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Apple Knows When to Make the Best Better

Time magazine covers the sweet new Apple iPod Nano with a nice tidbit for those in marketing or product development:

It's amazing that the Nano even made it to the stage. The story of the Nano started nine months ago, when Jobs and his team took a look at the iPod Mini and decided they could make it better. On the face of it, that wouldn't appear to be a fantastically smart decision. The iPod Mini was and still is the best-selling MP3 player in the world, and Apple had introduced it only 11 months earlier. Jobs was proposing to fix something that decidedly was not broken. “Not very many companies are bold enough to shoot their best-selling product at the peak of its popularity,” Gartner analyst Van Baker says. “That's what Apple just did.” And it did that while staring right down the barrels of the holiday retail season.


So when would you make the call to redesign your best-selling product because you knew you could make it better? This is a customer interest story. Apple has built a cult following and they know how to deliver the cool to keep the devoted devoted.

Time Magazine: Stevie's Little Wonder

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September 14, 2005 in Award winning publications, Blog Outsourcing, Brand enhancement, Web/Tech | Permalink

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Comments

I'm an avid Mac user, however this quote just reeks of evangelism.

Although the nano is pretty cool (i'd call it "a neat trick"), discontinuing the mini also alienates the main target market for the smaller mp3 players: women who want an ipod that "goes with their outfit". I've had more than one person talk to me about how annoyed they are about wanting a 'color ipod' and finding out all they make is black white now. Sure there are skins, but we all know that's not the same. I'm not sure what made SJobs think that this was the best idea (perhaps he wanted to be early-to-market with a high-capacity flash player), but i believe he should have thought a little harder about who was buying the mini rather than the full ipod before deciding that the 5-color 'hip design' model needed to go.

Posted by: Jeremy | Sep 15, 2005 9:00:26 AM

i really want one of these ipod nano's

i cant see anyone wanting a ipod mini or ipod shuffle now that the nano is here.

no wonder apple have been doing promotions with famous world wide crisp companys giving away the ipod mini.

Posted by: nano | Sep 20, 2005 5:23:54 AM