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The sleek little music player is making all the top tech gift lists, is featured in the major electronics retailers' circulars and continues to be one of Amazon.com's best-selling electronic gadgets.
But some consumers haven't been so quick to move away from one of last year's hot holiday gifts: the iPod Mini. Even though Apple Computer discontinued the Mini in September and replaced it with the Nano, these folks have been reluctant to take the Mini off their gift lists--and they're willing to pay top dollar to nab one.
Patrick McHenry of Erie, Pa., for example, just bought a pink 4GB Mini, which holds 1,000 songs, on eBay for $275. That's $76 over the original $199 price tag. But it's also less than McHenry would have paid at Compu-America--one of the few electronics retailers with the Mini in stock. The store is selling the same model for $349. And sellers on Amazon are listing prices for the 4GB Mini at more than $400.
So why would anyone pay so much for a Mini when they could buy the smaller and (some say) technologically superior 4GB Nano for $249, or even the new 30GB video iPod, which holds 7,500 songs, for $299?
In McHenry's case, it was to fulfill the Christmas wish of his friend's girlfriend. "She had her heart set on an iPod Mini mainly because they are discontinued, so not many people would have them," he said.
His friend's girlfriend appears to be just one of many fans of the Mini, which, unlike the Nano, comes in a 6GB version, and in a vibrant rainbow of colors: pink, blue, green, silver and gold.
In the past three months, about 36,000 Minis have sold on eBay, with the pace of sales picking up in the past couple of weeks, eBay spokesman Dean Jutilla said. As of Friday afternoon, 2,200 Mini auctions were under way on the site, he said.
The Mini has been averaging 15 to 16 bids per auction. That shows a strong demand, Jutilla added, especially when compared to the hot-ticket 4GB Nano, which is clocking in just slightly higher on eBay bids, at 18. And the average price per Mini--whether 4GB or 6GB--has gone up from $173 to $229, he added.
In living color
Compu-America sales manager Fred Rafi said he noticed a retail shortage for the Mini and last week decided to buy a bunch (he wouldn't say how many), even though he had to pay well over the retail price. He marked them up even further, and although he admits that it's kind of crazy, "people are buying them."
"I think it's because of Christmas, and a lot of people just still like the Mini."
Jeremy Horwitz, editor-in-chief of popular iPod site iLounge, said "there's no reason to prefer the iPod Mini (over the Nano) on technical specs." The Nano is faster, has better audio quality and a color screen, among other advantages, he said. So he can only guess that people are paying more for the Mini because it's now rare, comes in more colors, and, he said, is sturdier than the Nano, which has been accused of scratching easily.
"The Nano comes in black and white. Those colors aren't quite as fun," Horwitz said, adding that there also isn't a 6GB Nano, so there's no "intermediate step" for those who were ready to move up from a 4GB.
Shaw Wu, an analyst at American Technology Research, adds that the marked-up prices for Minis might simply be explained by the laws of supply and demand. "The availability of the iPod Mini appears to be limited...We saw a similar effect with the G4 Cubes when they were discontinued."
Wu said pricing might be a factor. With the introduction of the Nano, Apple upped the price for 4GB of storage by $50 to $249. The 6GB Mini cost the same as what the 4GB Nano now costs.
Apple has sold more than 28 million iPods overall since the players were introduced in October 2001, and some say the Mini, which came out in January 2004, accounted for just less than half that number.
So when the Mini was discontinued, it put accessory makers like Sonnet Technologies in a quandary. Irvine, Calif.-based Sonnet already had its PodFreq FM transmitter for the Mini in the works.
The company ended up bringing the product to market, anyway, knowing that "there are a lot of iPod owners who remain loyal to their model, regardless of the latest introductions by Apple," marketing director Christine Taylor said. "We felt that there was kind of a 'cult' surrounding the iPod Mini, and we wanted to redesign our PodFreq to attract those folks," she said, adding that the company's related slogan for add-ons is "love your iPod even longer."
Given the prices people are willing to pay for Minis, some might call it punch-drunk love, or in the following case, simply drunk love: An eBay member from the United Kingdom, who didn't want his name used for this story, recently ended paying $359.86 as the winning bidder of a blue 6GB Mini.
Why did he do it? "Errr, to be honest, I didn't know I was paying over the odds," he wrote. "I was pretty drunk when I was bidding."
See more CNET content tagged:
Apple iPod Mini, Apple iPod, eBay Inc., Apple Computer, Amazon.com Inc.
One thing for sure: experiment with colored players went extremly well, especially with female audience appreciating color selection and well made and nice looking accesories.
I hope Apple will not disregard that fact and release colored players again. I think colored Nanos would be great hit.
P.S. Another point. From all media players I have tried, I think only Minis got the size right. It fits right to my hand. And it light and thin enough to sit well in my pockets - unlike lighter Nano you will not forget that Mini is there.
I say keep the Mini.
I just picked up a mini for a great deal from a Mac dealer in Oregon (NO SALES TAX!) I don't know if they have any more in stock, but it's worth checking out:
http://www.ecartdeluxe.com/macpac/search.php?posted=1&stext=ipod+mini&sprice=&stype=&scat=ms99999&sortBy=&sortord=
Joey
Flashback to 1995. Apple has a slough of Powerbooks on the market, but Windows-based laptops are starting to eat away at the market share. Ultimately, the line as a whole is in decline. The 100 series computers have major heat issues with the new 68040s, so they go back to the drawing board and produce the 500 series. The design and technology all reflect a promising direction for the new 68040 architecture, and with a wide array of features completely unheard of elsewhere, the 500 series is poised to set Apple up for dominance of the market once again.
So if you were Apple, you'd probably play to your strengths and beef up your bottom line while annihilating the competition.
Unfortunately for Apple, Apple is Apple, so they promptly discontinued the 500 series and released the 5300 series, digging themselves into a whole from which they are likely never to recover.
As a former 540C owner, the parallels hit a little close to home for me.
not the case.
The 480MBs of USB 2.0 are a theoretical maximum that are only
achieved at burst rates. In other words. USB 2.0 sends out pulses
of data that may or may not hit the maximum throughput.
Furthermore, USB 2.0 offs more processing of the data back on
to the CPU instead of processing it in the USB controller.
Firewire, on the other hand, while it may rarely achieve its
maximum throughput, Firewire does not burst data on
throughput. Instead, Firewire sends out a more constant and
even stream of data. As a result, the overall throughput of data
is faster than USB 2.0. Furthermore, Firewire offs very little data
processing back to the CPU which also improves the "speed" at
which data flows out the port and leaves the processor time to
do more important tasks.
The issue with Firewire on Windows based PCs is that few
laptops have a Firewire port. Those laptops which do have built-
in Firewire generally have a 4-pin connector (the kind on DV
cameras) and this connector does not supply any power to the
device. Then there is Windows' ad hock hack of Firewire support.
The nano is really cool, but I think Apple should have continued with making different colors. I guess their sales prove otherwise, but I know I love my silver mini.
Nice journalistic standards *snark*
- FireWire
- by invalidname December 14, 2005 2:40 PM PST
- Steve "forgot" that not everybody has USB 2.0 when he dropped
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
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- yadda yadda
- by ethernet76 December 15, 2005 8:19 AM PST
- Actually I don't think he cares. It was nice to test out the iPod on
- Like this
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (47 Comments)FireWire from the Nano and the 5G iPod. That makes the mini
perfect for recipients whose Macs are more than a year or two old.
OK. He didn't forget. He wants us to buy new Macs. Again.
the macs back when they had a moving scrollwheel, but a lot of PCs
don't have 6-pin firewire.
Being that a majority of their sales goes to PC customers it makes
more sense to remove firewire support to save money than to buy
the firewire chips and ship a worthless (for most) cable.