Steve, your points re the MPTrip are well made and if enough of these are available at that price I certainly agree with you that flash based systems will have a chunk taken out of their market. No sign of them or anything similar here in the UK as yet, at anything near that price.
However, given that you can buy CD players today for about $30 there is obviously still some reason for people to buy a solid state player. After all, people must be choosing to buy $50 to $150 solid state plaayers when they could already play their own CD's on a $30 player.(Or record their own CD's from MP3 for $1 using your argument). And its no more hassle to take 5 CDs away with you than 1 if you take them out of the boxes.
So, in spite of your argumnent about the finances and the length of music you get, the great unwashed public dont appear to be making that analysis. Instead it may be more along the lines of "Way cool man, look how small it is, I'll buy one. What does it do?"
Secondly , re your comment that Flash memory MP3 players just allow people to do the same thing they can do with other types of MP3 players.
You could apply pretty much the same argument to CD vs LP, especially for the first 15? years of the CD when you couldnt record your own and MP3 wasnt even a twinkle in Shawn Fanning's eye. Yet I have no LPs, my record deck is in the attic, and I have pretty much every LP I ever bought now on CD. (and as an aside I dont recall the music industry selling them to me for a $1 each on the grounds I already bought the right to listen to the music when I bought the vinyl :-)
Tw |
