(Column) - Apple Computer is making an absolute killing with its ultra small iPod Nano. How good is the bounty you ask? Well, Apple is shipping about 100,000 units of the iPod Nano alone. Pretty impressive figure for a year, right? Think again, because Apple is shipping this many units every single day.

The situation is so ridiculously delightful for Apple that it has partnered with Synaptics to help make the Clickwheel as well, since Apple itself is not able to meet demand.

This has prompted Apple to perhaps consider 1GB variants of the Nano and rightfully so. The reason being is that despite all the hoopla about the scratches, people do indeed fancy the Nano for its sexiness. The other rumor doing the rounds is that Apple will drop the price of its iPod Shuffle to $80 for the 512MB variant. We might just see the iPod Shuffle being priced at $80 and $129 (for 1GB) while the Nano will sell for $149 for the 1GB edition. It has been fairly obvious that people are always willing to pay for the style and not necessarily the features (notably the Nokia 8800).

Apple could in fact pull a fast one on all of us and discontinue the Shuffle 1GB altogether and replace it with the 1GB Nano. I wouldn’t be surprised, to be honest, as it possibly makes sense. Users prefer a player with a screen, as I most certainly do and I’ll take a MobiBLU DAH-1500i any day over a Shuffle. But I’ll most certainly leave the MobiBLU for the iPod Nano. This is exactly the kind of thing Apple could be mulling over (Credit: Apple Insider).

If Apple wants to sell both, the Nano and the Shuffle, it would need to definitely make a price point difference between the two, or else the Shuffle doesn’t stand a chance.

I don’t really know what the newly designed iPod Shuffle looks like, but for all we know, they could just be a lower capacity iPod Nano.

The funny thing here is that the Nano has been such a big hit. One would expect that with all the noise everyone made about the scratch issue and the lack of a working protection case that the Nano might just stall in terms of sales, but apparently Apple has too much of an iconic image for that to happen.

Needless to say, 2006 will be a rather successful year for Apple. It’s already sold out of its 1GB iPod Shuffle, it’s selling 100,000 iPod Nano units per day, and of course, with the Intel Yonah based Apple notebooks debuting in the second week of January, Apple shows no sign of slowing down.