After years of a rumored touchscreen iPod Apple finally unveiled the iPod Touch. Trouble is $400 dollars only gets you a tiny 16gb hard drive. Pay $300 and you’ll get a microscopic 8gb hard drive. The nerds are not happy.
The macrumors forums say it all
only 8gb and 16gb??? come on. I need more than that!!!
16gb?? Not big enough for me….I’ll be going with the 160gb ipod classic
For the first time in my Apple life I am actually angry with an announcement….
Not even going to consider this one until it gets at least 60GB of storage.
You have to wonder what Apple was thinking. Surely there must have been some sort of focus group that would’ve told them people didn’t want something that small. If the technology isn’t there or is the hardware cost is prohibitive a person could understand the rationale, however the thing isn’t going to sell very well considering it’s not any better than an iPhone and comes without cellular service. And some silly wifi music store isn’t gonna be pushing sales, so stop beating that drum Steve.
2 Comments
If you recall Steve Jobs talking about video/movies back in the day, he said (if I recall right) that people don’t listen to music the same way the watch movies. And I also see the Touch as mostly a PDA/Movie device rather than a pure play music device. (Or else they would have spiked the Classic, eh?)
How that relates, imho, to the size of the Touch drives is
1) You’re not going to watch the same moview over and over again (except Spinal Tap!). Unlike music, you’ll probably not keep hundreds of movies on the Touch.
2) Even if you have them, how practical is is to carry them around, when the most you have time to watch is one or two (?!) if you’re on a plane or trapped some place.
Thoughts?
Hey Joe, I agree with you to a point. I don’t think folks need to carry all their music and movies with them, however I do not think that 16gb is a decent size. Apple seems to want to sell folks on decreasing their number of gadgets— we even see this in one of their recent iPhone commercials “One Thing.” So I don’t feel like the iPod Touch was meant to be only a video player. I think it was meant to play movies (or TV shows) and music. That being the case a person storing just two movies would likely have about 11gb of space left (factoring in that the 16gb iPod Touch doesn’t really have 16gb of free space to use). 11gb of music isn’t bad, but it isn’t a lot. In fact that represents about a tenth of my music collection. I have music is lots of different genres so that basically means I have to know exactly what I might feel like listening to before leaving the house every day, and that I’d need to have the time to make those choices and completely sync the iPod Touch.
Right now I have a 30gb iPod, which I update about once a month. I’m not always happy with what I have on there but I can usually find the music that strikes my fancy. With 30gb I can confidently grab my iPod at nearly anytime and leave the house knowing I wont be disappointed.
Now consider this scenario. I have a 19 hour flight ahead of me. I doubt I’ll be awake for the whole time, but I am sure to be awake for most of it. I could watch five two hour movies on that flight and still have time to spare. Those movies would take up nearly 10gb of the iPod Touch leaving about 3gb for music. This may seem like an extreme scenario but consider if a person left for a three day business trip without access to their computer storing all their music and movies.
16gb isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it is limiting enough to create a device that requires planning and while I don’t mind making plans for important things I hate the thought of making plans for an iPod.