Flash, Video, and Beyond: Future of MP3 and iPod - Hard Drives to Flash
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The newest twist to all of this is the movement that seemed to be pulling players back into smaller size and smaller capacity. Again, this has been led by Apple in large part because of Apple’s reliance on style and design to sell their products. In addition, this development follows similar trends seen in other areas of technology, most notably laptop computers and cell phones. By making good use of this demand from users, Apple continues to be able to capitalize on an ever-growing market.
The most recent embodiment of mp3 players growing ever smaller lies in the recent release of Apple’s iPod Nano. The Nano, far from being a heavy duty mp3 player capable of storing a user’s entire music collection, can rather store about 1000 songs, or about 66 hours of continuous music. That is no small amount of music, and certainly allows a user a great deal of choice in what genres and artists to carry with him or her. In addition, most mp3 player users never took full advantage of the capacity afforded by the hard drives in their players, but rather used it to carry their currently interesting music around with him or her. The Nano exists in a sort of middle ground between huge 20 GB hard drive players and the very small 128-512 MB sport type mp3 players. Even assuming the fact that many of Apple’s target audience won’t listen to entire songs, but will rather skip around and listen to snippets of many different songs, 1000 files is enough to keep them occupied while still allowing the player itself to be small and ultra-stylish.
The evolution of mp3 players (from their beginnings to the current status quo) has followed the general course of moving to smaller form factor, even at the expense of some capacity.
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