Cutting Off the Oxygen of iPod Rivals

Cutting Off the Oxygen of iPod Rivals: "Apple announced a 1-gig iPod nano today, for just $149, as well as price cuts that bring the price of the iPod shuffle's to just $69 and $99. Now, that's pricing 'for the rest of us.'"

Peter Drucker would love this. Apple is running a textbook business campaign. They leveraged their strengths into a new product. Recreated that market, since there existed products in that market. And now they are building higher walls to make it harder for others to enter that market by lowering their prices before someone else can come in with a cheaper product.

Dell just discontinued their HDD based mp3 players which couldn't compete against the iPod and now Apple has preemptively dropped the prices on the flash based iPods so Dell is playing catchup again.

A bureaucracy-infested company could not move like this. They would have milked the iPod mini a lot longer and would have had a hard time even just dropping prices.

The question I have is why isn't Apple doing similar things on the Mac side as well?

Dell drops out of HDD MP3 player biz | Reg Hardware

Dell drops out of HDD MP3 player biz | Reg Hardware
: "Dell has dropped its line of hard drive-based MP3 players, but it's taken more than a month for anyone to notice"

You know it's bad when it takes more then month for anyone to notice that you've stopped selling a product. iPods are great at what they do. There is a certain elegance to simplicity.

But with all the talk about the next iPod killer, whatever the latest and greatest from anyone else, and it always just sits on the store shelf. The Walkman held sway for 20 years. The iPod may just last that long.

And then it might just morph into something completely different.

Kiwis craft first iPod-integrating bed | Reg Hardware

Kiwis craft first iPod-integrating bed | Reg Hardware
: "What do you give the iPod owner who has everything? An opportunity to listen to their favourite digital music player while they sleep with none of that tangled-in-the-duvet earphone misery, that's what. And now you can, courtesy of New Zealand bed maker Design Mobel. The company's Pause bed incorporates not only an iPod dock, but a pair of Bose speakers and - just for the truly media obsessive - a built-in LCD TV."


Boy, howdy. That is a very impressive bed. Way over the top for me, but it is the first iPod bed I've seen. not too bad a thing.

Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online

Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online: "HMS Daring's 230-strong crew should be happy too. She and her sisters will be the first 'gender-neutral' warships to enter Royal Navy service, and the Hotel Facilities, as the living quarters are known, are the most opulent ever fitted in a British warship. Mess decks are replaced by individual cabins, each with their own� I-pod charging points, CD player,�internet access, five channel recreational audio and larger berths."

A warship got an iPod port before most American Cars, isn't that a sad take on the car manufacturer's nimbleness. It isn't as though they need to put a full dock connector on it, just a little stereo jack that anything can hook into. Oh well one of these days it'll all come together.