Apple’s iPod: More Music for More Money

Apple’s innovative new iPod demonstrates where portable digital music players are heading: They’re getting a lot more capacity, smaller packages and better connections to the computer.

The iPod, available Nov. 10, is the first pocket-size player built around a high-capacity hard drive instead of memory chips. It’s also the first to use a high-speed connection known as FireWire to load songs from a computer.

Unfortunately for Apple, which priced the iPod at a stunning $399, the company seems to have missed another important trend in digital audio players: They’re getting cheaper. Hard-drive-based products have plummeted in price this year, dropping near or below $200. And more low-cost products are on the horizon.

“It’s a cutting-edge MP3 player,” analyst Tim Deal of Technology Business Research said of the iPod, “but it’s really not priced competitively. At a time when consumers just aren’t spending as much money as they have in the past, it’s risky to commit marketing, sales and research and development resources to putting a device like this out.”

The initial iPods will work only with Apple computers, but it’s hardly the only product available for iMac and iBook users. The leading high-capacity player--Creative’s Nomad Jukebox--is Mac compatible, as are most top players based on memory chips.

Apple defends the high price by saying the iPod is uniquely valuable. Noting that Apple designed all the hardware, the operating system and the applications involved, Greg Joswiak, senior director of hardware product marketing for Apple, said, “We don’t have to hope these things work well together; we can engineer these things to work well together.”

The player has a 5-gigabyte hard drive, which is enough to hold 80 hours of music, or 80 times more than a typical MP3 player based on memory chips. The drive is significantly thinner and smaller than the typical laptop computer drive, Joswiak said, enabling Apple to make the iPod about half the size of the Nomad Jukebox.

With Apple’s pioneering synchronization software, it can grab newly ripped songs off an iMac automatically whenever it’s connected. And the FireWire connection moves a full CD’s worth of tunes from iMac to iPod in about 5seconds, Joswiak said.

All of these features are likely to appear on competing players, although no one has announced any comparable products just yet.

The decline in the price and size of hard drives is prompting several manufacturers to enter the field next year, including RCA, DLink and possibly Sonicblue. Creative plans to come out with a version of the Nomad Jukebox that’s 30% smaller than the original.

A number of manufacturers also are tackling the size issue by bringing out high-capacity players based on half-size recordable CDs. Compaq began selling one such device Monday for $99, and Philips plans to offer one later this year.

Although FireWire isn’t a standard feature on many computers yet, Creative recently announced a line of FireWire-equipped sound cards, so that type of connector is “definitely the next evolutionary stage” for its MP3 products, said Phil O’Shaughnessy, a company spokesman.

Apple has made consumer-electronics gear before, such as the ill-fated QuickTake digital camera, but “this is the first product that we’re doing in the digital lifestyle era,” Joswiak said.

The point isn’t necessarily to compete in the broad market for MP3 players but to enhance the value of the 7 million FireWire-equipped Apple computers already in the market.

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Jon Healey covers the convergence of entertainment and technology. He can be reached at jon.healey@latimes.com.