There's the original white plastic one... the celebrity endorsed ones... the pastel coloured, but slightly less powerful ones... and now the tiny ones perfect for discreet use... and once the battery runs out (as they so famously do) you can't get no satisfaction...
What am I talking about? Well probably not what you think...
As far as I can see, and this point has been made elsewhere recently too, iPods are just like, well, vibrators...
Sure, the iPod is a great invention of last century and the updates to them, the constant refreshing and renewal of them are obviously a good thing for Apple, who's last great invention was placing different coloured translucent pieces of plastic on thier iMacs to bring them up to date... OK, so that's not all they did but that was what most consumers saw and thought. The iPod has become central to Apple's image. And, it's safe to assume, its finances.
So anyway, are Apple conciously marketing the iPod like vibrators?
Well the sales of iPod speak for themselves. In 2004, Apple sold 4.4 million iPods - nearly four times as many than 2003. Apple's own iTunes music store, along with various accessories the iPod has spawned, has helped to push iPod-related sales to well over a billion dollars last year. Apple has over 70% of the market in legal downlods and over 90% of the market in players that store music on hard drives.
I don't have an iPod, although I do have an MP3 player - with a hard drive. I'm in that tiny minority!
Going back to the iMac, Apple now advertises its G5 as being "from the people that brought you the iPod"...
[partly via Q]
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