Rod Lavington wrote:
It is just a marketing ploy - Apple would rather you buy the higher spec iPod with the better features. Since the bigger iPod has been around at lot longer, the cost to manufacture these beasties will *probably* be less than the new mini iPods, thus Apple make more money :-)
Well, partly. The disks in the mini iPod is likely to be very pricey, as it's very new tech - high capcity for the size of the drive. As such, it probably honestly costs Apple a fair bit to make. Additionally, you generally pay a premium for miniature electronics.
I bet you will find in 6 months time that minis will drop to sub US $200, just like every other Apple product has after first being introduced.
I expect the drives will get cheaper as volumes go up and other people start using them.
As for size - the only way I can think of that I could use 15GB of storage for music I /liked/ would be if the player supported FLAC encoding so I could have high-quality versions. As the iPod appears to suppport only AAC and MP3, I can't imagine how you could use all that space unless you were using it for a portable disk too.
Craig Ringer
