In an embarrassing public-relations glitch, Apple on Wednesday admitted a flaw in its new iPod nano music players, saying that a small number of units have screens that could crack easily.
The announcement sent shares of the company down by about 5% at one point on Wednesday when they touched $50,70 from $53,44.
The development came just two weeks after the company released the new music players, which it hopes will dominate the music-player market in the upcoming holiday season.
”This is a real but minor issue that involved a vendor quality problem in a small number of units,” said Apple spokesperson Tom Neumayr. ”This has affected less than one-10th of 1% of the total iPod Nano units that we’ve shipped. And it’s not a design issue.”
While the company admitted that a single production batch had the faulty screens, it dismissed customer complaints that all have screens that scratch easily and advised users to buy a protective cover for their music players.
Apple released the iPod nano on September 7. The music player uses flash memory and can hold up to 1 000 songs in its four-gigabyte version. The company sees the nano as a replacement for its bestselling iPod mini, which uses a hard-disk drive for storing music and data. — Sapa-DPA