The Results

Here’s how I did.
Apple two days ago introduced the iPod mini, a business-card sized, 0.5-inch thick, 4 GB version of the popular iPod mp3 player.
I really only made a single prediction, and that was on the price of the device, which I expected to be higher than the original analyst-consensus of $100, as well as higher than the later street-consensus of $150. Well, it was higher than that. Weighing in at $249, it was higher than my $200 prediction, too.
But here’s something I didn’t expect: by combining the iPod’s operational buttons with the scroll-wheel, Apple essentially preserved the much-lauded iPod user-interface in the iPod mini, but smaller.
Right now, the general consensus is that the device is far too close in price to the 15 GB iPod, which is just $50 more. But as Daring Fireball points out, it takes a lot of money to miniaturize products which are already small. And they’re betting there’s a lot of people out there who’d love to have an iPod, but just figure it’s too heavy/too large to carry around.
While I’ve got no problem carrying around my brand new 40 GB iPod (woohoo!!), Kai’s first comment was, “Wow, so heavy!” (for the record, she was shocked it held 40 GB). 🙂 So…. at least from my experience — Daring Fireball’s assertion is correct.