I ran across an interesting commentary from Peter Burrows at Business Week Online, where he posed the question “did Jobs kill the iPod mini too soon?” It’s a fair question. In terms of traditional marketing and the product lifecycle, I’d say that the Mini was going strong somewhere between the introduction to growth phase of the cycle.
Perhaps our search term data might shed some light on the question:

From the chart above we can see that indeed, “ipod mini” queries were in the ramp or introduction/growth phase before being discontinued. I can’t think of a better indication of product demand (other than actual revenue numbers) than to examine what Internet users are entering into search engines.
So what’s happening to the existing demand for “ipod mini” queries? Using Hitwise Search Term Analysis we discover the following:

Interestingly, www.apple.com is the number one site receiving traffic on the term “ipod mini” at over 17%. If you try searching for “ipod mini” on Google, clicking on that listing will direct you to the iPod Nano page.