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August 07, 2004

Any colour you like, as long as it's not silver, pink or blue

Oh, yes, I forgot to mention in the middle of all the networking that I had a tiny little accident in Micro Anvika while buying my base station. "Ooh, is that an iPod mini?" I said incautiously, assuming they wouldn't have any to sell. "Lovely, isn't it?" "You want one, don't you?" said the salesman. "We have green or gold to take away now." Ooh.

So I'm now the proud owner of a green iPod mini; and when I plugged in the firewire cable, the icon that appeared on the desktop was green to match. I had wavered slightly on seeing the store model of pink; as reported around the place, it's not a grim hello-kitty pink at all, but a really cool strong purplish pink. There's a long waiting list for pink. But my desire for instant gratification kicked in, and the green's good too.

My old iPod looks just exactly like a radiogram now.

But here's the thing. I know Micro Anvika are a big reseller, and it was that busy after-work-but-before-closing time. Nevertheless, they were basically shifting iPods out of that shop just about as fast as they could get them off the shelves. Third-gen iPods, now discounted. Fourth-gen iPods all new and shiny, with a click wheel and loads of space for only pennies more than the mini. iPod Minis in less popular colours to impulse buyers like me, and in more popular colours to names being checked off a list. They must have shifted a couple of dozen just while I was in the store. Is this happening everywhere?

Posted by Alison at August 7, 2004 10:39 PM

Comments

Hell, it was happening a year ago when I was working retail at CompUsa. We couldn't keep the things in stock more than a day or two. We'd get in fifty, and they'd be gone the next day or two; we never did not have waiting lists.

Again, that was in August of 2003. I know demand has only shot *up*.

(The downside of the third and 2nd gens, though -- I can't speak about the minis or 4ths -- is that they broke really easily and commonly if you dropped it. And a noticable number simply stopped working for no visible reason. Not a huge number. Not a drastic number. But a noticable number.

Posted by: Gary Farber at August 11, 2004 05:09 AM

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