Can Apple get iPod users to buy iPhones?
The market for MP3 players has been shrinking and is expected to keep doing so. The cell phone market keeps growing. How will Apple persuade all those iPod users to get an iPhone?
It seems that the trend points away from stand-alone music player and towards telephones that can also play music. Analyst Toni Sacconaghi at Bernstein Research thinks that Apple should be paying attention to this trend, and even help it along, by bringing out an iPhone that does not need a data plan. As reported in Fortune, Sacconaghi thinks that the mandatory $30 a month data plan required by the iPhone is keeping this migration from happening.
Sacconaghi believes that doing away with this part of the iPhone monthly cost would help the company keep those exiting iPod users in the Apple fold. He says “Apple’s more than 100 million iPod users give the company a huge opportunity to capture significant market share in the mobile device market, if it can successfully migrate these users to the iPhone. We note that these users would likely be very partial to migrating to an Apple offering, given their familiarity with iTunes and purchases of DRM encoded content.”
Of course, there is also another possibility: intelligent music players that can also make telephone calls. An app was just released by DeFi Mobile that will allow voice over Wi-Fi calls to be made from the iPod Touch, similar to using Skype but from a mobile device over Wi-Fi. That might make it possible to eliminate not only the data plan but the telephone plan as well, or at least significantly lower the price of mobile telephone service.
In truth, Sacconaghi may be missing the boat by further than that. We don’t need to move users from iPod to iPhone, or from somewhere else to the Touch. What Apple needs is a device, or a series of devices, that are highly mobile (like the iPod and iPhone) and which are capable of performing a number of mobile activities in a number of ways.
Both the iPod Touch and iPhone are at their heart computers. As the size of technology continues to shrink, and the power of portable computing continues to grow, there is no reason why Apple could not take the world by storm with an attack on the bleeding edge. Work towards a computer the size of an iPhone, with the capabilities of a MacBook Pro, obviously able to act as a telephone and a music player, with a series of accessories that allow it to act like a laptop.
That is where computing is going anyway. By getting there first, and by building on the considerable lead it enjoys with the Touch and the iPhone, Apple could lead the world into an entire new paradigm of portable computing.
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February 5th, 2009
I like your thinking. Only things stopping me from getting a touch are 1) no built in FM 2) No Replaceable battery 3) No microSD. In that order.
February 5th, 2009
I have a touch and love it.
I would like the micro SD and replacable battery also.
FM couldn’t care less.