Tuesday, Apple released the ipod, their futuristic, small, stylish mp3 player. The only problem seems to be the price. The little machine is packed full of ease of use and stylish exterior and ground breaking technology, but is it only for those with deep pockets?

If you read any of the reviews on the ipod the main question asked is why so much. Would you as a consumer pay the luxury-like cost of $599 ($399 USD) for a revved up mp3 player? Although the Canadian economy is doing slightly better than the American economy, most people still do not have the money to buy a device that is this expensive even if it is extremely cool. There are plenty of mp3 players out there that do the same thing and have a much larger disk capacity for a cheaper retail price. Nevertheless, is there more to the ipod? Yes there is.

At first glance, the ipod is just an mp3 player. However, if you look more closely you will see that it is more than that. First off, it is a very fast mp3 player. Apple is promoting the fact that when using firewire there is no wait time to transfer music from your computer to the ipod internal disk. In addition, many users are stoked at the fact that the ipod doubles as a portable firewire disk. Although this may not be what most people need in a portable device and there are a lot of cheaper firewire drives out there, none of them can play music. The fact that the ipod doubles as a portable firewire drive allows users to quickly transfer music and personal files to the ipod for easy transfers between machines. Apparently, the ipod can also be used as a bootable drive and you can install applications on it too. AppleÕs own ipod page states that you can install either OS9 or OSX on the ipod and boot your local machine from it. All these features make the ipod an intriguing machine, but is apple just packaging another setback with a cube like pricing scheme.

We all remember the cube fiasco and as a lot of you know, Apple is being constantly reminded of it with a lawsuit as we speak. The cube was nice looking and an engineering feat, but it did not warrant such a hefty price tag. Many Mac users are skeptical that this new ipod is going the same route as the cube. Strangely enough at the same time, a lot of PC heads are giving the ipod a lot of praise even though the ipod is not cross platform compatible. Apple has stated that it will be windows compatible within a year but who are we kidding, there will be many copies out there by that time at cheaper costs than the ipod. But is there more to this story?

Some people are hailing Steve Jobs as the marketing king again with this announcement. Although the ipod is high priced (Apple obviously can not afford to take a loss at this time) it is causing a hell of an uproar in the computing world and thus, driving more people to the newly opened Apple stores to see one. All this extra attention is sure to put the Mac in the spotlight for some time and hopefully as I am sure Steve has already planned for, increase Macintosh sales in the coming Christmas season.
What do you think?
AG