Apple announces new iPod lineup

[|darc|]

New iPod interfaces.

iPod shuffles now available in many colors.
iPod nanos are now wide like iPods, but a lot shorter. Supports video.
iPod becomes "iPod Classic," now up to 160gb of storage space for $350.
iPod touch: iPhone without the phone support (includes wifi, safari, etc.) BUT ONLY FUCKING 16GB FUCK YOU APPLE I WANTED THIS SO BADLY BUT WITH FUCKING DECENT SPACE

[MulletMan13]

iPod touch: iPhone without the phone support (includes wifi, safari, etc.) BUT ONLY FUCKING 16GB FUCK YOU APPLE I WANTED THIS SO BADLY BUT WITH FUCKING DECENT SPACE

A hard drive based Touch iPod would be awful... thick, slow, and battery life would be shot to hell. If they could they would have done it, but the product would have failed before it even launched.

... and a 32 SSD is a ridiculous amount of money, so they went with the logical 16gb.

Do people not realize the limits of technology?

[anyways, go ahead and flame away]

[|darc|]

iPod touch: iPhone without the phone support (includes wifi, safari, etc.) BUT ONLY FUCKING 16GB FUCK YOU APPLE I WANTED THIS SO BADLY BUT WITH FUCKING DECENT SPACE

A hard drive based Touch iPod would be awful... thick, slow, and battery life would be shot to hell. If they could they would have done it, but the product would have failed before it even launched.

... and a 32 SSD is a ridiculous amount of money, so they went with the logical 16gb.

Do people not realize the limits of technology?

[anyways, go ahead and flame away]

Have you seen an iPod before? They're hard drive based, you know.
Most of the "touch" features wouldn't require storage access (at least immediately, so things could be cached) so I don't see how that would shoot the battery life to hell. Thick? Yes, but that would be something I'm willing to deal with. I doubt it would make it that much thicker, though. Slow? What? Most access to the hard drive is going to be during movies and music, which work fine on the iPod Classic, so I don't see how it's going to slow anything down. The thing has RAM, you know.

This "iPod touch" is too expensive for normal people, so it's going to be mostly gadget nerds who get it (most likely if it were cheap it would still be for gadget nerds, so that's OK) but gadget nerds also have lots of music and movies, and I'm assuming there's a big screen there so we can watch movies on it, but there's no space to put the goddamn movies. And come on, $400 8gb iPhone vs. $400 16gb iPod touch? The price points are too close.

There's an iPod model out there for everyone except me, pretty much.

[Deth2k7]

Wow.This is going to be interesting.Instead of getting a new iPod when my current one breaks/runs it course,maybe I'll get a Zune.

[MulletMan13]

iPod touch: iPhone without the phone support (includes wifi, safari, etc.) BUT ONLY FUCKING 16GB FUCK YOU APPLE I WANTED THIS SO BADLY BUT WITH FUCKING DECENT SPACE

A hard drive based Touch iPod would be awful... thick, slow, and battery life would be shot to hell. If they could they would have done it, but the product would have failed before it even launched.

... and a 32 SSD is a ridiculous amount of money, so they went with the logical 16gb.

Do people not realize the limits of technology?

[anyways, go ahead and flame away]

Have you seen an iPod before? They're hard drive based, you know.
Most of the "touch" features wouldn't require storage access (at least immediately, so things could be cached) so I don't see how that would shoot the battery life to hell. Thick? Yes, but that would be something I'm willing to deal with. I doubt it would make it that much thicker, though. Slow? What? Most access to the hard drive is going to be during movies and music, which work fine on the iPod Classic, so I don't see how it's going to slow anything down. The thing has RAM, you know.
.

Quit whining -- buy a different product then. The big sell of the touch is the full web browser, so it's more of a PDA than anything. The argument I see with full size iPods is that... you NEED to take your entire music library? Oh yea, because you listen to every single album you own. I'd vouch to say that the play count of over half your music is 0. Plus synching music is oh so fucking hard, it takes five minutes to swap out tracks if you want something new. Grow up.

Yeah, iPods are hard drive based. They play music and play videos based directly on PortalPlayers chip. The iPhone and in this case iPod Touch are essentially computers -- they run a FULL operating system ( if you really don't believe me ssh into an iPhone or check out one of the iPhone dev sites and look into it ), and in order to conserve battery life you'd have to save current state to RAM before putting it into energy saving "sleep" mode. Sure, it could be done but it definitely is not practical. Nearly everything about the Touch with hard drive would be feasible except for battery life. Without adding SIGNIFICANT bulk to it, you would maybe get 4 hours of usage... tops. You'd be recharging every day.

If they COULD make the product, they would have. But right now where things stand it is simply not feasible or practical. Plus nobody would buy a Rev. A product that you are describing, and at this point a lot of companies really wouldn't want to put one out for fear of fucking something up.

BTW nice touch in kicking me from IRC when somebody steps up to you.

Buy an Archos 160gb mp3 player that has WiFi in it... that should satisfy you...
If you're going to complain about something as worthless as this, good fucking luck.

And herald, what the hell.... you would buy a shittastic 30gb Zune for $200 when you could get an 80gb iPod for $250? Meh, I guess the choice is yours...

[DaMadFiddler]

Actually, I'm sort of with |darc| on this one.

I would have bought the iPod Touch today, right after the keynote, if it'd had a large-capacity drive in it. There are other devices that offer all the same features, such as the Archos 605, but what Apple really has going for it is UI design and integration. And since my home computer is a Mac, the integration would've been really nice.

I'm sure those of you who are regulars have seen (and are tired of) my rants about what I'd like from a handheld device, and why I haven't bought an MP3 player yet because it just didn't feel like the technology was quite ready, or everything left me wanting more for the price. Well, the iPod Touch looks to have that potential, if not for the storage. If/when it gains a notepad and an IM client (both perfectly feasible--and, depending on how similar it is to the iPhone, possibly easy ports of existing projects), this would actually be enough to get me to retire my aging Tapwave Zodiac.

As for dimensions: I understand the technical challenges of working a hard drive into something like this, but I don't buy the "it's not possible" argument. I present the above-linked Archos model as evidence. The Archos actually does everything the iPod Touch does, with a few additions: an SD slot, a 160GB hard drive, Opera browser with full Flash support, PDF reader, and DVR functionality (with an optional cradle unit), in a package that's about the same size and about the same price. The main draw for the iPod is that my home computing at this point has become pretty Mac-invested, so the iTunes/iPhoto/Address/Calendar integration is key. Especially since I'd be using this thing to replace my PDA. (And yes, yes, I *know* that isn't really what it was designed for).

I also agree that they've rather saturated their product lineup now, and that the price for these things puts them too close to the iPhone. Hopefully that will change over time.

One other issue of contention is the "do you really need your entire library?" question. Of course you don't need to take your entire library on the go. This is a personal choice from person to person, in terms of what they want and how much content they have. But a Discman costs 20 bucks. If I'm going to put down $300-$400 for a music player, you can be damn sure that I want to be able to use it as a portable version of my library.

My family and friends are actually rather scattered around the country, so it would be really nice to be able to take everything with me without hauling along the laptop or a giant CD/DVD wallet. And even though it doesn't take too terribly long each time...again, if I'm throwing down that much money, I'd really rather not have to deal with syncing and swapping all the time.

Besides, I rather like the idea of having it serve side-duty as an external hard drive for pushing data around. That means having space above and beyond what I need for music.

So yeah, that's more of a rant than I expected. Sorry about that And though he's being a little melodramatic about it, I actually found myself with pretty much the same reaction as |darc|, for (what I imagine are) most of the same reasons. Anyone who shares these same concerns may find it worth their while to check out the Archos, though. It does a *lot*, and it's garnered pretty good reviews.

[S. Thompson]

Pictures?

- Fuzmeister

[DaMadFiddler]

Pictures?

- Fuzmeister

I think I speak for everyone, though, when I say I wouldn't mind it being a little thicker to get some more storage in there.

[APE]

iPod touch: iPhone without the phone support (includes wifi, safari, etc.) BUT ONLY FUCKING 16GB FUCK YOU APPLE I WANTED THIS SO BADLY BUT WITH FUCKING DECENT SPACE

A hard drive based Touch iPod would be awful... thick, slow, and battery life would be shot to hell. If they could they would have done it, but the product would have failed before it even launched.

... and a 32 SSD is a ridiculous amount of money, so they went with the logical 16gb.

Do people not realize the limits of technology?

[anyways, go ahead and flame away]

Have you seen an iPod before? They're hard drive based, you know.
Most of the "touch" features wouldn't require storage access (at least immediately, so things could be cached) so I don't see how that would shoot the battery life to hell. Thick? Yes, but that would be something I'm willing to deal with. I doubt it would make it that much thicker, though. Slow? What? Most access to the hard drive is going to be during movies and music, which work fine on the iPod Classic, so I don't see how it's going to slow anything down. The thing has RAM, you know.
.

Quit whining -- buy a different product then. The big sell of the touch is the full web browser, so it's more of a PDA than anything. The argument I see with full size iPods is that... you NEED to take your entire music library? Oh yea, because you listen to every single album you own. I'd vouch to say that the play count of over half your music is 0. Plus synching music is oh so fucking hard, it takes five minutes to swap out tracks if you want something new. Grow up.

That's been my arguement for a long time, in order to listen to 80gb of music you'd have to have the thing running for the better part of a year 24/7. I have a Sansa Express with a 2gb microsd card for a total of 3gb. Put my favorites on there and swap them out over usb when I want something new.

[|darc|]

Quit whining -- buy a different product then.

According to you, it's impossible to make, so there wouldn't be a "different product" for me, would there?

And come on, you know that's not reasonable: I use Apple products for the same reason you do, and you know it's definitely not the feature set.

The big sell of the touch is the full web browser, so it's more of a PDA than anything. The argument I see with full size iPods is that... you NEED to take your entire music library? Oh yea, because you listen to every single album you own. I'd vouch to say that the play count of over half your music is 0. Plus synching music is oh so fucking hard, it takes five minutes to swap out tracks if you want something new. Grow up.

No, I don't need to take my full 93gb library with me at all times. However, I do need to take about 60gb of it. Whether you believe me or not, I do listen to *all* of that 60gb--often. I like a lot of music, and I am extremely spontaneous in what I want to listen to at the moment. Not only is syncing hard, it's impossible, unless the iPod touch has a crystal ball that lets me know what I feel like listening to tomorrow. I am very, very disappointed when I want to listen to a song that turns out I didn't include in that 60gb of music. When I bought a 20gb mp3 player many years ago, that was my entire portable library, and I'm used to having an entire portable library. I've listened to a lot more music since I was 15 or whatever, and my music library is several times larger. I will not purchase a music playing device that goes backwards in features from my current one.

Today, I listened to Pink Floyd, The Beach Boys, Ravi Shankar, and Korn. I could not have predicted that at all.

I also bought an iPod 5thG 60gb so I could use the movies and photos features, as well as store maybe a few small files on it. But I wound up deleting the photos and never using the video because they take up way too much space.

Without adding SIGNIFICANT bulk to it, you would maybe get 4 hours of usage... tops. You'd be recharging every day.

In other words, I have the option of sitting there and hand-picking tons of music every day, or I simply place the iPod touch on the dock every day to charge? That's a no-brainer, I'm going to choose to charge a lot.

Besides, I don't think adding a bigger battery to the device would add that much space. The iPod classic 160gb adds an additional 1/3 battery life for just a .12in depth increase over the iPod classic 80gb. I doubt the battery technology is much different for the iPod touches/iPhones.

If they COULD make the product, they would have. But right now where things stand it is simply not feasible or practical. Plus nobody would buy a Rev. A product that you are describing, and at this point a lot of companies really wouldn't want to put one out for fear of fucking something up.

No, I don't think the existence of a product is a requirement of that product's ability to exist. Why do I think they never bothered? The iPod touch is simply a piggybacking off of the iPhone's design, just the phone stuff has been yanked out. There are too few people interested in an iPod touch to justify making radical changes to the iPhone for that product. I most definitely think it can be done and I most definitely think it would be profitable for Apple, but would probably spread too thin their development team.

BTW nice touch in kicking me from IRC when somebody steps up to you.

Your being tempbanned from IRC has nothing to do with disagreeing with me on whether this iPod could exist, but rather for this:

.:14·56·31:. «mulletman13» you're a fucking idiot
.:15·02·16:. «mulletman13» You're so fucking stupid that my mind can't comprehend your circular logic

I said nothing to you that warranted that kind of response, and you needed time to sit out and cool off.



We've been waiting for what people have called the "true iPod video"--an iPod truly designed for video capabilities, not just a video function tacked onto the standard functionality of the iPod. Rumors have said that this device would be widescreen, covering the entire iPod front, and the click wheel would be replaced with touchscreen functionality.

Apple today released a device like this, but without the "video" target--16gb is not enough to do music and video. They have failed to deliver a device that many people have been wanting for years--the 5th gen iPod was said to be a temporary solution to video capabilities the day it was released! I have been looking for Apple to improve the iPod for a long time now, and instead of improving it, they forked it and took an entirely different road. This is extremely disappointing for me.

That's been my arguement for a long time, in order to listen to 80gb of music you'd have to have the thing running for the better part of a year 24/7. I have a Sansa Express with a 2gb microsd card for a total of 3gb. Put my favorites on there and swap them out over usb when I want something new.

93gb of music is one month.

[stagg]

Without adding SIGNIFICANT bulk to it, you would maybe get 4 hours of usage... tops. You'd be recharging every day.

In other words, I have the option of sitting there and hand-picking tons of music every day, or I simply place the iPod touch on the dock every day to charge? That's a no-brainer, I'm going to choose to charge a lot.

You are going to have 20,000 songs and only listen to 4 hours of it at a time?

....

[Specially Cork]

Without adding SIGNIFICANT bulk to it, you would maybe get 4 hours of usage... tops. You'd be recharging every day.

In other words, I have the option of sitting there and hand-picking tons of music every day, or I simply place the iPod touch on the dock every day to charge? That's a no-brainer, I'm going to choose to charge a lot.

You are going to have 20,000 songs and only listen to 4 hours of it at a time?

....

What's wrong with that? People who don't see the purpose of being able to store music on an MP3 player than you can play at once clearly don't understand what it is like to have an eclectic music taste. I don't think my taste in music is as varied as darc's, but I can certainly relate to what he is saying:

It is easier to choose what music you want to listen to it at the time when you want to listen to it, rather then before you leave to go on a trip or whatever. That's what is so great about having your entire library in portable form.

Looking at what mulletman said:

Plus synching music is oh so fucking hard, it takes five minutes to swap out tracks if you want something new.

I can't relate to that at all. Choosing (i.e. predicting) what I want on my iPod on a daily basis is a fucking pain in the ass, and takes a lot longer than 5mins.

[|darc|]

Without adding SIGNIFICANT bulk to it, you would maybe get 4 hours of usage... tops. You'd be recharging every day.

In other words, I have the option of sitting there and hand-picking tons of music every day, or I simply place the iPod touch on the dock every day to charge? That's a no-brainer, I'm going to choose to charge a lot.

You are going to have 20,000 songs and only listen to 4 hours of it at a time?

....

What Boney said, plus:

The battery life loss wouldn't happen when I'm just listening to music, as it would be consuming the same resources as would a normal iPod. The iPhone has 24hrs of music listening time and 6hrs of internet browsing time. What MulletMan is saying is that I would get 4 hours of internet browsing time tops... and seriously, I don't anticipate sitting at my iPod browsing the internet for 4 hours.

[MulletMan13]

You win.

The Archos player DMF posted is for you -- seriously go ahead and buy that. I'm done arguing about this -- your argument has come a long way since we talked earlier on IRC and you've convinced me.

Fuck Apple, I'm quitting my job and getting an HP.

[Actually the only part of my sarcasm is that last line]

<3

[butters]

Without adding SIGNIFICANT bulk to it, you would maybe get 4 hours of usage... tops. You'd be recharging every day.

In other words, I have the option of sitting there and hand-picking tons of music every day, or I simply place the iPod touch on the dock every day to charge? That's a no-brainer, I'm going to choose to charge a lot.

You are going to have 20,000 songs and only listen to 4 hours of it at a time?

....

Honestly, how often are you going to listen to music off of a battery powered device for more than four hours?

[MulletMan13]

All right, here is what I was honestly thinking when this was announced:

At work we recieve the most full size iPods back due to hardware failure. People run with them, abuse them, move them around too much, or anything like that, and I guess I've just been fed up with dealing with that. The masses are stupid and don't realize that a hard drive has moving parts inside of it, and if the Touch did have an HDD in it, they would fly off the shelves and there would be a huge backlash from stupid people.

As engadget put it on the top 5 things they hated about today:

• iPod touch's 16GB of flash - Solid-state can't deliver enough storage capacity yet—shoulda risked the bulkier, more fragile HDD, Steve!

You are right -- it would have been possible... but it would have been a huge risk... the masses would have treated it like shit and they would be returned so quickly.

[Ex-Cyber]

Yeah, iPods are hard drive based. They play music and play videos based directly on PortalPlayers chip. The iPhone and in this case iPod Touch are essentially computers -- they run a FULL operating system ( if you really don't believe me ssh into an iPhone or check out one of the iPhone dev sites and look into it ), and in order to conserve battery life you'd have to save current state to RAM before putting it into energy saving "sleep" mode. Sure, it could be done but it definitely is not practical.

What do you mean by "save current state to RAM"? Wouldn't most state already be in RAM, with only CPU context and some hardware configuration state needing to be saved?

Also, the PortalPlayer chips are not just dumb decoder chips; they are - like the iPhone - built around an ARM architecture (granted, the iPhone has a later/faster/more featureful ARM core). There's even an iPod port of uClinux.

[politoe]

Now I want to see what will be MS response to this.

[DaMadFiddler]

Now I want to see what will be MS response to this.

[Zealous zerotype]

I don't care if the iPod can do a special format video or not, what I care about is if the iPod can do just about every other video format? My friend recently bought an Archos and it really is awesome having a device that plays just about any divx/xvid file you throw at it and comes with the damn plugs to hook up to your television.