The sound and the fury

Say I was to walk down to Circuit City with $250 in my grubby mitts. Almost all of the MP3 players I could get for my money would be of the 256MB-or-less flash memory variety (the exception being the Archos Gmini 20GB thing). I buy Steve's argument: $50 more bucks, way more player.

Where $299 was looking a little steep for some people, $249 is the next psychological price barrier. My own informal survey of my colleagues and friends indicated that, among those who didn't yet have an iPod the mini was priced low enough (while still being an iPod) to raise eyebrows.

To those who wanted a $150 MP3 player from Apple: whatever they could have jammed into a box for $150 wouldn't have been good enough to bother calling an iPod.

It also seemed that the world fell into two camps on GarageBand: huge bore or uberkool. I vote for uberkool. Bringing Apple's UI sensibility to the creative process will enable hundreds of thousands of people to do things with music that they could only dream of doing before. By lowering the barrier to being able to create, Apple's going to enable a whole new class of amateur musician. If only you could automatically attach a Creative Commons license to your works.