New iPods

OK, so here’s what Apple announced today, iPod-wise:

The new Nano is short, fat and ugly.  It’s essentially a slightly larger Shuffle with a screen, and it plays video, etc.  No likey.  iPod Classic...now we’re talking.  Still hard-drive based, sorry Flash fans.  Flash memory is still a little too expensive for devices with this kind of storage capacity.  The new “Classic” has 80GB and - in an announcement that make me drool with lust - 160GB.  One hundred and sixty gigabytes of storage.  Can we say lossless?  I knew we could.  $349 for the 160, and I gotta tell you I am insanely tempted even though I just got my 5.5G iPod last year.  I won’t buy it, but it’s nice to know it’s there.  In case I hit the lottery.

The third one is the Flash-based iPod Touch.  Think iPhone, only no phone.  It does have Wi-Fi and Safari, so you can browse the web?  Cool, I guess, but very limited in storage for now.  8GB and 16GB, $299 and $399 respectively.  Obviously this is the future of all larger iPods, as soon as Flash RAM gets down in price to where hard drives are.

The other things announced were new colors for the Shuffle (Jody!  Purple!), as well as the elimination of the 4GB iPhone.  Also, the 8GB iPhone gets a $200 price drop.  Also, a Wi-Fi iTunes Music Store for all the Wi-Fi-enabled iPods.  That’s kind of cool.  iPhone people can finally use tracks as ringtones, for an extra 99 cents.  About a half-million select songs will let you pay 99 extra cents on top of the cost of the track, then make your own ringtone out of it.

Ringtones are a total fucking scam.  I can’t believe how much money gets made.  I make my own for my Verizon phone running the Brew OS.  It’s not that hard.  There’s already hacks to do it for the iPhone as well.  Learn to roll your own, peoples!

All in all, today seems like kind of a placeholder, get-those-Christmas-dollars kind of thing.  Nothing really revolutionary, and one god-awful design change (that new Nano is terrible) but some solid products.  If you have an aging iPod or need more space, or really want the touch screen and Coverflow...now’s your chance.

By the way, iTunes for Windows is almost tolerable now.  That last update improved performance a bit.  Not enough to call it good, but enough that I don’t swear at it every 14 seconds.  Since new iPods mean a new iTunes will be (or maybe already is - yup, it is) available...here’s to hoping they don’t screw it up.

Posted by JimK at 03:48 PM on September 05, 2007
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Categories: Technobabble (Technology)
Tags: ipod itunes apple