Creative drops $50 from some music player prices

Creative on Tuesday reduced the prices of its Zen Micro digital-music players.

Prices are up to $50 less than those the company had announced earlier. The cuts closely follow the debut of a new line of iPod Mini players from Creative's rival, Apple Computer.

Creative's 6GB player will see the biggest cut. It will ship for $249.99, rather than the earlier-announced price of $299.99. The device is not yet available, but customers can preorder it on Creative's Web site.

The company's 5GB player now costs $229.99, instead of $249.99, as it did previously. The 5GB player has been available since November.

The 4GB player will be available for $179.99 after a $20 mail-in rebate, Creative said. The Singapore-based company had previously said the device would cost $199.99. Like the 6GB player, it can be preordered on Creative's Web site.

Sim Wong Hoo, the company's CEO, said in a statement that Creative has its competitors on the defensive and that "we can further drive our momentum by dropping the price of our Zen Micro MP3 players."

All the players will feature support for both the MP3 and WMA formats, up to 12 hours of battery life, an FM radio and recorder, a voice recorder, vertical touch pad controls and access to 2 million downloadable songs through MSN Music and services such as Napster, Musicmatch and Wal-Mart's online music store, Creative said.

I dunno but...

I don't know, but if you drop your prices because another
competitor makes a new product with more competitive prices...
I don't think thats having "its competitors on the defensive..."

Sounds like they are on the defensive, not their competitors,
especially since they have very little market share compared to
the ipod...

[dolfox]

has molly mentioned her hatred for all things apple/Steve Jobs?

i mean, this lady has a vendetta against apple's success that
knows no shame. just a couple of days she was ho-humming the
updates to the iPod mini and the iPod photo, and today she's
heralding Creative for matching prices and putting apple on the
'defensive'. come off it...just preface every article with "I hate
Apple..." so that people know where you're coming from, instead
of this veil of 'news'

[lingsun]

So "bias" means you don't worship Apple and all things Apple makes??

So anyone with an open mind is biased?

What the article didn't mention is how Apple has been cutting the price of its Ipods to compete with lower priced players by Creative and others. Creative is just reacting to Apple's countermove. It's like a chess game.

Apple has an unsustainable share of the market. They are just not going to have 90%+ forever. It just doesn't happen in the real world. Apple likes to make high priced items and they like to have an extremely high profit margin on those items. They aren't going to lower their prices just because they feel like it. They're running scared and for good reason. Eventually, their competitors will make items good enough and cheap enough to move Apple below the 50% market share range. Just look at what happened to Apple's computer business.