They finally made the iPod I’ve been wanting; essentially it’s the iPhone minus the phone. Also, they released some sort of iPod fatty as the new Nano, but really, it’s all about the iPod Touch. $299 for the 8GB and $399 for the 16GB. For those who bought iPhones… sorry, but the price just dropped $200 for the big one.
So, who’s going to talk me out of buying the Touch as soon as I can get my grubby, 3.5" smearing fingers on it?
I really, really want an iPod Touch. It looks so very cool, and probably preferable to the iPhone (if it ever becomes available up here) with the larger storage capacity. I’m just hoping that my well-loved, nearly three-year-old 4G iPod survives until I can afford to replace it.
I guess I don’t really see the point. The big screen looks pretty but are you actually going to watch movies or surf the web on that thing? I couldn’t imagine ever doing that. Even if you would watch it on the regular iPod there is no way you would ever do so on the Nano.
I think they are going to need to get a bit more storage space for this thing before I’m going to get excited about it. I’m thinking 30 gigs at the minimum.
I really don’t understand the fuss over occasionally rewriting the music on your player, instead of the archivist need to have EVERYTHING available IMMEDIATELY. Yes, I’ve had HD players that stored the vast majority of my collection. And what happened? Except for a few albums that work well as thematic wholes or just really good piles of songs, I’d just play playlists that didn’t take more than three or four songs from any given album. I’d guess that 20% of the songs on the player never got more than one or two listens, because they were weak, throwaway album tracks.
On the other hand, I’ve had flash players with lower capacity (right now, I use a 1GB Creative), and the limits on the music that can hold are a bit annoying and restrictive.
Something like 8GB? A good compromise if you’re willing to re-sync once per week or two. 16GB? Re-sync the singles as your mood changes and keep those dozen “must have whole” albums.
I turn on my Wii at least once a day when I’m watching TV down in the living room in order to use the internet browser that’s there without having to go to a computer, just to answer a quick question.
So surf the web? Check.
Video playback, probably not so much, especially when a full length movie can be anywhere between half a gig for a fairly low bitrate 90min film up to (or beyond) a full gig for a higher bitrate and/or 2.5 hour bladderbuster. That’s where the Touch’s size will really fail.
Honestly, though. Why spend $399 on a 16G iPod when you can spend $217 and get a 30G Zune? Is it all about the eye candy?
A what?
I want a Touch – really badly. Except for the storage space. I am probably among the “archivists,” though my entire library on my 60GB iPod right now is at about 35 gigs. Still, the main playlist that I listen to most is 19 gigs, and I could thin that down quite a bit if I really set my mind to it, I don’t really want to have to. 16 gigs just doesn’t cut it, especially where video is concerned. I think Steve really dropped the ball on this part. I understand why he did it – if he put all his eggs in one basket, making a 80+ gig hard-drive based Touch – he’d bite into his iPhone sales. Still, it annoys the hell out of me. It seems to ridiculous to give it this nice big screen to watch movies and other videos on and then cripple it with such a minuscule capacity for storing said movies and other videos.
sigh In the end I’ll probably wait 'til next September, when he’ll likely release a larger Touch.
A what?
Oh, yeah. That. The iPod wannabe. The one with the consistently mediocre reviews. Sure, that’s a great choice.
Woosh, methinks.
Stranger
Zune has dropped to $199. Although for $50 more you can get an 80gb iPod “Classic” (what the Video is now called). For $150 more you get 160GB.
The price comes as a pleasant surprise to me. I saw the US prices you quoted and figured, knowing what a poor deal we tend to get over here on electronics, you could probably just replace those dollar signs with pound signs for the UK market.
But no, the UK prices are just £199 for the 8GB and £269 for the 16GB. OK, that’s still about $400 and $540 respectively, but we Brits are getting shafted less than we used to. 
I’m currently still using a 5-year-old Archos Jukebox Multimedia which seems pretty clunky now!
To be honest, though, 16GB doesn’t seem very much…
Or spend $250 and get at an 80GB iPod classic.
I don’t really see the point of the iPod touch either. IMO, 16 gigs is a laughably small amount of storage for something being marketed as a high-end music and movie player (in other words, something that doesn’t have the word “mini” or “nano” in the name). The touch interface is cool, but not that much better than the good old iPod classic interface that it justifies the storage tradeoff.
Maybe I’m just special, but my iPod is currently only holding 6 gigs, and that’s including a music collection that has more music than I’d ever get tired of listening to, as well as a hefty collection of audiobooks. Not a lot of video, but then, the last time I was really able to watch videos was on a 14-hour flight over a year ago.
Do you all, like, buy an entire album to get a single song or something?
Two things.
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You are probably just a young kid. When you have been buying music for a few years you too will have 30 gigs of MP3s.
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Where do you buy just one song? Itunes? Apple will not be the dominant music player forever. Buying music from Itunes locks you into using apple products. There are some songs that don’t lock you into Apple but it is not easy to choose among them you look at what you want and see if it is not broken by DRM.
Most of the time, if I like one song by an artist, I’m likely to like more, so I will buy the entire album (after previewing it, of course). Occasionally I’m disappointed and find that the one or two songs are the only ones I like, but that’s fine. Most of the time though I’m glad I did buy the entire album. On those occasions where I’ll hear a few songs I like but the rest of the album doesn’t really strike my fancy, then yes, I will buy only those few tracks. This is rare, but I did it recently with The Brooklyn Funk Essentials. I’m not a huge fan of acid jazz and/or funk, but there were a few tracks that really knocked it out of the park for me (I Got Cash, Take The L Train (To Brooklyn) and Kik It) so I bought only those tracks, because the rest of the tracks, while decent, weren’t the sort of thing I’d be likely to listen to very often if at all.
I’m an avid music lover though so I tend to buy a lot of music. Then again, I also have an EMusic subscription, so I get 90 downloads a month for $20, which is a lot more affordable than 9 albums off iTunes, hence I tend to use it all each month. 
(I’ve still bought a few albums off of iTunes that I really wanted and EMusic didn’t have, but that’s rare.)
I also love remixes, so I buy a lot of CD singles with various mixes of the same song on it. (I mostly listen to my songs on shuffle, and having more than 5,000 songs on my iPod means I’ll have a great variety to listen to without running into repeats during an average listening session) That increases my consumption.
I don’t know how old you are, but the older you get the more you tend to broaden your musical horizons. I’ve been discovering a lot of new music through EMusic, and a lot of it is pretty excellent stuff that I wouldn’t have bought through normal means. This is how you end up with more songs than can fit on a 16 gig device.
Sorry, mid-twenties.
I suppose I’m just highly selective about what music I listen to.