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Consumer Electronics Info-Tech - Marketing Marketing - Trends Variety - Music & Dance At 5, iconic iPod rules music player world Anand Parthasarathy
IPODS DOWN THE YEARS: Between the shirt pocket `Shuffle' and the latest `Nano' Red (bottom right), a whole procession of iPods. -- Anand Parthasarathy from Apple Photos.
Bangalore , Oct. 24 The world's best selling portable music player, is five years old this week. Apple's iPod, launched in late October 2001, made few waves till the inspired creation of a complementary iTunes music download service at 99 cents (Rs 45) a song, two years later, rocketed the handy device to iconic status and saw 60 million units sold till date - 40 million in the last one year alone. It has been a triumph of marketing and shrewd positioning rather than technology. The iPod was, after all, just a handy storage device with the ability to download and reproduce music that had been digitally compressed. There are many imitators (Microsoft has announced its own music player, Zune, for later this year) but Apple's design captured the imagination of the world's young and footloose. When first launched, the chunky device using on-board Flash memory to store the songs was a pricey $400 toy for the well-heeled. Today prices have crashed to an average of under $100. But the latest Apple Nano `Red', launched on October 13, comes with 4 GB of memory - enough for 1,000 songs - and has a battery that keeps going for 24 hours. It costs $199. The red colour denotes the company's commitment to donate $10 for every piece sold to the global fund to fight AIDS. The largest iPod to date, launched in September, is a jumbo 80 GB model for $349 - with enough storage for 20,000 songs or 100 hours of video. The iPods were always costlier than clones which used the MP3 format to compress and store music, but the Apple product soon assumed cult status, not the least because its youthful owners soon discovered other uses: on many US college campuses, lecturers routinely transmit their notes and assignments wirelessly to students' iPods in the classroom at the end of every session. In India, the iPod has been fairly, but not spectacularly successful because import duties kept prices out of the reach of most young people - typically Rs 6,000-20,000. And the academic world here has been slow to exploit its potential as a compelling educational tool. What next? Apple has been talking about iPods that will download full-length feature films. Whether the average iPod freak will want to view films on the small wallet-sized screen is a moot question that only time and public taste will tell - in the iPod's next five years.
More Stories on : Consumer Electronics | Marketing | Trends | Music & Dance
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