Saturday, October 30, 2004

Flash based iPod for Apple?

Rumours abound that suggest Apple will be making a flash based iPod in the coming months to capture the low end music player market.

Unfortunately, that makes little sense. Steve Jobs has repeatedly said that low capacity flash based players are fairly useless, and that's a reasonable assessment. High capacity (2+ GB) flash based players would be more useful and are technically feasible, but they would probably be at least as expensive as the 4 GB iPod mini. If new lower capacity iPod minis were to appear in the near future, it is likely they would be hard drive based as well, just like the current one. However, what's more likely is that a new 6 GB iPod mini would become the new $249 model, and the 4 GB version would simply drop in price, to $199.

1 comment:

Eug said...

Your argument has merit, but I know of some people that jog with the iPod, with no problems. The iPod has quite a large buffer.