New Mini iPODs

su_dios

Ok I've gone through quite a few ipods and I'm now settled on my ipod mini which has had no problems now for a good 10months and I love it, but my gf just bought one of the new mini ipods in the us last week and apple have really done a microsoft on it! They no longer come with wall chargers??..and she only got a usb2 cable! Now if I was thinking about buying an mp3 player now I would definitely go for the zen micro beacuse of this. I have never used my usb cable..always use my firewire, and I rarely charge it from my laptop. The price difference of the new 4 gb and old 4gb is due to the fact that they upgraded the specs of ipods, but that shouldn't mean that they have to screw customers over. Anyone else notice this?

Clank

No wall charger?the shop ripped you off hard luck, theyre still given with all iPods.

On the USB, all iPods have moved over to USB now no more Firewire, it still works but the standard cable has switched to USB.
Personally I still use Firewire.

Goldstein

You didn't get ripped off, chargers don't come with iPod minis anymore. That's what was behind the recent drop in price. Personally I think it was a pity to stop including Firewire cables with all iPods but I suppose they reasoned that while everyone has USB of some sort, not everyone has a Firewire port. So ditch the Firewire cable and drop the price a bit, from a business point of view it makes sense.

For the same reason they stopped including chargers with iPod minis. I think that however, was a definite mistake. Aside from the fact that you should (where possible) charge your iPod with the A/C adapter anyway, to preserve long term battery life, having to have a computer present and turned on to charge your iPod mini is unacceptably constraining. That's taking cost cutting a step too far I think. Achieving a lower price is only a good idea as long as the consumer is still getting all the essentials (Ignoring for a moment the poor quality white earphones), and I think the charger is an essential, not an extra. Docks are no longer included in the high capacity iPods either - much less serious but also indicative of the approach Apple have adopted recently.

I did some tests moving about 8 Gigs of music onto my iPod using USB2 then cleared them and did the same thing via Firewire, Firewire was significantly faster even though USB2 is faster on paper. I'll be sticking with my Firewire.

Clank

Oh sorry, i was almost certain they were in 4GB minis, obviously not 6GB.

On the subject of docks though, they werent really needed, they were a luxury, IMHO.