Continued...

SanDisk makes the mistake of assuming that people are comparing prices when ultimately making the decision to purchase an iPod. That’s not the case. Tying back to my first point, iPod is a viral device, and therefore, it’s one of the few devices that people are willing to pay for, regardless of how ridiculous the price may be.

I sure hope SanDisk isn’t banking on audio quality (now that price is out of the question) to use as a marketing vehicle. Let me tell you something. A good portion of people are perfectly satisfied with default earphones and headphones they get with music players. As someone who has tested these out-of-the-box instruments, I can confirm their ridiculously substandard quality and would always recommend buyers to throw them out as soon as they purchase a half decent music player. They don’t warrant any attention whatsoever. Keeping this in mind, quality will probably be the last thing, if at all, on the mind of mainstream buyers. It’s the coolness that matters.

While I would love to give SanDisk credit for doubling its onboard storage, it’s not going to matter at all. In reality, no one is going to opt for the Sansa just because it can store twice as many songs as the iPod. 1,000 songs are good enough to keep many people going for days without ever feeling the need to update their music library. So whether it’s 1,000 or 2,000, it won’t matter one bit.

With that, I have stomped on SanDisk’s three main selling points: price, storage and quality. Hopefully, by the end of this column, we have all realized that, while things sound rosier on surface, they just aren’t enough for SanDisk to grab a significant portion of Apple pie. Besides, it’s better to think about maintaining its market position than gaining a few percentages for a quarter or two and later getting squashed by Microsoft Zune (SanDisk didn’t forget to tally Microsoft into the equation, did it?). Talk about a moral letdown.