iPod Nano

My friend Bryan did a quick analysis of this tiny, little device. I completely agree with his conclusion regarding color choices: what happened? Like Tif, My wife agrees that the mini is soooo "I want one" because of the color choices. As it stands now, your only options are white and red (U2). Wow it's small, though.

Check out Bryan's article for some more commentary and references.

I find the iPod pricing structure devilishly clever. It kills me:

Model	Size (GB)	Cost	$/GB
Shuffle	0.5	$99	$198
Shuffle	1	$129	$129
Nano	2	$199	$100
Nano	4	$249	$62
Mini (disc.)	4	$199	$50
Mini (disc.)	6	$249	$42
iPod	20	$299	$15
iPod	60	$399	$7

Let's ignore that last column for now ($/GB). We'll work our way down. Suppose you are interested in a Shuffle. You get double the songs for a mere $30 more. That's a tough upgrade to ignore unless you really lock into the first model being sub-$100. Don't worry, it gets worse.

Suppose you were interested in a Nano. Starting at $199, you are damn close to a full blown iPod. For a mere $100, you get ten times the space! Ok, ok so space is important to you but not that important? So you move up to the larger Nano (4 GB). Whoops, now you're only $50 away from the real deal—might as well upgrade right now. We had basically the same problem with the Mini that this model replaced.

Tomorrow I'll discuss a few ways you can talk yourself out of (or maybe into) these upgrades.