

Steve Jobs Snipes at Amazon, Praises Ice Cream - raghus
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/in-qa-steve-jobs-snipes-at-amazon-and-praises-ice-cream/

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e1ven
This is interesting because we see Jobs' answers to the two big questions
which I saw coming out of the event- Why not Camera on the iPod touch, and why
no stills on the nano.

The answer comes down to price on the iPod touch- They really really wanted to
get under $199, and didn't feel they could do that with a Camera. On the Nano,
they couldn't fit the lens needed for the autofocus.

.

You put a camcorder on the iPod Nano. Why not on the iPod Touch? A.

Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone
without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers
told us was, they started to see it as a game machine. Because a lot of the
games were free on the store. Customers started to tell us, “You don’t know
what you’ve got here — it’s a great game machine, with the multitouch screen,
the accelerometer, and so on.”

We started to market it that way, and it just took off. And now what we really
see is it’s the lowest-cost way to the App Store, and that’s the big draw. So
what we were focused on is just reducing the price to $199. We don’t need to
add new stuff — we need to get the price down where everyone can afford it. Q.

How come the Nano can now record video, but can’t take stills? A.

The sensors for doing video are fairly thin. The sensors for doing a still
camera, at much higher pixel resolution — and we’d really like to have
autofocus — they are just way too thick to ever fit inside the Nano.

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allenbrunson
i wouldn't say he "snipes" at amazon. he's just making a point that he thinks
there's isn't much of a market for single-purpose book-viewing devices, and
using amazon as an example.

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iterationx
linus once made the point that once a device has a processor, people will want
to turn it into a full computer.

