Apple Unveils $249 Mini IPod MP3 Player
By RACHEL KONRAD
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The newest iPod digital music player, debuting in February for $249, will be a half-inch thick and roughly the size of a business card.
The price is about $50 cheaper than Apple’s previous least expensive model of digital music’s most popular product.
The iPod mini, introduced by Apple chief executive Steve Jobs on Tuesday at the Macworld Conference & Expo, will hold about 1,000 digital songs on a 4-gigabyte hard drive.
Although the Expo crowd applauded the mini, many analysts and Macintosh aficionados had predicted a far less expensive device.
Some rival music players from Rio, Creative and Dell cost less than $200 but most hold fewer songs than the 4-gigabyte mini and use flash memory instead of hard drives.
Apple’s other iPods range in price from $299 to $499.
IPod sales generated $121 million in revenue in Apple’s fourth quarter that ended in late September. Between October and December, Apple sold 730,000 iPods, or nearly one out of three portable digital music players sold in the United States.
The anodized aluminum mini iPods will come in silver, gold, blue, pink and green. The mini gets about eight hours of battery life – buts it’s unclear if the newest player will generate the same power supply complaints of other iPods.
Some users have criticized iPods, complaining that battery life diminishes within several months or a year. Rechargeable replacement batteries cost $50 or more.
The five-day Macworld also commemorated the 20th anniversary of the first Macintosh, a beige box that dramatically boosted the popularity of home computers.
“It was literally a decade ahead of anything else,” said Jobs. “We literally had to go teach people what a mouse was, what pointing and clicking was, what cutting and pasting was.”
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