There is, for example, a huge market there for small players retailing about forty dollars US. Many are styled to look like iPod Nanos but unlike a Nano include an FM receiver with twenty-station speedtuning, off-air recording capability and a dictation microphone too. Unlike the iPod they can be loaded with music simply by plugging them into a USB port and dragging and dropping files from your desktop; the unit looks like a standard thumb drive to your computer.

They have a 1.8-inch color screen like a Nano but improve on that by playing videos from flash memory, not just displaying slideshows as Nano does. Plus which, they recognize standard playlist files and can carry hundreds of these sorted into subdirectories. And being from Asia, they naturally include a Karaoke lyric tracking capability for audio and video files. Now how much would you pay? But there’s more.

For forty dollars you get all this and a gigabyte of flash too; capacities up to four gigabytes are also available. Fit and finish are equal to anything you see in a cellphone, and they come in an assortment of styles including an aluminum-cased model with built-in speakers.

So naturally most Americans have never seen one and don’t know they exist. Pity.

As for the Zune, Microsoft is now actually pulling them out of their packaging and repainting them in hopes of selling them by color alone. Yes, its the consumer electronics equivalent of tying a porkchop around your kid’s neck so the dog will play with him: paint it pink so some debutante gets it for a Sweet Sixteen present. Other people buy them so they can cybernetically crack them, discarding Microsoft’s firmware in favor of Linux. Seems the DRM system evaporates along with the Microsoft code, making them formidable piratical vehicles ready to surf the WiFi waves for plunder. I must say it was a bit of a blunder not making them Vista compatible; you can only hook one to a Vista machine by cracking it first….

As for iPod, it will continue to eclipse its only true competition, Sandisk for at least another year. Steve Jobs can afford to take the brand in radical directions thanks to its sky-high profit margins and devoted following. The expectation is that in 2007 he will ditch the 1.8-inch hard disk drive now inside iPod Videos in favor of a Solid State Disk, a straight replacement part that consumes a tenth the power and has no moving parts. Next year he may ditch the iPod Video entirely in favor of an SSD-equipped iPhone. And an iPhone with an 80-gigabyte SSD in it would be a formidable palmtop computer. In three years a cost-factored version could cross the ninety-dollar bill-of-materials sweetspot of current midpriced cellphones, at which point it would likely dwarf all sales figures to date for iPod.

As for AppleTV, it takes Apple towards something becoming quite popular in Europe — IPTV, the streaming and downloading of current television programming over packet-switched networks. About forty-five percent of European television watchers have reportedly used IPTV in the past year, and we could expect even higher numbers in the US if a wireless, always-on Internet connection were assured.

That assured wireless connection may arrive as a so-called mesh-topology network — self-sustaining field computers perched up power poles, trees and towers throwing a blanket of WiFi-derived radio communication across neighborhoods. Currently about 700 wireless nodes suffice to service a 100,000-population suburban community at a cost of about two million dollars, but by 2010 advances should allow a per-node cost of six hundred dollars and an equivalent coverage with fewer than 500 nodes, allowing ninety percent of the US population to be “meshed” at a cost of about six billion dollars. Such a network could be fielded by 2015, paid for within a year by selling Internet service subscriptions and click-through advertising. After that an iPhone’s WiFi capability would allow it to place Voice Over IP calls on the national “comweb”, and AppleTV would be all the high-definition tuner your house would need.

Now how much would you pay?

I think it’s a safe call that the iPod will stay dominant. The main advantage Apple has is it’s enormous mindshare. MP3 player has almost become ubiquitous with iPod. When someone says “I want an MP3 player for Christmas” I bet 80% of the public thinks “get him/her an iPod.” If Microsoft were to offer lots of giveaways of Zunes they might be able to seriously damage the iPod mindshare hold. The more Zunes are “in the wild” the more chance someone will see one and ask what it is. If the person using the Zune likes it then they will give a positive recommendation to the inquiring person. This is the best endorsement the Zune, or any product, can have. We trust the “average” person more than people or announcers in commercials.

Apparently you weren’t around for the first three generations of I-Pods.

They had an extremely high return rate due to defects. About 20% in the FIRST month, and up to 50% within 3 or 4 months were broken where I worked. It was hell on earth for customer services at retail. I’d say the first 3 gens of I-Pod were the most defective mp3 players ever.

I’ve read reports an worldwide, each i-pod gen up until the most recent ones had an atrocious defect rate, varying from 20-40% (even 20 is really, really bad).

Research before you blurt.

The only reason the I-Pod is successful was a great marketing strategy. They had the best viral marketers mixed in with unsavory marketers too you think it was a coincidence the internet saw a billion “get a free i-pod” promotions, which in turn got tons of high schoolers, or anyone else with limited cash talking? Apple coulda shut down those spamverts but I wonder why they didn’t… Why not have someone else spam your product for you?