You know what’s surprising? Even though Apple announced a set of completely redesigned iPods, the stock price dropped on Wednesday, falling some 10 dollars to close at around $135. I’m guessing this is mostly due to the price cuts on the iPhone. Say you’re an investor, and you expect Apple to sell a million iPhones at $599 a piece, grossing some 600 million dollars. But with price cuts on the iPhone to $399, Apple’s expected profit is only 400 million dollars– still a lot of money but far from the original estimate. Combine this with the fact that the price cuts indicate decreasing demand for the iPhone, and you’ve got discouraged investors.
But that’s only part of Apple’s problems. The bigger issue for us consumers is making a decision: which iPod do I want to get? You have so many choices:
- Get an iPod Touch ($400) but limit yourself to 16GB of music. But hey, you can wirelessly fill that huge amount of space.
- Get an iPod Classic ($350) and have 160GB of storage space, but lose the cool factor associated with the Touch. Scroll wheels are so yesterday.
- Get an iPod Nano ($199) with 8GB. Not so cool either. And the fat widescreen look doesn’t help this “ultraportable” music player. And the scroll wheel placement doesn’t look too comfortable. Bad ergonomics? Let me know what you think.
- Keep your old iPod 5G or nano ($free!). Yeah, it’s old, but it works. Do you really have to be on the cutting edge this time, and is it worth four C-notes for the Touch?
There’s really no clear choice, unless Apple gives the Touch more storage space. Maybe. Which brings me to my last point: what’s to come.
As you all know, the iPod Touch comes with wifi connectivity, allowing you to access the iTunes music store from any wireless network or Starbucks. So you can buy music anywhere you find wireless internet; kind of pointless, but still kind of neat. Instead, what if you could use your wifi for something so much cooler: streaming your music from iTunes to your iPod Touch. You already have a huge library of songs on iTunes that you’ve legally purchased. Apple has a huge server with copies of all your songs on it. Who cares about only having 8GB of storage when you can just stream all your music?
It would be awesome if Apple developed this, but not the end of the world if they didn’t. Steve Jobs already included Safari on the Touch, and you should have no problem accessing free online libraries of songs, like imeem. It wouldn’t bode well for the iTunes business model though…
Related Posts:
