanted at least some sort of Apple product so I could be cool too!" Ugh... THIS is the kind of person that would buy "the pink iPod" just because it was pink and "cute", without even knowing or caring how many songs it holds. It could hold 50 songs and she would still probably want the little cute one.

I also expect her to lose or break the iPod in less than a year, or just put it in a drawer somewhere and never use it at all.

"It's an image item, as the first iPod was, and still is. " - Pganguly

Or, it's a portable music player that holds all my contacts, calendars, a ton of music and acts as a really fast hard drive for me to take files as large as billboards home with me to work on - in my pocket.

Just because a new item is trendy doesn't mean it's a useless "image" item. You make the iPod sound like a pair of shoes a woman would window shop for.

Personally, I agree with the topic of this thread to an extent: I think that the new mini iPod isn't in for the success the iPod has seen. But, I think Apple knows what they're doing. Marketing has never been their shortfall. They are going to adjust pricing accordingly, develop and release new products almost immediately, and make us, in this great little forum, look like exactly what we are: amateurs.