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Apple plays to hot market with new, cheaper iPods
7/22/2004
 

          Apple Computer Inc. on Monday began selling cheaper, revamped models of its popular iPod digital music players as competition heats up in that market.
Separately, in a sign that the device may be branching beyond its musical roots, Duke University said the school will give all incoming students a new iPod to download educational materials such as recorded lectures and schedules.
The two announcements capped a busy day in the digital music market, in which Apple is trying to maintain its lead over rivals such as Sony and Napster.
The latest challenge is coming from a new consumer electronics arm of the Virgin Group, Virgin Electronics, which unveiled a 128-megabyte MP3 player as part of its announcement on Monday that it has moved its headquarters from New York to San Jose.
Apple, moving to solidify its lead in the MP3 player market, unveiled two fourth-generation iPods -- a 20-GB model priced at $299 and a 40-GB version priced at $399. Each is $100 less than previous iPods with similar storage.
The new iPods are slightly thinner and address a top complaint among iPod users, offering 12 hours of battery life compared with the previous eight hours.
And the new iPods use a Click Wheel control, a combination of the trademark scroll wheel and five new push buttons. The Click Wheel control was introduced with the smaller iPod Mini players and gives users easier one-handed operation of the iPod, said Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of hardware product marketing.
Hewlett-Packard Inc., meanwhile, said the new iPods clear the way for an HP-branded iPod scheduled to be out in September.
"We decided to wait for this amazing new fourth-generation iPod as it will offer our customers an even better experience,'' HP Chief Executive Officer Carly Fiorina said in an Apple news release.
But Apple did not introduce a larger 60-GB model as some Apple watchers had been speculating. Apple did say it is dropping the $299, 15-GB iPod model, which was seen as too close in price to the $249 iPod Minis, which use a 4-GB hard drive.
Joswiak said the company decided the 20-GB model priced the same as the old 15-GB model would be a better value. The iPod Minis -- which come in several colors -- have drawn more women and younger buyers than the iPod white models, "so the Mini has helped expand our customer space for the iPod, not just cannibalized it,'' Joswiak said.
Duke University of Durham, N.C., will be the first to fully test whether the iPod works as an educational tool as well as a music player. According to a news release, Duke will hand out 1,650 20-GB iPods to incoming freshmen as part of a Duke-funded pilot program to "encourage creative uses of technology in education and campus life.''
The Duke iPods will come preloaded with text and audio such as campus orientation material and the school year calendar. Students will also be able to download course material such as language lessons, music, lectures and audio books from a special Duke Web site modeled after Apple's iTunes Music Store.
Faculty and students at other colleges already have been using the iPod for academic purposes, such as recording lectures or testing language skills, said Tracey Futhey, Duke's vice president for information technology. Using the iPod at Duke may even stimulate more creative uses, such as distributing the campus newspaper in digital form, she said.
Napster, an iTunes competitor, said Monday it has signed six more schools for its pilot service that gives students access to Napster's 800,000-song online music catalog. Those schools include the University of Southern California, Cornell University and George Washington University.
But the Duke-Apple deal could extend Apple's reach into education far beyond just music, said Ross Rubin, director of industry analysis for NPD Techworld.
.................
sfgate.com

 

 
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