What is the intended niche?
Originally posted by kuyu
this could work in a specific niche. Perhaps young kids or older people would buy them. I know my little cousins and grandparents don't own more than 500 songs.
Well, I fall into the "older people" category, and a smaller capacity iPod isn't a big concern for me: I can cherry-pick my music collection to resolve that part. Besides, I want to minimize my labor of typing title/artist/album info when importing the song into iTunes anyway
Now I can easily afford to buy any iPod, but I haven't done so, because at the current price point, I can't justify the toy.
Much of this is the infrequency with which I listen to my music collection. I'd like to have a song-carrier for listening in my car, but my reality here is that while this is where I do listen to 90% of my music, its radio-based so as to also get traffic & weather, which is why my cars' cassette & CD players go unused. As such, to justify it, not only should it be inexpensive, but it needs to offer more utility.
One aspect of utility is that I travel a lot, and it would be nice to take an MP3 player with me on vacations and business flights. However, I prefer to travel really light, and in order to be able to use such a device for a multi-day trip, a small, light battery recharger is necessary. Unfortunately, it appears that Apple's $49 iPod AC recharger is one of the ancient, heavy "brick" transformers that is an insult to technology and innovation.
(For comparison, he's the small, light recharger for my Motorola StarTAC cellphone...its under 2oz and under 2 cubic inches in volume):
http://tinyurl.com/zbo0
But even this isn't probably _enough_ utility for me. Two additional features would be enough to push me over would be:
- autonomous sound recording
- digital wallet function to support a digital camera.
FWIW, I realize that the latter in particular would mean a lot more storage than a 2GB 1" HD. For my personal preferences (YMMV), I'd keep the existing form factor and take the volume savings of the 1" HD to invest it in longer battery life - - - and leave the heavy brick recharger at home.
Finally, now that Apple has decided on the design interface for their iPod dock, I need corporate reassurances that its not going to change with future products.
I realize that some change is inevitable, but I've already gone through this nonsense with PDA docks with a lack of forward thinking and product planning: if a new "mini-iPod" can't use the same dock as the current iPod, then the message that Apple is saying to me is that if I do want to eventually have a product that is very flexible (car, airplane, work PC, home Mac, stereo), that Apple's "solution" is that I have to fork over an extra $200 in interfaces with each new product revision...not only does that discourage me from buying at all, but it also will make me more likely to buy something and then stick with it for 10 years instead of buying more frequent product upgrades.
From an Engineering standpoint, this isn't that hard: its just some planning for backwards-compatibility to the now-existing dock design, which should have been designed with future growth in mind.
-hh
