[Macworld]

Post your comments for The iPod classic is just keeping the seat warm here

[deemery]

Agree completely; but I think I'd rather have a large capacity (even if slightly bulkier) iPhone than iPod Touch.
dave

[SandroM3949]

I was so happy to combine my very bulky Treo 650 and my bulky 3rd gen iPod into one iPhone. I don't mind the loss of capacity, since 8GB of music is plenty for me. However, I will replace my 2nd gen nano with a shiny new red one in the next few weeks. I do a lot of backpacking and taking an iPhone with me is a) pointless for anything but music b) heavy c) expensive to lose.
The iPod Classic is a good fit for some people, but I think those are now in the minority and clearly Apple thinks so too.

[folklore]

One thing I've learned from having a 5th gen. 60GB iPod: I never use all the space. Never. And my library is much larger than 60GB.
When I bought my 5th gen. I thought I needed an iPod that equaled my library size. But I've learned that I really don't need to carry a month's worth of music in my pocket. Even with video, I could easily get by with a 30GB iPod.
Most of the time, I'm away from my computer for like 8-10 hours. Worst case scenario, I need a playlist that's about 200 songs to get me through until I plug in again. We're talking about 3GB of music, max, and that's if those songs are encoded at high bitrates.
With a 32GB iPod Touch, that'd leave almost 30GB free for video. Unless I'm away from my computer for a week or more (the horror!) I just don't need anything more than that.

[heavyboots]

Another year, another iPod event where I had the credit card halfway out of my wallet only to shove it back in again after they announced the largest storage size on the Touch. Am I the only one who would have gone to $500 for a 64gb model? I have 3gb left on my old 60gig iPod 5G (without carrying any videos, games etc on it) and I'm not part of the crowd that is willing to spend time messing with which parts of their music library they want to carry today. Grrrr...

[minimalist]

I could care less about the smaller Classics being a 16th of an inch thinner. I've got a 140GB library and I don't want to micro-manage what goes on and what stays every time I walk out the door. I just want to synch it and know that whatever I might be in the mood for will always be there.
Glad I bought my 160 GB Classic last year because it appears it will be several more years before we will ever see a iPod with that kind of capacity again. Downgrading to a smaller capacity is just not an option for me.
I wonder if the 160GB classics will start to command ridiculous amounts of money on eBay like the discontinued standalone iSights?

[JoeC]

You're missing the point of the Classic entirely. Sure, you can make a playlist that can suit a day's needs very easily, but when are you going to do that? The day before? Every morning when you wake up? I don't want to decide what I'm going to listen to tomorrow today.

One of the best parts of my day is when I get into the car to drive to work, and I choose what I want to listen to right then and there, depending on my mood. No pre-thought involved. No worries. Because anything I might happen to want to listen to is right there in my hand. And on my way home, if my mood has changed entirely, no problem. I still have everything I own right there.

Do you keep only 10% of your clothes in your house at a time, and go to the storage space to pick the ones you want for the week out in advance?

One of the promises of the iPod from its inception was that it would enable users to carry their entire library with them at all times. Of course, for most people, an 8 GB nano can actually do that, but for those of us with much larger libraries, there's absolutely no reason not to keep increasing the storage capacity. After all, if Apple wants to sell more music on iTunes, it should want all of us to have some free space on our iPods at all times.

So I think the Classic is here to stay for the time being. Until, as the article suggested, there's a 128 GB iPod Touch, at the least. And I'm not optimistic that will happen by next year. After all, 2008 came and went without an increase beyond 32 GB. Next year we'll see only 64, most likely. Especially if Jobs keeps up his obsession with thin.

Why wouldn't Apple want to keep those customers who need the space? They'd only be opening up a hole for competitors. It's not like keeping the Classic around costs them money.

[wafflelad]

The bigger concern for me, at the loss of the Classic, is the fact that the iPod Touch will be its successor. The iPod Touch, like the iPhone, is horrible in terms of simple one-handed operation. It really needs something along the lines of the click wheel interface, even if it's just an on-screen emulated thing. It's really cool that you can operate multitouch devices with two hands in all kinds of fancy ways, but there's been a slight loss of usability in the process.

[MorrisTheCat]

Apple will never be able to satisfy all customers' needs. If they did, they'd have a computer and iPod/iPhone lineup that would rival Dells hundreds of systems. That's just not Apple. It will always be a matter of compromises when talking of Apple's products.
I for one will be happy with a 32 GB Touch, once I can afford to get one. Some folks will always want more storage, but at some point you have to ask, how much is enough? Do we really need media devices that can hold hundreds of Gigs or even terabytes of files?
Though I will be sad to see the classic EOL'd when that eventually happens, only because of its lineage, it makes sense Apple is moving away from HD technology for the players. Flash memory or its derivatives are the future of storage, at least in a portable device, for all the reasons pointed out in this article.

[Chano]

I believe that Apple will maintain a touch-wheel driven iPod for some time as a defence against copy cats who would jump in if Apple ceased to use that particular UI, even if Apple had moved forward to a a fully touch-screen based iPod range.

[folklore]

JoeC said:

You're missing the point of the Classic entirely. Sure, you can make a playlist that can suit a day's needs very easily, but when are you going to do that? The day before? Every morning when you wake up? I don't want to decide what I'm going to listen to tomorrow today.

When I take a look at the playcounts and last played date on files in my library, it's pretty clear that I actually listen to only a fraction of my library. In the past year, I've listened to about a third of my library. That amounts to less than 20GB of music. In the past two years, I've listened to just over half of my library.

I should note that I actually do carry my entire library around with me all the time on my 5th gen 60GB, and I still don't listen to more than about 55% of the tracks in my library over a two year period. I don't want to get rid of the tracks that I haven't listened to lately, but I obviously don't need to carry them around with me either. I'm just not listening to them.

Part of that could be due to my spectacularly inadequate skills at creating playlists. I just cannot create a playlist that's worth a damn. The new Genius feature in iTunes 8 should help that. I've played around with that a bit and its results are very good so far - better than anything I create myself, and it's a one-click process.

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Do you keep only 10% of your clothes in your house at a time, and go to the storage space to pick the ones you want for the week out in advance?

No, but I do keep only this season's clothes in the nearest closet, with all other seasons in a different closet. There's no sense in tripping over my winter coat in August. Nor is there any sense in having Christmas music on my iPod in August.

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Why wouldn't Apple want to keep those customers who need the space? They'd only be opening up a hole for competitors. It's not like keeping the Classic around costs them money.

Keeping the Classic around certainly costs Apple money. It costs them in manufacturing, it costs them in shipping, and it costs them in terms of retail space that could be used for other products. This is especially true if the classic isn't selling as well as the other models.

[doglesby]

Apple's obsessed with thinness only to the extent it's obsessed with portability. Thinness is a functional requirement of any mobile product.
The fact is, iTunes really does make it easy to live within the confines of a smaller device. I don't find my 8GB iPhone hard to live with and that has applications the iPod doesn't have to accommodate.

[Jarmo]

What I'd like would be a HD equipped 240GB touch.
That'd start to look like a gadget to have, especially as the cost wouldn't be higher than the current base model.
And up the max volume thank you.
I cant hear the soft parts while using proper headphones.

[Wondercow]

heavyboots said:

>Am I the only one who would have gone to $500 for a 64gb model?

And store security would stop you on the way out and demand you finish paying the $700-$800 price. I don't think may people complaining realize just how expensive a 64 GB iPod Touch would be. A single 64 GB chip is, what, $600? $700? Two 32 GB chips would run about as much: This one goes for $366 per chip--so double that for your 64 GB. Sure, Apple would get 'em cheaper, but then I've just listed the price of the chip; there'd still be the case, screen, innards, and profit.