iPod Mini
Words by Chris Mace
Images by Caesar Lima

July 2004

In less than three years, Apple's® iPod™ has conquered the high-end music player market. With the sleek iPod mini, Apple is now thinking even smaller as it vies to compete for your cash.

iPod: Over Two Million Sold
At Macworld Expo in January, Apple CEO Steve Jobs recapped the music player's wild success. The company pushed out 730,000 iPods in the December quarter, Jobs announced to the Mac® faithful. He cited the latest statistics, giving the iPod a 31% unit share of the entire MP3 player market and a 55% share of revenue.

Now that Apple has sufficiently dominated the market for high-end music players and is aggressively promoting iTunes® for online music sales, the company seeks to take on another market segment: Flash-memory players that store about 60 songs on 256MB chips. These high-end Flash™ players are available to customers at a cheaper cost of around $200. "We are going to introduce the second member of the iPod family today, to go after these guys," Jobs said, as he unveiled the iPod mini.

Think Japan. Think Smaller.
As the name suggests, the iPod mini features the same key elements that characterize the regular iPod, including a backlit display, skip protection, FireWire® dock connector, and support for iTunes on a Mac or PC. Apple advertises the same eight-hour battery life for the iPod mini as well as a miniature hard drive with 4GB of storage (about 1,000 songs)-the same capacity that Apple put on board the original iPod in 2001. When Apple introduced the first iPod, the company won praise for offering a high-capacity hard drive in a small unit enclosure. As Apple takes on the Flash-player market, the iPod mini's defining characteristics will enable it to stand apart.

The iPod mini measures in at 3.6 inches in height, 2.0 inches in width, and 0.5 inches in depth. Its enclosure is smaller than the iPod in every dimension, and its face is about the same size as that of a business card. It's also the lightest iPod Apple's ever shipped, weighing in at 3.6 ounces.