Wholly Schmidt!

Apple has announced the new iPod lineup, and I think it’s time to stop kidding myself: the coolest iPod will never again be the one with the storage I need.

It’s been this way since the nanos arrived on the scene; the “big” iPods got the video, but the nano was the one people were raving about for the slick form factor (and more accessible pricing).

It’s getting close to two years since I dropped my 3rd generation iPod (twice) in the parking lot, and with every new revision since then I’ve held off; rumors of a wide screen or touch screen iPod circulated before every new keynote or announcement for at least that long. The first really new iPod to come along and deliver on those expectations was the iPhone, and it was certainly impressive, but if all I wanted was impressive, I would’ve caved long ago for a cute little nano or something (I did get a Shuffle, but that’s so cheap and different it’s almost not worth bringing up in comparison; I justified it very specifically as a workout music device). I want my entire music collection with me wherever I take my iPod. Once you’ve enjoyed that luxury (my 3rd gen was 20 GB, which wouldn’t hold all my music now, but it did at the time), you can’t go back without feeling like you’re compromising.

Now we have a genuinely new iPod, incorporating everything from the iPhone except the phone itself, but 16 GB of storage isn’t any closer to satisfying me than the one gigabyte Shuffle. There aren’t degrees of convenience, it’s binary: I can fit all my music onto an iPod, or I can’t. It doesn’t matter how much of my collection fits on an iPod, as long as it’s not all of it, I’ve got to think about what I want when I sync, and I don’t have access to everything once I’m away from the house. That’s the utility I want from my “real” iPod, and the only way to get that is the iPod Classic, which still isn’t truly different from the video iPod that debuted in October of 2005. That sounds ancient, and comparing it to the iPhone or the iPod Touch, it looks ancient too.

So here we are, and I guess I’m going to break down and buy an iPod Classic sometime this winter. Not only is it not nearly as cool a gadget as the iPhone or the Touch, it will make both of them nearly impossible to justify as additional purchases. In fact, the iPod Touch is kind of silly for anyone; you’re getting a sorta iPod, with some sorta PDA capabilities, and a sorta web device. On the iPhone, these features make more sense: you’re replacing your cell phone with a gadget that does everything your cell phone did better, plus all those sorta-features as a bonus. All those sorta-features by themselves just make a really cool device that doesn’t quite do anything the way you’d like.

The only way I could justify the iPod Touch is if I really wanted a device specifically for video. That’s a really slick screen any way you look at it; if video is your priority I can’t imagine being content with the smaller, non-wide screen iPod Classic format. Even so, you may end up hamstrung by storage limitations.