Some_Big_Spoon said:
ok, so what does this do for us? We get flash ipods and Apple increases their player market share.. great, so? I know I bash the ipod all the time, but seriously, where does this get us?
Is the ipod $ going into R&D for useful things? Chip dev? Hardware? Software? Or does it just go to "profit" I know Apple spends a great deal, proportionally, on R&D, but is the ipod fuling that? Would be nice to think so.
increased brand awareness (quote wired magazine "the ipod brought apple more attention than apple brought ipod).
theoretic halo effect. people who get an ipod/ipod mini/ipod micro are so impressed with it and/or itunes and/or the apple store, when it comes time to buy their next computer they buy apple. even if the conversion rate is 1% of current ipod owners that amounts to 5,000 new apple computer users. if the projected sales of 28 million by 2008 are correct that's 28,000 new users. now imagine they get 5 or 10%.
increased likelihood of itunes/aac becoming the defacto standard for online audio sales. there are multiple benefits to this: a) stop microsoft from monopolizing yet another arena, b) should apple retain 70% of the download market sales are projected at $4.4 billion. apple may not make much on sales yet, but when you talk about 70% of 4 billion songs you can bet they'll be making money. c) proof to hollywood that apple knows how to cater to the consumer and the corporation, first dibs at a real online video store.
diversification to help apple out in lean times. like when motorola fails to make a single megahertz improvement on over a year and people stop buying or wait on buying power macs. or like when there were no imacs to be had for a month. without the ipod division the last 12-18 months wouldn't have looked so hot for apple.
stock price increase. the majority of people who buy and sell stocks are sheep who jump on bandwagons and wouldn't know an ipod from an ice cream cone if they didn't read it in forbes or on etrade. ipod has wall street buzz, adding a third model kicks up the price of the stock.
in short, the ipod does absolutely nothing bad (despite what people may think) and lots and lots of good for the company.