Rumours, even covered by Reuters, are growing about a new, lower cost addition to the super successful Apple iPod range. Thoughts are that Apple CEO Steve Jobs will announce the so-called “Mini iPod” during his keynote speech at Macworld Expo on 6 January.
Pundits are guessing that they will have a capacity of between 2 and 4Gb and will cost from $100, and are designed to take on the lower-end MP3 players from Creative and Rio.
Most speculators think that the players 400-500 song storage will be based on Flash-memory, but we suspect that could contain tiny 1-inch mini-hard drives, or microdrives. Hitachi have already announced their intention to bring out 4Gb drives by the end of 2003 which uses their fantastically named, patented “Pixie Dust” media technology.