Reception and Impact
The iPod Shuffle was announced at the same time as the Mac Mini. Like the iPod Shuffle, the Mac Mini is a scaled-down product which has been introduced at a lower price. These two products together can be seen as a conscious effort on the part of Apple management to target a lower-end market and increase visibility in the mass-market. Previously, the success of Apple's iPod and especially the iPod Mini had been chipping away at the inexpensive flash player market, causing flash players at the beginning of 2005 to account for less than half the market share they did in 2004. However, the original and Mini iPods were costly and the Shuffle was intended to make the iPod compete with mainstream players.
By April 2005, the end of Apple's second fiscal quarter, the iPod Shuffle had already proven itself to be a successful product for its manufacturer. Although Apple has chosen not to specify how many iPod Shuffles were sold in the product's first three months of existence, analysts at Piper Jaffray estimated that 1.8 million of the 5.3 million iPods sold in the second quarter were Shuffles. NPD Group estimates that the iPod Shuffle captured 43% of the flash-based music player market in February 2005, after only its second month of existence. By March 2005 the iPod Shuffle's market share had risen to 58%.
In September 2006, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced during his keynote presentation on the "It's Showtime" Special Event, that until then, Apple had sold 10 million first generation iPod Shuffles.
Read more about this topic: IPod Shuffle
Famous quotes containing the words reception and/or impact:
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)