iPods – They’re everywhere!
I know, I know. You’ve been been concerned Apple isn’t as committed to the iPod as it was – say a week ago. With daily output of media articles concerning the iPod slowing down to about a 5000 per day crawl – Apple is vying for attention and recognition. Or ‘was’ vying for media attention.
Today Apple announced the new iPod mini 6GB version, cheaper 4GB version, dropped the higher end regular iPods (who uses those anyway?), and added a 30GB version of the iPod photo, making it more of an impulse buy than it was before, by far. Needless to say, Apple did quite a bit of ‘shuffling’ of the iPod lineup. How about that pun? Huh? Huh?
The iPod photo just become a much easier buy for more than a few people. The 60GB version now has a reduced price of $449 and the 30GB now goes for only $349. Quite a bit cheaper. But if you’re an extreme fan of U2 – for that same price, you can get 10GB less of storage, and minus the color screen – but hey, their signatures are on the back!
Apple more importantly (in my opinion) introduced the Camera Connector (Apple, never at a loss for original accessory names) today which directly connects your camera to your iPod photo, and directly imports your pictures to the iPod, eliminating the need for a computer to be the middle man. It’s expected to be available in March, and will sell for around $29. Basically a “screw you” to the overpriced Belkin Media Reader that went for $70 retail. This will greatly increase the iPod’s usefulness and make it more than a “ohhhh look at that purty screen”-kind of device.
Not surprisingly, the mini was bumped up to a 6GB hard drive, for the old 4GB price of $249. Apple dropped the price of the 4GB version to $199. What was missing from this update was the supposed color screens and availability in gold. Two new accessories were also introduced, a new armband, and a just-for-the-mini lanyard. Kind of surprising though, I don’t know how many people are about to dangle their iPod mini upside down, and around their neck. Who knows, it might catch on. Probably just as well as the gold mini did.
If after all these announcements from Apple, if you’re left wondering what’s up and what’s down (like I was) – I’ll help you out. Here’s the current iPod lineup and pricing.
iPod shuffle 512MB (120 songs) – $99
iPod shuffle 1GB (240 songs) – $149
iPod mini 4GB (1,000 songs) – $199
iPod mini 6GB (1,500 songs) – $249
iPod 20GB (5,000 songs) – $299
iPod U2 20GB (5,000 songs) – $349
iPod photo 30GB (7,500 songs or 12,500 photos) – $349
iPod photo 60GB (15,000 songs or 25,000 photos) – $449
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Guest Columnist Jesse Perry blogs on AppleWatch, the definative Apple News Blog.
