Apple is apparently set to sell about 4 million iPods per month in the last quarter of 2005, breaking all records. The iPod has crushed the competition in Japan by capturing 60% of the marketplace, with Sony a huge loser. And more than 73 million cars will be manufactured in 2006 as "ready for iPod."
But wait, there's more! The market for iPod accesories continues to grow so fast that it is really difficult to keep up. I just stumbled onto this "accessory," which is a set of high fidelity headphones with an iPod dock built in. You drop your iPod nano into the dock, put the headphones on, and you can listen to your entire music collection of thousands of songs--no wires, no base station, no nothing. It's a wearable stereo system.
My first stereo system cost as much as an iPod nano, weighed about forty pounds, including two speakers, and played about six songs at a time--what would fit on one side of a vinyl LP. And it required AC power--lots of it.