Apple's iPod Touch Is a Beauty of a Player Short on Battery Life
In the hyper-competitive world of consumer electronics, it's highly unusual for one branded product to dominate its market for years on end. Yet, that's what Apple's iPod media player, now approaching its sixth anniversary, has managed to do.
Context & Ripple Effects
The iPod touch arrives a week after PC Magazine's first hands-on look and into a franchise nearing six years of unbroken market dominance — a run already documented back when Apple added spoken menus to the iPod in 2006. But the launch window is unusually messy: Apple has confirmed some early units shipped with defective screens, and owners of existing iPod games must repurchase reformatted versions to play them on the new nano or classic.
The timing compounds the pressure. Days earlier Apple cut iPhone prices, so this review of a screen-driven player that shares so much with the phone lands squarely on the question of what role the touch plays — and whether its short battery life undercuts the case for choosing it over either sibling.
First-order effects
- Battery-life criticism hits a device whose core appeal is video playback, forcing Apple to defend the touch's value against a freshly discounted iPhone and its own longer-running click-wheel players.
- Confirmed defective-screen reports on early units stack onto the review's caveats during the critical pre-holiday launch period.
Second-order effects
- Forcing existing customers to rebuy reformatted iPod games for the nano and classic tests buyer goodwill at the exact moment rival player makers are trying to crack Apple's six-year hold on the market.
- The iPhone price cut compresses Apple's whole handheld price ladder, squeezing the space the touch occupies between phone and dedicated media player.
Third-order effects
- If Apple keeps shipping multi-touch as the interface across its handheld line, the biggest threat to the click-wheel iPod empire becomes Apple itself — self-cannibalization replacing competitive displacement as the mechanism of change.
The trend: Apple is converging its entire handheld lineup on multi-touch screens, letting the iPhone and iPod touch cannibalize the iPod before any competitor manages to.