So far at Apple’s media event, the company has touted its 30,000,000 iPhone sales figures, 1.8 billion apps downloads, 75,000 apps available, iTunes 9, 100 million accounts with credit cards, 8.5 billion songs sold, Home media sharing and more. One notable announcement is the current estimated share that Apple’s iPod music players have of the MP3 player market.
As things stand, Apple says it has 73.8 percent of the market, followed by 18 percent held by “other”, SanDisk at 7.2 percent and Microsoft at 1.1 percent share. Apple’s own data shows that 50 percent of new iPod sales are to new customers (didn’t previously own one) and the total number of iPod sales is closing in on 225 million units.
The fastest growing model is the iPod Touch, which has sold over 20 million units since it was unveiled two years ago by the company. This means that 40 percent of the “iPhone platform” is accounted for with the iPod Touch (20 million sales for Touch, 30 million sales for iPhone).
Apple quoted BusinessWeek as saying, “Apple could be on the cusp of claiming the crown as the world’s leading in pocket gaming,”, referring to the use of an iPod Touch as a portable games device. To emphasize the company’s point further, it touted that the PlayStation Portable has 607 games available, the Nintendo DS has 3,680 games available, and the prices of the games for both platforms are easily higher than games sold at App Store.
It then went on to point out that technically, 21,178 games are now available from the App Store.
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Result for: music players
Sandisk has added a new model to their Sansa Clip line of MP3 players. This new addition features 8GB of storage and will have a MSRP of $99.99. It joins existing models with 2GB and 4GB capacity which retail for $39.99 and $59.99 respectively.
The Sansa Clip is a line of small flash-based music portable music players. It’s small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. It weights less than an ounce and is designed to be clipped to clothing, a backpack, or a purse.
Audio formats supported include MP3, WMA, and WAV. They also feature a built in voice recorder and FM tuner.
Result for: music players
Norway’s Consumer Ombudsman Bjoern Erik Thon is keeping his pledge to put more pressure on Apple to cut the DRM tie between its iPod models and music downloads from the iTunes download store. The consumer mediator gave Apple a November 3rd deadline back in September this year, and now that the deadline has passed without Apple making enough effort (in the Ombudsman’s opinion), it may face being brought before a government agency.
“iTunes has shown a lacking will to comply with our demand and we are now preparing to try this case in the Market Council,” Consumer Ombudsman Bjoern Erik Thon said in a statement. Back in 2006, Norway was among the world’s first countries to take issue with Apple’s FairPlay DRM, which while protecting music, also created a tie between hardware made by Apple and digital downloads it sells.
Apple responded to the pressure by providing certain information to its customers including a workaround that includes burning copy protected music to a CD with iTunes and then ripping to standard unprotected digital audio, which will work with pretty much all MP3 players on the market.
“iTunes maintains its previous views in its response to the Consumer Ombudsman. The company is in other words unwilling to make changes to make music in the iTunes Store available to all music players,” the agency said in its statement. Whether or not Apple will cave to the pressure remains to be seen.
