The 13-year-old and I are having a philosophical disagreement: "You mean there is no way I can have an iPod for my birthday?"

"Yes."

"That's so unfair," (shooting withering look of injustice). "Don't you realise I want one more than anything else - I'd even give up having a mobile to have one?"

"Yes, I know. But $350 is an insane amount of money to spend on a birthday present."

"No it's not, and you can get them for $320."

"I'm sorry, but that's still a ridiculous price. Just wait a while, the prices will come down."

"How long? you've been saying that for ever."

"Six months, maybe a year."

"A year! You're such a retard." (Storms off, door slams.)

She has a point. I have been saying prices will come down ever since the iPod was introduced in 2001. Since then, about 15 million have sold worldwide and while prices have dropped a bit, in reality they haven't fallen that much.

That's because iPod maker Apple has followed a masterful marketing strategy. First it created a winning product for a hot and hungry market where price doesn't seem to be a barrier. It was a spectacular success - capturing 30-per-cent market share in 2004 and harnessing the "Kleenex effect" - where consumers now see iPod as synonymous for portable digital music player.

Next Apple employed the versioning tactic - creating several different iterations of the product for different market segments. The result is that today one can buy iPods of various sizes and capabilities starting at about $175 and finishing at about $775.

My daughter sees all this as proof that prices have fallen, and she figures something around the $300 mark is quite acceptable. She's looking longingly at the four-gigabyte (GB) disk drive Mini.

We have discussed the lower-cost memory options. But these have less storage - just 512 kilobytes (KB) at the entry cost level - and less features. We both agree the 1GB Shuffle might be acceptable in storage terms, with about 16 hours of MP3 encoded songs, but at around $270 it's still to my mind horrendously expensive. And compared to about $320 for the Mini, the Shuffle doesn't add up.

Ditto for the competition, such as Creative's 1GB MuVo, which sports an FM tuner and LCD display - both lacking on the Shuffle - but it still costs around $300. I have to concur with Monika also that the Shuffle's aesthetics are way ahead of the rest of the field. The MuVo is butt ugly.