I Shall Call Him… Mini Me
So I’m still watching Steve Jobs give his Keynote at Macworld. He just announced the iPod Mini. He stated that they are going after the “high-end ($199)” Flash-based mp3 players, which typically have 256megs of RAM (est. 60 songs). The mini will have 4 gigs of RAM memory (est. 1000 songs), will be the size of a business card, will be 1/2″ think, features the standard iPod interface, and will be compatible with the standard iPod dock. It will cost $249. Ooops.
This is one slick looking piece of hardware, and Jobs stated that $249 vs. the stated competition, i.e. $199 high-end flash players, is the best $50 you’ll ever spend. He did a nice breakdown of the market, showing that 31% is the target competition. But I still think they might have mis-calculated. For another $50, you can get least expensive full-sized iPod… which, Jobs announced, is now 15gig: (vs 10gig before) for the same $299.
Either way, they’ll be in store in Feb, and I do plan to check one out.
Oh, and they come in colors.
Update: The Tao of Mac has a nice summary of everything in the keynote.
Update 2: I may have been giving too short a shrift to the coolness factor. They are wicked cool… but if they had a 2 gig version for $149, I’d buy one for my teenage daughter, so she could use iTunes Music Store. At $249, that’s still a bit high for something a kid may lose… or drop.
Update 3: I changed “4 gig of RAM” to “4 gig of memory”, since I don’t think Jobs mentioned what kind of media is in the iPod mini. My guess is some kind of mini-drive. Flash would be too expensive.
Update 4: Confirmed - iPod mini uses hard drive storage. (via Daring Fireball)
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