Comments about:

Steve Jobs Keynote at San Francisco

I think it is great that apple now finaly comes with software for musicmakers, not just for musiclisteners.

i think the iPod mini is a rip-off at that price. i think $199 would have been more managable.

i fail to see how jobs could say, 'as an answer to the mp3 players under $200us we offer the iPod mini at $250us'. just strikes me as lame- even more so now that the low end iPod got a boost to 15gig. it's more than 3 times the capacity for $50 extra and it's not like anybody ever complained that the latest iPods were too big a form factor in the first place.

GarageBand is a nice new offering though.

I was thinking the same, Boze. I'd never buy it.

If Jobs thinks that people will pay that extra $50 for the extra space on the iPod-mini, instead of a Flash-player, he should think that they might as well spend another $50 for a normal iPod.

On the other hand, I suppose there has been a lot of market research. It might be the $50 bucks that makes a difference in terms of what people would spend at all for a harddisk mp3 player.

It kind of fills the price gap between the two types of players, so it also addresses a specific target group, that had not really been addressed, yet.

Anyway, it's always good to lower your prices by tiny bits instead of big leaps, especially when you're market leader...

maybe the $250 initial price is because they know from experience that a certain number of mac heads are going to get one no matter what. then make it more competitive when the evangalists are out and about.

I'm a first-timer here, and I apologize for the wordiness.

I completely agree! On one hand, the flash market is expanding in size (see Rio's new 4GB flash MP3 for $250), and has always been the dominant MP3 market. But, Apple wants to grow market share and be competitive, so they offer the same thing. Not very different, Apple. I personally don't think that this is the way to do it. Also, I personally wouldn't buy one, knowing that I could spend $50 more, and get almost 4 TIMES the space, with all of the extra capabilities (games, PDA, voice recorder, etc. etc.)

On the other hand, as it was stated above, I'm sure they did research to see the viability of the product, and they feel that a flash entry into that market makes financial sense. I'm just not sure how they will be able to compete with the already-considered standard-setter of the MP3 market, Rio. And, I'm not sure that flash memory vs. the shrinking (in size) harddrive iPod will win. I would always go with the more power, more options, for not much more money.

Being a musician, I was excited about GarageBand, and even the iPod. Overall, though, the Keynote left me looking for other company's announcements at the Expo.