Apple to Flip Off Cisco With New iPods
by John Paczkowski
Posted on July 23, 2009 at 12:53 PM PT
Cisco’s acquisition of Pure Digital, developer of the Flip digital video camera, may prove an ill-timed one. For while the Flip currently dominates the market that it largely created, it’s about to be taken to the mat by a new and formidable rival: Apple.
In a research note issued this week, Canaccord analyst Peter Misek speculates that Apple (AAPL), which recently debuted an iPhone capable of shooting and editing video, plans to bring the same functionality to the iPod.
“We believe Apple is now targeting to enter the low-end camcorder market by adding this functionality into its iPod lineup,” he writes. “…We believe Apple will unveil various iPod versions with camcorder functionality. We believe this will drive sales not only for traditional MP3 players, but as a new competitive dynamic to the lower end camcorder market that is now dominated by Flip line of digital camcorders.”
Misek sees such a move giving a nice boost to iPod sales, which, as Apple revealed earlier this week, have been declining a bit. “On anticipation of this we have markedly raised our iPod growth assumptions and have raised our iPod shipment forecast from 50 million to 65 million units.”
And what of Cisco (CSCO)? What would the transformation of the iPod into a point-and-shoot camcorder mean for the Flip? Certainly not good things. Who’d want to carry two devices for music and video capture when they could carry just one?
Comments
Anecdotal evidence of the “one device” theory.
Our family owns 4 cameras.
1. Canon 300D with $1500 worth of lenses.
2. Canon Powershot A570.
3. iPhone 3G
4. Samsung A650 phone
Only one of these cameras is used a lot. The iPhone of course.
The 300D is just too big to cart around.
The PowerShot takes much better photos than the iPhone, but it is larger than the iPhone.
The Samsung is never used because it costs money to get the photos from the camera to my computer and because I would have to re-read the instruction book.
The iPhone’s picture quality is: good enough.
The iPhone is small enough to carry all the time.
Transferring photos to the computer is trivial both in time and money.
In the medium run (2-4 years) all low/lower-end cameras (still and video), navigation devices, music players, audio recorders will be replaced by the iPhone and its rivals.
Only Moleskine will survive the onslaught.
Posted by Dave Barnes at July 23rd, 2009 at 3:04 pm