Sources: Apple set to grow iPhone family pre-holidays - Page 3

mwclare, give it up. You expect anyone to believe you after you admit lifting words from Ireland's previous post?

Both of you, enough. The point has been made.

Still waiting for the iPhone Shuffle thatll make random calls to my neglected friends.

Do you really think an iPhone nano would be backwards and green?

Actually, the real problem I see with both this design and the other guy's photoshopped version of it is that it simply takes an existing product and varies it in an obvious way. iPhone nano? Take an iPhone, make it smaller, remove a few apps. Not much to fight about.

I would think Apple would be Apple and avoid the obvious derivation.

Reminds me of all that speculation about their super secret phone prior to the iPhone announcement. Basically, people were just slapping keypads on iPods. Glad they were wrong.

And the latest crop of iMac speculation? Minor variations of the existing model. Historically, since each new iMac has an entirely different look, chances are the new one will as well.

When the iPod nano came out, it looked fresh and cool, not just a shrunken iPod. Here's hoping the iPhone nano, if there actually is one, is just as unpredictable. Although, come to think of it, backwards and green would not be something most people would expect.

From dictionary.com:

Which is correct: I could care less or I couldn't care less?

The expression I could not care less originally meant 'it would be impossible for me to care less than I do because I do not care at all'. It was originally a British saying and came to the US in the 1950s. It is senseless to transform it into the now-common I could care less. If you could care less, that means you care at least a little. The original is quite sarcastic and the other form is clearly nonsense. The inverted form I could care less was coined in the US and is found only here, recorded in print by 1966. The question is, something caused the negative to vanish even while the original form of the expression was still very much in vogue and available for comparison - so what was it? There are other American English expressions that have a similar sarcastic inversion of an apparent sense, such as Tell me about it!, which usually means 'Don't tell me about it, because I know all about it already'. The Yiddish I should be so lucky!, in which the real sense is often 'I have no hope of being so lucky', has a similar stress pattern with the same sarcastic inversion of meaning as does I could care less.

[Just trying to be helpful, that's all. I couldn't (or perhaps I mean the sarcastic inversion, could) care less.]

In America you think colour is spelled color, LOL.

Enough with the backward on green talk, I explained that before. So the nano was a shrunken' iPod, and that surprised you, yet a shrunken' iPhone wouldn't?

I agree Sir.

iphone is small as it is

We always have to fix your incorrect, and antiquated, spellings. When will the English learn?

Wow, I'm not really intending to start your rant all over, but it seems that you took it too personally. You don't need to repeat 20 times that you were first and he's a liar. He even gave you credit for being first with a correct guess. I'd say look in the mirror and check if your ego has not gotten out of hand.
If the dude is right (which we'll find out October 30 or earlier), I would expect a public apology from you.

Compared to what?

Sounds like a genuinely fair request.

Mr. Ireland?

Guys. Everyone is guessing about this. Does it really matter that someone made a public guess that is somewhat close to the mark?

Somehow, I feel pretty sure that most of us were thinking about a more Nano-like phone.

Who cares?

If it comes out, then fine.

A nano-like iPhone makes sense. Thinner, lighter, smaller than an iPhone, basically a nano plus cell. Imagine a 4GB cell/iPod without EDGE or WiFi. Just Bluetooth. It wouldn't hurt iPhone sales one bit. It also wouldn't hurt iPod or nano sales since it'll cost more than a nano and won't have the capacity of an iPod. It also seems like it wouldn't have many of the cool functions of the iPhone.

I'd also expect to see new versions of the nano and iPod before the holidays. If Apple has new iPods, a wider range of iPhones, a new iMac line, and maybe a thin, light 13" MBP, wow, what a Q1 Apple will have! Add to that movie rentals via Apple TV from the couch and watch Apple TV sales soar. Oh, and Leopard!

Does anyone really believe that Apple is going for a 1% market share of the cell phone business?

Seems really low target, like they might sell that this year, especially with a Nano iPhone...

OK, so it's worse because AppleInsider recycled an old story by attaching "reliable sources" to it without mentioning the previous one or the JP Morgan USA denial.

Nice try on the attempt to differentiate the Chang story from the AppleInsider version. Unfortunately, you left out the next line of the marketwatch story: "He believes such a move is the only way for Apple to launch a lower-end phone without severely cannibalizing sales of its iPod Nano." I think the word "cannibalizing" is more elegant than the word "pinch," which pretty much describes what happened between the Chang version and the AppleInsider version.

By the way, how many different accounts do you have on this site? AISI, indeed!

That's not an attempt, looks like I misread last week's story. Anyway, I don't want the iPod nano replaced by a phone. If a lower-cost iPhone is available alongside an upcoming revision to the iPod nano, I have no problem with that. We'll see if this rumor proves true.


About 38,966.

Is it just me, or does this post make no sense at all?

Sounds like an essential move when you consider the fact that the market for dedicated mp3 players is basically going to die over the next year or so. It's getting hard to buy a phone at any price without media functionality and a memory card slot - with 4 gig cards (more than enough for %80 of people) going under $50, I don't think most people will even be interested in a dedicated mp3 player (no matter how elegantly designed) unless they need something to work out with.

Apple is in big trouble if they DON'T do this.

I don't know about dedicated music players disappearing right away - people like their iPods an awful lot - but yeah, music phones will definitely increasingly eat into portable media player sales.

What's interesting about the iPhone is that it's basically a defensive move - Apple responding to music phones - but carried out in a very bold and aggressive way.

That move will only become bolder, more aggressive, and (IMO) very smart if the iPhone nano rumor proves true for this (!) holiday.

Visual voicemail runs over EDGE. So how can the iPhone nano not have EDGE and have visual voicemail?

No.


Yes. Apple lies the whole time - it's called marketing.

"Wow, beat their own goals, they are really successful. And they didn't just beat them, they tripled them, amazing, wow!!" Now do you get it?

There's only one that can to be too small round here. Well two things really. Well three if you count the second one.

It obviously means a hell of a lot to ireland!

I think this has been said before. I fully agree that 4GB is enough for most people, but that's not the problem. Most phones in the past two or three years had some form of music playing capabilities. The problem is, it's one thing to say that a device can play music, it's another ballgame to make it good enough or easy enough for most people to use it. So far, it looks like most phone user interfaces are still too cumbersome to be worth using.

That's one of the reasons his "sources" are really just what he's reading elsewhere, and guesses.

To point is he's referring to secret sources, and he said he's actually seen the device. Enough with this crap already.

I agree, some people say they aren't guessing though. Some of us have apparently seen this device in the flesh.

I'm sure Apple can do it better, but the Sony and Nokia phones, for example, are very straightforward - I don't think anyone that can handle the complexity of, say, SMS Test messaging, would have any problem operating them. The problem, or opportunity for Apple, is that right now, most of the phones are deliberately crippled, not including any memory and requiring you to buy some kind of music pack for niceties like headphones and a USB cable, which is indeed more trouble than it's worth for the general population.

However, I think we're going to see gobs of internal memory becoming a standard feature, especially given the iPhone's success and the inevitable decline in RAM prices, at which point a standalone mp3 player is going to go the way of the standalone Palm Pilot.

Stop with this "deliberately crippled" garbage.

You have no idea at all as to why Apple hasn't included some abilities.

If some of them don't show up in some big update, or upgrade, six months or so down the road, THEN you can make that statement. Until then it could as easily be that they didn't have the time to implement them.

I think he meant that most of the competitors' phones were deliberately crippled, not including any memory and requiring you to buy some kind of music pack for niceties like headphones and a USB cable.

Sorry if it wasn't obvious enough, but I was talking about Apple's competition, not about the iPhone. The other phone manufacturer are making fairly functional media phones, but they are crippling them by scrimping on memory, cables and headphones so that they can make a few bucks selling add-on music packs. Eventually, they're going to wise up and start including a useable amount of memory in their more affordable phones, which is why I think the iPhone nano is important for Apple.

OOPS!

Yeah, sorry about that.

There's been so much BS here about Apple crippling the phone, that while I read your post, I thought, carefully, my reaction was automatic.

Otherwise, what I said stands, in general, though not pointed at you anymore of course.

You're right - Ireland misunderstood (perhaps I wasn't being all the clear).

The point I was making was that the iPod Nano wasn't simply a smaller version of the existing iPod. it was a different design, and something surprising rather than predictable.

Similarly, while Apple may simply shrink the existing iPhone and remove a few apps in order to create an "iPhone Nano" - something that is so predictable in fact everyone is predicting it - it would be far more "Apple" to create something surprising, just as they did with the design of the iPod Nano.

All of the speculation tends to veer towards the obvious. Spculative next generation iMac predictions are obvious (the current design just slimmed down a bit). Speculative next generation iPhones are obvious (the current design just slimmed down a bit). And for all I know these may be correct.

But historically, when Apple comes out with a major iMac revision, or a "Nano" revision, they don't simply reduce the dimensions of the current model. I don't think they sit in a room and say "let's just make this smaller and call it a day." I think they are trying to invent new forms that exploit the design possibilities of a different size.

The iPhone itself is such a new design that simply shrinking it might be enough of a variation from the existing model to justify the lack of a more significant variation. However, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Apple's design for a smaller phone was far more surprising.

In this case I just think shrinking it makes sense, and allows them to use their advance 'space-efficient' user interfaces as an advantage over any other phone maker, and phone, on the planet. Multi-touch is simple too juicy for Apple to resist using on iPhone nano, and what's more texting on a click wheel would be a joke, and very inefficient. Besides why not make more use of all the iPhone research, and let less well-to-do people have something really, really cool too.

You forgot the Mac Amateur....

Actually, the original iPod nano was just a shrunk down version of the iPod with flash storage rather than a hardrive as with the iPod and iPod mini (which was in fact a completely different look than the iPod).

As far as the second generation iPod nano, it followed the design of the iPod mini. Rounded side surfaces, flat top and bottom and bright metal colors.

So as far as an iPhone nano, no matter which way you look at it, the nano product line has always just been a shrunken version of another iPod model. If and only if the rumor of an iPhone nano is true (which I hope it is) simply making it a smaller version of the iPhone is a very realistic and understandable prediction which is not at all contrary to apple's previous nano line releases. They have never done anything exciting other than shrinking something that is amazing. (Which in itself, I feel, is exciting enough.)

There's a big difference between the simple, mostly text based iPod interface, and the rather complex hi-rez iPhone version.

While the one for the iPod translated well to a smaller screen, I don't see the iPhone making that transition so well. There would have to be changes.

Could you see a screen less than three fifths the size with the same rez? Of course not. It would be unreadable.

Something has to give.

I think that they will replace the iPod nano line with an iPhone nano at the same price points.

No touchscreen, but instead a back-illuminated touchpad that can do a "clickwheel" and a "number pad" or "text pad" mode. GSM, no SIM-lock, world-wide availble immediately.

Why? The price difference between a 4GB nano and a 4GB Sandisk has gone to 100$, which basically shows how cheap flash memory has gotten. Now, they could obivously do the same as last year: Change the design a bit, double the capacity, sell that.

But: This will get old soon. In fact, very soon. Expect vastly more music phones next year, everywhere. I would assume that even low-end phones will include a 1 Gig flash player and a headphone jack. Just because it is soo cheap to do that. Then, in order to sell a nano, you need to convince all these people that the MP3 on their phone is too crappy, and that they actually need something better. I find that a hard sell. Remember: Up till now, most phones did not have MP3, if you wanted it you paid a lot extra, and, as pointed out, Sync/Headphones was an issue. That will change next year.

The whole iPhone thing was to aggressivly attack the coming transition from stand-alone MP3 players to cell phones taking that over. Apple know this is coming.

Now, consider the alternative I discribed: With the margins the iPod nano is enjoying at the moment, it is absolutly possible to include Microphone, Loudspeaker and Phone Chip for the same price as now (these components should be max. 30$).
In one big swoop (Christmas) Apple would get roughly 8-10 million of their Phones out into the market. In one blow, they would hit the phone market, hard. And the entire threat of mobile phones replacing iPods would be gone forever. Now, iPods would be replacing mobile phones.
Who would have thought that?

:-) I know it's bold, but I could imagine Jobs doing that.
What do you think?