The Halo Effect
Many have claimed that Apple’s recent stock performance is largely due to the amazing popularity of their ubiquitous iPods and the “Halo Effect” this is having as people purchase Macs to go with their music players. I’m no economist but I should have known something was up when my dad bought himself an iPod a couple of Christmases ago (oh if I would have picked up some Apple shares then!) I held out - sure, iPods are trendy and lots of my friends have them but I just didn’t listen to enough music to justify the cost. Well, today I broke down and joined the masses.
Am I a sheep? I don’t think so, but I’m happy to be in the flock as it were. If there is such a thing as the “Halo Effect” I think I’m part of it but not in the way you would expect. You see, a few months back I bought a 15″ PowerBook. I’ll write more about why I switched soon but frankly, that purchase spurred me on to get an iPod. I suppose that’s backwards, but then most of the things I do are!
Of course the “real” reason I bought an iPod had to do with photos (I bought a 20 GB now that they are all color) more specifically our upcoming trip to Spain. While I have a 512 MB chip for our nifty digital camera, I didn’t want to deal with deleting photos or shooting at lower resolutions. Sure, I could have just purchased more memory cards but what fun would that be? Anyway, I’ll let you (yes, all two of you) know what I think as I start to play with this new toy but so far so good! That said, the ear buds aren’t so great - if you have any advice on good replacements (that don’t cost more than the iPod itself) I’m all ears!
August 23rd, 2005 at 9:34 am
Congrats on the purchase of your iPod. I’ve been resisting (though craving one). In the end, I really only listen to music while working on my PC. So really, my laptop is my iPod.
Hey… I’d love to hear more about your experiences with your PowerBook! Do you use it for any development?
August 23rd, 2005 at 7:41 pm
Hey John - I’ve got a whole entry coming about why I switched and yes, i do some development work on it. For those of you that haven’t tried NetBeans lately, you really need to… Honeslty, given the choice, I would take an OS X machine for development over anything else (unless of course, I had to do .NET stuff!) Anyway, my “Why a Mac” entry is coming, I promise!
August 25th, 2005 at 10:06 pm
I’m still waiting for a day when I can just run into Best Buy and buy OS X and run it on my PC. I promise its not that far away.
It’s simply a matter of economics. Apple has made the price of entry into their world so much higher than say Windows to Linux, that its not practical for most people to make the switch. Instead of costing me $150 to try out OS X, it will cost me over $1000 because I have to buy the computer too. For cheapskates like me that will take me a while to get in to. I’ll let you know when I get one!
August 29th, 2005 at 9:37 pm
Yeah, I’m not sure - we’ll see. I’m not so sure Apple is keen on selling an extra hundred thousand copies of OS X. Of course I’d argue that, at least with my PowerBook, and extra I paid was worth it and I can only think that Intel based machines would be cheaper… You could argue that Apple is really a consumer electronics company these days with the iPod making up such a large share of the revenue.
October 31st, 2005 at 8:38 pm
[…] It always happens doesn’t it? You buy some new-fangled gadget and a week later out comes a cheaper, faster, bigger, prettier gadget. Sigh. Back in late August I broke down and bought an iPod - mostly for our trip to Spain - and now we have video iPods. When I first heard rumors about watching a movie or TV show on an iPod, I had to admit I was skeptical. Well, I guess I should know better than to do doubt - Apple has sold more than a million videos in less than 20 days despite a rather limited content. […]
November 10th, 2005 at 7:44 pm
[…] Back in late August, they launched a podcast. Now, I’ll admit, I was late to this whole iPod thing but I have to tell you, I find podcasts really interesting. Heck, they *almost* make me wish for a Californian style commute so I could actually keep up with all the great podcasts out there. I’m currently “reading” an audiobook and I have to tell you, I find myself gravitating to podcasts… […]
February 23rd, 2006 at 8:29 pm
[…] I’ve written about my iPod before and I have to admit…I really like it. Frankly, I don’t listen to that much music but I’m digging podcasts especially while I’m working out. I used to try to read a book or a magazine but never again - it’s just much easier to listen to something and with the quality of the podcasts out there I can learn a ton. Anyway, two of my favorite blogs commented on iPods and the Olympics and I just had to chime in. First, Clive Thompson, over at collision detection posted Do iPods help Olympic athletes perform better? where he points to an article from the Baltimore Sun. A little while later I ran into Kathy Sierra’s post iPods increase performance? which talks about the same article but also references this New York Times piece (interestingly, Clive and Kathy posted within 20 minutes of each other). […]