This weblog is no longer being maintained. All information here has been ported to EclecticEchoes.com. This site (heupel.com/eclectic) remains only for archival purposes.
The rumors were proved true this week when Apple unveiled the new smaller iPod Minis. While these are nicely designed and come with 4GB drives, they are also unfortunately only $50 less than the 15GB version of their big brother iPod. I can understand that component costs (the shell, the electronics and the 4GB drive) all add up to justify the cost for the most part, but market wise, it just doesn’t make much sense to me to price these new iPods at $250. Especially when the original iPod in the 15GB variety is now priced at $299 — and the original iPod is not that large a device to be a real hassel to carry unless you are out jogging or something like that. For my money the original iPod is still one of the best designed and featured large capacity players out there for the money. The Minis would need to be under $200 — more likely closer to $150–$170 — to entice me into giving them a second look.
What I really want to find is a single device that can reliably and affordably function as MP3 player and photo backup device, with at least a CF I/II port and firewire or USB 2.0 connectivity. I don’t care about AAC files, although now that the DRM protectection on them has been revealed, that would be nice, as would OGG support. The main thing I would like to see is the ability to drive decent headphones with quality sound. Unfortunately I haven’t seen anything yet that really does this well. I still love the styling and simplicity of the original iPod, but it looks like the add on to allow it to be used as a photo tank is exceedingly slow and eats batteries. If I’m going to be tied to the DC power in my car I may as well have the notebook in there for along with a cheap 64MB or 128MB MP3 player which I can reload with new songs when I dump the photo’s to the PC.
There were also announced minor updates to iTunes and the whole iFamily of products, but apparently still no support for scripting iTunes on Windows, which is one feature of iTunes I would really like to see. Generally I find myself going back to good old WinAmp 2.91 more and more as my main music player. While iTunes has many excellent features, it also takes up considerably more system resources than WinAmp. My MP3’s are fairly well organized already, and I can’t afford to buy many songs from the iTunes store, so iTunes, for now at least, will remain installed, but little used.