iPod and the Bell Curve

Today I noticed that Apple is expanding their iPod functionality to allow you to store pictures. Maybe they are actually realizing that $400 is a lot to pay for just being able to listen to music on the train home, or that most people don’t even have 2,000 songs they like, much less 10,000. So why have they upped the price for the picture version to $500 (40Gb) and $600 (60Gb)?

Obviously I’m wrong; not only are people happy to spend $400 to listen to music, but they are also willing to spend $100 - $200 more to be able to carry around several lifetimes worth of snapshots as well. The 60Gb model will purportedly hold 15,000 songs or 25,000 pictures, or some combination.

So who’s buying these beautifully designed music players? Is it primarily a status symbol? The law of diminishing return has got to kick in here at some point, don’t you think? I mean, lets be honest, how many songs are there that you like enough to go to the effort of individually storing them on your PC, possibly ripping them from a CD, then transfer to your iPod? Maybe a couple thousand if you have a lot of free time on your hands. I know that there are people out there who will disagree with me, but come on, you guys are at the tip of the bell curve and you know it.

What about pictures? Lets say you’re an avid photographer and you take 100 digital pictures every weekend, and if you’re pretty good you select half of them to keep. At that rate it would take you ten years to fill up your iPod. But that’s assuming that you were willing to spend several hours every weekend going through your pictures, maybe fixing red eye, cropping, doing color corrections and carefully annotating every picture with who’s in it, location, date, category, good, medium, fair, etc. and organizing them into albums. With 25,000 pictures you would need a really well thought-out system for categorizing all your pictures otherwise you’ll be lucky to find them again.

You can tell that I don’t own an iPod, in which case I would probably be talking about how amazingly well thought-out the controls are (which they are), and how this makes me feel so much cooler than all those losers with CD players (which it would). Maybe an Apple evangelist will read this and send me one just to convert me. (hint, hint)

I just had a thought, what if the music/picture iPod and the cellphone could somehow merge into one product, now you’ve got something worth the money! That’s worth a whole separate post....