iPod marketing, or: Why the new iPod touch lacks a camera
Yesterday’s Apple event didn’t draw gasps of amazement of the good kind. Some great announcements were made (app management in iTunes 9, a cheaper iPod touch, a camera in the iPod nano), but the biggest surprise was the lack of a camera in the iPod touch.
This strikes a lot of people as crazy, but from yesterday’s event it’s pretty clear that Apple is aiming to differentiate each of its devices in a very clear way, rather than in the old days where everything played music and perhaps did a couple of extra things not particularly well.
The iPod shuffle is the truly mobile device, aimed at people who don’t care what they’re listening to, and don’t want any weight to carry around.
The iPod nano has been repositioned as a device to smack Flip with, due to bundling a VGA camcorder, but in a device much thinner than its rival.
The iPod touch, judging by the fact a quarter of yesterday’s announcement was about gaming, is now positioned as a handheld videogames device—Apple’s answer to the DSi and PSP Go. I still feel that the device’s name is a massive hindrance to true mass-market acceptance, but with 21,000+ games on the App Store, it’s clear where developers think the money is.
The iPod classic remains the player for people who must have every tune available at all times, under pain of death.
The iPhone is the device that mashes everything together in a profitable package for Apple.
Despite this desire to differentiate individual devices (presumably to encourage people to buy more of them rather than concentrate on convergence), it still seems odd that iPod touches lack a camera. Jobs argues in an interview with David Pogue that iPod touch is “the lowest-cost way to the App Store, and that’s the big draw”. He says Apple was focused on “just reducing the price to $199 […] to get the price down where everyone can afford it”.
I suspect in the medium term, there will be an about-face on the camera decision, not least when you consider Jobs goes on to say in response to Amazon’s Kindle: “General-purpose devices will win the day [because] people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device.” Right now, iPhone is the only truly general-purpose device; iPod touch is close, but really needs that camera to have the widest appeal and scope.
But next year will see flash memory reduce in price to the point that the iPod classic becomes irrelevant next to a 128 GB iPod touch. At that point, it’ll be a no-brainer to add a camera at least to the more expensive models in the iPod touch range, perhaps leaving the low-end without a camera, intended as a cheap gaming device to continue attacking Apple’s newfound handheld-oriented rivals.
“The iPod classic remains the player for people who must have every tune available at all times, under pain of death.”
That paragraph made me smile…
“The iPod classic remains the player for people who must have every tune available at all times, under pain of death.”
That’s me. Them managing to do an even bigger classic and still keep it single platter and thus tiny was more than I could possibly have expected. Bought my first Apple product since the Newton yesterday.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I still don’t like iTunes, but it’s become more and more noticeable that even if the hardware wasn’t now my only HDD option, however bad itunes is, no-one is even TRYING.
So I’m going to learn how to work with it, for the benefits it can provide (and my god the device itself is good now) because no-one else wants to give me those benefits in any form.
The competition thing is very odd. Gruber argues (and I agree) that the way to take on Apple is simply to aim higher. Do something better and shinier and more premium to grab the headlines. Become more Apple than Apple. Right now, everyone’s trying to aim low, and with Apple’s prices gradually falling that’s a really dumb way to try and compete in the portable music player space.
As for iTunes… version 9 sucks even on the Mac now. It’s a really broken, nasty piece of software. It is, however, still better than anything else on the platform, but then on Mac there’s no point in trying to compete in this space. From what I hear, it’s rapidly heading that way on Windows too.
Yep, they have my £189 entirely because I had no choice. My main requirement was simply a “Butt load of space” for audio.
My use of the other benefits only even exists because a chum lent me his 20gb Ipod gen 3 (the last pre-photo one) and I used iTunes and started getting podcasts etc.
Actually you touch on another point that occured to me, I’m kinda surprised they went to 160gb on the classic. I can’t believe there’s many extra sales there.
It’s relevant because the top of the flash based range tends to double in capacity every gen. By putting the classic back above 120gb, you’ve just made it an extra generation before the touch has more than it.
The 160 GB is clearly a sales pull (New! More!), but it’s an odd decision. I’d have left it at 120, leapfrogged it with a 128 GB touch next year, and killed the Classic at that point. I now wonder whether the Classic’s sales/profit margin are such that Apple will keep it hanging around until 2011, at which point it’ll be quietly put to sleep. Either way, the device is clearly on borrowed time.
Exactly my point, you’ve just made it another generation before flash matches the capacity. It’s not even as if they’ve got any competitors. I’d be astounded if the difference between 120 and 160 was many customers at all. I’d have certainly bought a 120 and was going to until I saw the announcement event was coming up.