| Friday, March 5, 2004 |
14:30 - Good call
|
(top)  |
I wonder if this...
...has anything to do with this?
"I've never seen a product line sell like this," says Jack Wahrman, senior merchandising manager at New York's J&R Music World. "The iPod [mini] is a phenomenon."
. . .
"The demand is incredible," says Wahrman at J&R, who had 25 of the silver minis left in stock Thursday. Best Buy and Amazon, on their Web sites, said they were sold out. Savvy entrepreneurs were auctioning minis on eBay with starting bids ranging from $299 to $310.
On its Web site, Apple tells shoppers to expect a one- to three-week wait. "We're asking people to be patient with us," says Greg Joswiak, Apple marketing vice president.
It's not a component shortage that's causing the backlog. "We're making and shipping them as fast as we can," Joswiak says. He says teens are taking to the cool colors. And the mini is appealing to athletic fans, who like exercising with an ultralight device.
Nah. Every time Apple does something good, the stock goes down, remember?
Via CapLion, who also links to a story about the $600 MicroDrives in the iPod mini and the Creative player-- the latter of which people are buying by the bucketload so they can cannibalize it for the drive and turn a tidy profit. Trouble is, people buying iPod minis for the same reason are discovering that Apple has performed some hackery on the drive's firmware that prevents it from being used as a generic drive, whereas Creative doesn't seem to have seen fit to do so. Which means that just about all those iPod mini sales are people who actually want (gasp!) an iPod mini. Whereas who knows how many of the Creative players are being treated as nothing more than digicam storage devices shipped inside very expensive, hard-to-open blister-packs?
|
|
Brian Tiemann
