Ok, With the big announcement of the new line of products form Apple hitting the world by storm yesterday it’s time for some of us to take a look back and see exactly what went on and how Apple might have gone wrong with the iPod Touch.
Yesterday apple announced basically a complete overhaul of their entire iPod line, it sounds like a huge deal right? Well, not really, because the chunk of Apple’s ipods will remain nearly identical. The iPod Classic as it’s called looks identical to the older iPod Videos, it gets a bit of an overhaul in the UI but beyond that and more space its pretty much the same old stock ugly iPod still. Yes apple did redo the nano line of products which was probably the most suprising change and it indeed was a great change adding a bigger screen, shrinking its hight down and keeping it uber thin. Very sexy, if not a little odd looking at first its definitly the biggest news, even if pictures of it were leaked to Gizmodo weeks in advance… you might recall the “how much does this suck if its the new nano” poll they hosted where everyone said it was ugly.
But as I said something went wrong yesterday, the iPod Touch was also announced at the conference yesterday. Now who wouldn’t get excited about a touchscreen based 3.5″ video ipod? Well Me for one. The iPod Touch is basically the identical brother of the iPhone, the difference being that the iPod Touch has had it’s phone parts stripped bare and only the iPod side remains, yes safari is still in their which is great and rumor has it that hackers might be able to get other apps installed as well since the Touch uses MacOSX just like the iPhone.
But here is the issue, the iPhone was already chastized as being a subset of a smartphone missing certain key features, now we have the iPod which is pretty much a subset of the iPhones featurebase. Normally this wouldnt be a horrible thing I mean as long as it’s cheaper then its more attractive. Well this is where things get tricky, you see at the same time they announced the iPod Touch, they also announced that the iPhone would see a reduced price to 399$ for the 8gb and dropping the 4gb completely, with the iPod Touch coming in at 299$ for the 8gb edition and 399$ for the 16gb edition.
Yes you read that correctly, 16gb is the largest iPod Touch, the wide screen multitouch VIDEO device. The crowd at the conference was shocked when apple announced this fact. Why in gods name would apple release a product targeting video and multimedia at 16gb? Well most say its because they wanted to release it with its slimline 8mm thickness, but here comes my main gripe over the touch to sum up.
If the iPod Touch is an iPhone lacking the phone but only with an extra 8gb at the same price point, why would i want the iPod touch? 8gb vs a full Phone and Multimedia pack together? The choice seems obvious.
Had Apple done what most would have thought they would do would to have released instead of the “ipod classic” they should have released 8, 16, 60, 80, 120 gb versions of the touch… This way everyone could enjoy the same sexy device regardless of space needs, ya the 60-120gb versions would be thicker but who cares, if someone needs 120gb as is what most people have been begging for forever, then they don’t mind it being thick. Now on the other hand they might mind the fact that if they want the 120gb version instead of the 12gb verison their going to get stuck with an old crappy looking iPod Classic instead!
Source: Inhouse
