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Apple Shares Affected by iPod nano Lawsuit

The iPod nano and its sensitive display caused the lawsuit, and Apple Computer Co Inc's share-price drop.

The FTCR (Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights) asks Apple to replace iPods with unreadable screens caused by easy-to-scratch materials.

The attorney who filed the latest complaint, told the San Francisco Chronicle:

"This is marketed as a beautiful, sleek device, which it is, but that feature is completely gone after a few weeks of using it. If Steve Jobs can pull it out of his pocket, we should be able to pull it out of our pockets without it being ruined."

Starting late 2005, filings against Apple (on the same subject of fragile materials used in the production of the iPod nanos) came from California, New York, New Jersey and Louisiana as well as Montreal and Ontario in Canada, though some experts say that there is no difference between the nano and regular iPods' casing.

iPod nano is Apple's fourth digital audio player, replacing the iPod mini. The iPod nano's is 1.6 inches (40 mm) wide, 3.5 inches (90 mm) long, .27 inches (6.9 mm) thick and weighs 1.5 ounces (42 grams). It provides up to 14 hours of music playback or up to 4 hours of slideshows with music. The display is an 1.5-inch color LCD with LED backlight.

Cupertino-based Apple fitted it with a Dock connector and a stereo minijack. It charges in about 3 hours (1.5-hour fast charge to 80%capacity). iPod is supporting AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), Protected AAC (from iTunes Music Store), MP3 (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 2, 3 and 4), Apple Lossless, WAV, AIFF, as well as photos in JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, PSD (Mac only) and PNG formats.

The iPod nano uses flash memory instead of a hard disk. As a result, it has no moving parts, making it immune to skipping and far more durable than disk-based players technology-wise.

History

Development of the iPod grew out of Apple's digital hub strategy, as the company was creating software applications for the growing number of digital devices being snapped up by consumers. While digital cameras, camcorders and organizers had well-established markets, the company found digital music players lacking in quality and Apple decided to develop its own.

Apple's Hardware engineering chief Jon Rubinstein assembled a team of engineers to design and build the first iPod in less than a year, with Tony Fadell and Michael Dhuey as the principal hardware engineers. It was unveiled by CEO Steve Jobs on October 23, 2001 as a Mac-compatible product with a 5GB hard drive that put "1,000 songs in your pocket."

In 2002, Apple released the second-generation iPod in two versions, one for Mac users and one for Windows users. The only difference though was the bundled software, since there was no iTunes for Windows at the time, the Windows iPods came packaged with Musicmatch software. The actual iPods could work with either system (though to work with Windows, they had to use the FAT32 filesystem, Mac iPods could use either the FAT32 or HFS Plus filesystem).

In 2003, Apple released third-generation iPods that included a single CD that included a Windows version of the iTunes software along with the Mac version. As of October 2004, iPod dominated digital music player sales in the United States, with over 90% of the market for hard-drive-based players and over 70% of the market for all types of players. The iPod has sold at a tremendous rate, now past 42 million units since its release. Apple and several industry analysts have posited that the iPod has a "halo effect", encouraging users of non-Apple products to switch to other Apple products, such as to Macintosh computers.