[alansky]

In my opinion, the iPod Classic is redundant... Moof in Charge
Redundant for you, maybe; but iPod sales have made it abundantly clear that the market for high-capacity iPods is alive and well, your narrow-minded opinions notwithstanding.

[JakeB]

I agree that as flash memory capacity increases, we may well see the iPod classic phased out; IF the iPod touch is a success, which I've no doubt it will be. I think the nano will top iPod sales, with the touch coming second (no need to worry about the shuffle in this equation).
In terms of increase in iPod classic capacities, where will it end? At some point I'll have around 500 GB of music and movies/TV shows, content it would take me around six months to consume, assuming I played it continuously. Surely at this point the iPod classic as back-up drive surpasses its portable function. No human, outside of a Lost character, needs so much content for a trip, and why not simply back up to a desktop hard drive? I travel with my 15 GB 3G iPod and even on longer trips only listen to a FRACTION of the music I have loaded.
There's a point where human limitations are going to kick in, reducing the real-world utility of iPod classics with massive storage. At the moment the 'I like to have my whole music/video collection with me' still applies. But I think there's a point utility is passed and it becomes simply the comfort of possession.
Jake

[Dalebarely]

Actually, both are incorrect. standard vhs was 240 lines horizontal, exactly the same as ipod nano. SVHS was better, but still not 480. Analog broadcast tv is limited to around 330 horizontal lines, NTSC DVD is 480.

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Just to clarify: Standard def tv, vhs and dvd are all 720x480. This is what's either called 480i (interlaced) or 480p (progressive).

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Just to clarify further.... Standard def (composite video) TV and VHS are 525 x maybe 350 (if you're lucky.) The first DVDs, like all digital feeds, got rid of the guard bands and decided on 480 lines as the height, and actually increased the horizontal resolution so it was more than the vertical at 720 lines. Recent DVDs, however, have gone back to 640 lines horizontal, figuring nobody can tell the difference, and on their old TVs, they're probably right. Still, it's annoying.

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[Moof_in_Charge]

Note to self.
If your opinion differs from alansky you are narrow-minded.
Things to do
1. Update Narrow-minded definition in the dictionary
2. Insert picture of self in wikipedia next to narrow-minded.
3. Send thank you email to alan the superior intellect.

[Moof_in_Charge]

the new nano nearly enough credit for how much better it is in pretty much every way than the previous one -- save, in your view, the shape, and, in my view, the shiny back.
On the contrary, I think the new Nano is great, however the new Nano created a void in the sports market. While the previous Nano was easily navigable while running, biking or working out, the new one is cumbersome and intrusive :-) I wont put the new Nano on my armband (it's too wide) and it feels bulky in my pocket while running. Not to mention it is a bit heavier too.
So now, I am at a stage that think a Shuffle with a screen is a good idea.. ohh wait that was the Nano /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif
Hence my beef with the product. It was the only iPod for active people who need to control their music selection on-demand.

[folklore]

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I agree that as flash memory capacity increases, we may well see the iPod classic phased out; IF the iPod touch is a success, which I've no doubt it will be. I think the nano will top iPod sales, with the touch coming second (no need to worry about the shuffle in this equation).
In terms of increase in iPod classic capacities, where will it end? At some point I'll have around 500 GB of music and movies/TV shows, content it would take me around six months to consume, assuming I played it continuously. Surely at this point the iPod classic as back-up drive surpasses its portable function. No human, outside of a Lost character, needs so much content for a trip, and why not simply back up to a desktop hard drive? I travel with my 15 GB 3G iPod and even on longer trips only listen to a FRACTION of the music I have loaded.
There's a point where human limitations are going to kick in, reducing the real-world utility of iPod classics with massive storage. At the moment the 'I like to have my whole music/video collection with me' still applies. But I think there's a point utility is passed and it becomes simply the comfort of possession.

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Except... I suck at making good playlists. Every time I cobble together a few dozen songs, it's always just wrong. Slapping all my music on my iPod (5G, 60gb) and hitting shuffle always seems better to me. It's not like I listen to 60gb of music all at once.
Essentially, the ability to have my entire music collection at my fingertips is why I started using my computer as a jukebox in the first place. The large-capacity iPods allow me to do the same thing in my pocket.
Until flash memory catches up in terms of storage and price, there's going to be a market for hard drive based players.

[d00d]

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Redundant for you, maybe; but iPod sales have made it abundantly clear that the market for high-capacity iPods is alive and well, your narrow-minded opinions notwithstanding.

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Way to both: take a quote WAY out of context and completely overreact and attack the person (which is not cool by the way, so let's not do that anymore).
In the context originally presented, that the iPod Touch should have capacity of the iPod Classic but retain everything else, Moof is right on (IMO, YMMV).

[d00d]

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As I've said in a couple other threads, I think Apple would have loved to offer the touch with lots of storage, but large-capacity flash-memory chips are very expensive right now, and adding a hard drive to the touch wasn't in the cards (for various reasons relating to size, battery life, and production). Once those chips come down in price -- which will likely happen in the next year or so -- we'll see 32GB, 64GB, 128GB in the iPod touch, and the classic will be unceremoniously put to rest.

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Apple apologist! Apple apologist! Seriously though, I agree with Moof. Apple's desire to use flash memory in the iPod touch just seems foolish. Sure, they'd need to make the iPod Touch a little fatter (for both the hard drive and extra battery to sustain the moving parts), but they'd have a far more practical product (especially when it comes to playing movies, which is the real strength of this iPod). A friend of mine remarked that he would have marched out and bought an iPod Touch on the day of release, but the tiny storage made it essentially useless to him (can't store enough video). We've now got: tiny screen with big storage (Classic), tiny storage with big screen (Touch), tiny screen with tiny storage (nano). I still think the former two should have been combined, size increase be damned.

[nyip11]

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Until flash memory catches up in terms of storage and price, there's going to be a market for hard drive based players.

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I don't understand it myself, but there are quite a few people who like to have their entire music collection (we're talking > 50 GB here) on their iPod; and are willing to put up with the downsides of a disk-based iPod: weight, power consumption, low tolerance to jostling, etc.

[Gatesbasher]

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Actually, both are incorrect. standard vhs was 240 lines horizontal, exactly the same as ipod nano. SVHS was better, but still not 480. Analog broadcast tv is limited to around 330 horizontal lines, NTSC DVD is 480.

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You're right: what I meant was, 350 lines horizontal is the absolute maximum you could hope for, because of the bandwidth of the channel. Broadcast TV in black-and-white could approach that, but the artifacts due to the beating together of the luminance and chrominance signals in composite video made that impossible in color broadcasting. And yes, about 250 lines horizontal was about it for VHS. Super-VHS could have delivered (through the S-Video input) the same as today's digital cable, 640 lines horizontal, if there were ever any prerecorded SVHS tapes to buy, which of course there weren't. Vertically of course, a line is a line. They decided on 480 to match VGA monitor resolution, though the original broadcast standard was more like 485 actual picture lines. And of course on CRT TVs, to avoid you ever seeing black borders, they have the picture so much larger than the screen that you'll be lucky to see 400 lines (and the cheaper your set, and the more primitive the power supply is, the worse they have the overscan set at.) There is a difference, though, in seeing 250 or 350 pixels worth of information smoothly varying across a screen and seeing 320 sharp, clear little pixels.

[Dan Frakes]

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Apple's desire to use flash memory in the iPod touch just seems foolish. Sure, they'd need to make the iPod Touch a little fatter (for both the hard drive and extra battery to sustain the moving parts), but they'd have a far more practical product (especially when it comes to playing movies, which is the real strength of this iPod).

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There's no doubt it would be more practical (although I think considerably fatter). I've said myself many times that it's a shame the best video-watching iPod doesn't have much space for storing video.
But as I've noted before, most people are ignoring costs. An iPod touch with a hard drive and a bigger battery would be a very different product with different internal parts and design. Which means another design process and another production process for what is essentially little more than a stopgap product. Once large-capacity flash memory is affordable enough for Apple to dump hard-drive-based iPods altogether, switching over to a flash-based design would require even more expense. By going with flash memory from the start, the iPod touch can switch to larger-capacity flash modules without much of a delay or expense. In the meantime, the current classic becomes the "stopgap" product, and is similar enough to the 5G that it likely didn't require much tweaking of the production process.
Again -- since views other than "this sucks" or "that's great" seem to be so easily misunderstood these days -- I'm not in any way contesting the appeal of a large-capacity iPod touch. In fact, I'd bet Apple is well aware that there are lots of people out there who'd quickly snap one up. But given that there's no real competition -- there's little risk that the people who want such a player will buy something else -- my guess is that Apple determined the current approach was the most economical over the long run.