Rotten Apple

Is it just me, or are Apple’s new iPods sorta disappointing?

The Shuffle hasn’t changed. The Nano does video and has a new interface, but looks fat and ugly (best comment I’ve seen about it: “does it do the truffle shuffle?”). What’s now called the “Classic” has the new interface and looks pretty good, and got a storage increase, which is nice, but for me, not worth upgrading for.

What will be talked about most is the new iPod Touch. It is, almost literally, an iPhone without the phone. It has all the stuff that people have been asking for in the top-of-the-line iPod for years: A giant touch screen, a snazzy new interface, and most importantly, a wireless internet connection to connect to the iTunes store directly (and, I pray to Jobs, sync with a computer wirelessly). It even has some cool stuff nobody expected, like having a web browser and doing fun stuff while in a Starbucks location.

This is all awesome. If it stopped there, and we used logical assumptions to fill in the blanks, I’d currently be putting my old iPod and a few internal organs up on Ebay in order to pay whatever it could possibly cost to get my hands on one. Unfortunately, one of those logical assumptions turns out to be false. I’m talking about storage capacity. This is the most advanced, most expensive iPod ever. It looks like an iPhone, but its focus is on music and video. So you’d expect it to hold the most songs and videos, at least as much if not more than the Classic. But this assumption is wrong. The biggest Touch is only 16GB.

It looks like they took the “iPhone without the phone” part a bit too literally. Why would I want this new iPod, then, if it does less than the iPhone, but doesn’t do much more? This sentiment is enhanced by the fact that Apple has also announced that the Touch’s WiFi capabilities will be immediately available on the iPhone as well, and it has just dropped in price to only $100 more than the Touch.

I’d rather pay $100 more for the same device with a phone. But I’ll do neither, not only because the iPhone still isn’t available in Canada, but because 8GB, or even 16GB, isn’t enough space to hold even a medium-sized music collection. Mine is already bigger than the previous 80GB ceiling, so even if I could afford it, using the Touch or iPhone as my primary iPod just isn’t practical.

Why can’t Apple just make one device that does everything? Fix the stupid problems with the iPhone, add a 160GB drive to it, and nobody could resist it.


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