There are times in the history of consumer electronic devices when a single product becomes an “icon”, meaning that it comes to represent in the public mind all the products in that market segment. For example, in the 80s and 90s, Sony’s Walkman became the icon for personal music players using the cassette and CD formats. Sony was first to market, and best in the market for a long time. As time passed, other manufacturers caught up, although even music players from other makers were referred to as Walkmans. One could argue that Apple’s iPod has become the icon for the current digital music revolution.

As history often repeats itself, the player market is slowly catching up to the iPod. Actually, the market has become segmented into low-end “flash” players (a flash player stores data in memory chips, similar to RAM), high-end flash players, and hard drive players (like the iPod and Dell’s Digital Jukebox). All the segments have advantages/disadvantages. Low-end flash players are small and relatively inexpensive, but they can’t hold much music. High-end flash players can hold much more music, but their cost-to-memory-space ratio is very high. The best cost-to-memory-space ratio is found in hard drive based players.

Back in January, Apple announced the iPod mini, targeted at the price points in the high-end flash player segment. This segment includes players like the Rio Cali, which retails for $199, but has only 256MB of memory (about 120 songs in Windows Media Audio format). The iPod mini retails for $50 more, but contains a 4GB hard drive that holds 1000 songs in Apple’s AAC format. Pundits have wondered whether the iPod mini would take off when it became available last weekend, and many felt the $249 price would be too high.

Well, over 100,000 preorders were taken, and last weekend lines (normally reserved for store openings) formed at Apple’s retail stores. Demand for the multi-colored mini models was high. What makes the iPod mini attractive? Unlike its white-only siblings, the anodized-aluminum mini comes in silver, gold, blue, green and pink.

The mini is also, well, mini. About the size of a business card, and only 1/2 inch thick, weighing in at only 3.6 ounces. The mini retains all the features of the maxi, and accesses them through a new ClickWheel, which should find its way into the larger models soon.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski