Data Circle

Apple Sells Out of 1GB iPod Shuffle via Beta News

Apple’s stock of 1Gb iPod Shuffles has sold out just before Christmas, including at third party resellers and stores such as Amazon. At first this might not seem too unusual, after all such products make popular Christmas presents and I’m sure Apple shareholders will be happy to see them flying off the shelves so quickly. However, it appears that no extra 1Gb shuffles will be available until January, which just happens to coincide with the Macworld show in San Francisco. Apple generally uses Macworld to make new product announcements, amongst other things, and for the last couple of years the headline grabber has been something new to do with iPods. Could it be that there is another variation of the best selling MP3 player just around the corner?

Personally I’m not too sure whether this shortage in supply is a good indicator that an iPod product announcement is imminent. It’s not uncommon for popular electronic goods to sell out in the run up to Christmas, and there’s rarely time to manufacture and ship more if demand happens to exceed supply. In many ways, it’s often in the interests of businesses for product supply to fall a bit short of demand, because that generates a lot of hype about the product and also, in theory at least, creates a rise in price (I knew that A level in Economics would come in handy some day). The fact that Macworld happens to be around the corner might not be as significant as the Apple fans would like to make out – most industries supplying consumer products suffer a quiet period in January and February, so Macworld could be just a way of keeping customers interested when they find themselves with empty wallets after Christmas.

On the other hand, it does seem a bit too much of a coincidence that the two events will be occurring within such a short space of time. It’s a year since the iPod Shuffle was released and in terms of age it’s the model that’s gone the longest without a product refresh (in the meantime we’ve had the Video iPod and the Nano), so perhaps Apple has something new in the works. As with any potential Apple product release/update, there are a lot of rumours doing the rounds, but the only ones that I see as having any substance are the option of different colours for the shuffle (presumably this wouldn’t be too hard to implement on the manufacturing side) or a reduction in the form factor to produce an even smaller iPod. I can’t see the capacity being increased, because that would mean the shuffle was competing with the 2Gb nano.

Macworld 2006 is going to be held on the 9th-13th of January, so we shall see then what Steve Jobs has in store for us. Unfortunately I can’t afford to go to San Francisco to watch the event, nor do I qualify as a media analyst for the purposes of getting in that way, so I’ll probably be watching the live webcast with most other people.