Double Trouble from Apple

[Verto]

Originally posted by Q Cubed
Verto has taken up Mr. Nice Guy's mantle.

How so? This is just a thread about two new products, not an "Expose on the Imminent Destruction of Microsoft".

[Verto]

All the Harry Potter books out on audio book are 99 hours, 10 minutes...anyone have an idea as to how many GB that is?

[Provost Harrison]

Nano? See, they should have gone to milli and micro first - given them more room for naming manoevre. They're going to have to use pico, femto and ato next, and those sizes are just taking the piss really

[Kuciwalker]

I'm pretty sure it's more than 4 GB.

Same order of magnitude, though. My optimistic approximation (a six minute song takes 3 MB) give 3 GB for 100 hours.

[Kuciwalker]

I'm too lazy to actually look at the songs on my computer to see the average size/length ratio.

[Provost Harrison]

Isn't it usually about a meg a minute?

[Kuciwalker]

optimistic

It may be that without instrumentals it takes less space; I dunno how the audio compression actually works (hell, I'm not sure how raw audio files actually work).

[alva]

Something like that, yeah.

[Zopperoni]

Originally posted by Asher
It's a niche market.

I disagree here, but I can only speak for the Dutch market since I don't know how phones are sold internationally.

Over here, a mobile phone is often offered as a gift with the subscription. This is seen by the operator as a token of appreciation for choosing its service.

Currently, the Sony Ericsson W800i walkman-phone is the hot phone that's being offered with subscriptions, and before that, it was the Nokia 6230, also with mp3-playback functionality.

In sum, there may not be a visible, conscious need for it, but when marketed aggressively, music-playback functionality can arouse a certain "latent need" or realization of additional benefits.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by Kinjiru
The phone thingy will be huge. The reason is simple, teens.

My kids already download music clips as ringtones, and they are very annoyed that they can only get 10-sec clips. They have been wanting to get whole songs for quite a while.

27 million teens with phones already + money to burn + the ability to set a unique song with each person in their contact list = $ billions to Apple.

Ah, but that formula isn't quite right. Apple will only have the market to themselves for a short while. Once another manufacturer brings out something similar that is also more easily hackable and tradeable (i.e. not using iTMS), Apple will quickly lose the teen market.

But that just means that the parents will be the ones stuck with the old phones. And they will HATE the music selections already loaded up by their kids, so they will replace a couple tunes with something more age-appropriate.

So....

27 million teens + money to burn + link song to contact + say 4 months market capture = $millions for Apple
plus
maybe 10 million phones go back to the parents + 2 songs 'reloaded' each = another $20 million for Apple
plus
maybe 500,000 of those parental phones will see extended use and get the parents hooked on this whole downloading music thing, so that's maybe another $1 million monthly...

Not a bad little business plan...

Game over.

There is an interesting tension here, though. In observing the scary universe of my teenage daughter and her friends, it seems to me that both devices (like everythying else in teenworld) are used to cement identity -- but in opposite ways; their phones are icons of individuality, whereas their mp3 players are icons of conformity (i.e., have an iPod or be shunned). It will be interesting to see how a convergence of the 2 devices plays out on that terrain.

[Kuciwalker]

IME, phones are icons of individuality only inasmuch as "having superficial individuality" is what conformists do nowadays.

My phone is in my boot compartment, and used pretty much only to call my parents, as they insist that I always have a cell phone with me while driving.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


IME, phones are icons of individuality only inasmuch as "having superficial individuality" is what conformists do nowadays.

As I think I made clear, we're talking about teenagers here...

[Asher]

What the hell is a boot compartment?

Trunk?

Glovebox?

[Kuciwalker]

Glove compartment

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Rufus T. Firefly
As I think I made clear, we're talking about teenagers here...

The point being that they don't actually have any more to do with individuality than an iPod does.