The Next Generation

Classic - 160GBs + 320GBs. One to two years from now might be a bit of a struggle for 320gb, but hey, none of us really guessed 160gb would make it so soon.

Touch - New colors, camera. I honestly can't see Apple swaying from the colours of their main products. I know they changed to a more silver look with the new classic but to be honest I don't see those horrible new colours making it to the Touch. Camera is a maybe but the use for it I can't see still -- if you have an iPod Touch, you'll have a mobile.

iTunes - All of those except the black skin are 100% possible, and I think the DRM thing could be coming sooner than you all may think. Apple, through all their products... forever... have stuck with the silver colours so until the next release of their operating system (the one after Leopard), I can't see it changing - and that's only if they change it then.

Still, I agree with the rest and would love to see it all - especially wireless headphones although I don't know if that will speed up brain tumour growths or not ;]

Can you really see Apple keeping the Classic all the way out to 2009 AND ruining it with those horrid colours?

2009 would be 64gb, and BlueTooth headphones are ####... so...

Fair enough.

Would you expect it to remain a 2.0mp camera, though? The quality on those without some pretty heavy imaging programmes built in are pretty crap. My Sony Ericsson k800i has a 3.2 and it's bulky as hell with a huge lense. The photos aren't that bad but there's quite a difference... especially since Apple isn't really in the camera/lense market... uh... at all. So yeah..

Can you really see Apple keeping the Classic all the way out to 2009 AND ruining it with those horrid colours?

2009 would be 64gb, and BlueTooth headphones are ####... so...

No, I just wanted to play along.

;)

Can you guys elaborate a bit more on the less DRM on iTunes. How much less DRM? Why do you think this? When do you excpect this by?

Apple Launches iTunes Plus

Higher Quality DRM-Free Tracks Now Available on the iTunes Store Worldwide

CUPERTINO, California—May 30, 2007—Apple today launched iTunes Plus—DRM-free music tracks featuring high quality 256 kbps AAC encoding for audio quality virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings—for just $1.29 per song. iTunes Plus is launching with EMI’s digital catalog of outstanding recordings, including singles and albums from Coldplay, The Rolling Stones, Norah Jones, Frank Sinatra, Joss Stone, Pink Floyd, John Coltrane and more than a dozen of Paul McCartney’s classic albums available on iTunes for the first time.

iTunes will continue to offer its entire catalog, currently over five million songs, in the same versions as today—128 kbps AAC encoding with DRM—at the same price of 99 cents per song, alongside the higher quality iTunes Plus versions when available. In addition, iTunes customers can now easily upgrade their library of previously purchased EMI content to iTunes Plus tracks for just 30 cents a song and $3.00 for most albums.

“Our customers are very excited about the freedom and amazing sound quality of iTunes Plus,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We expect more than half of the songs on iTunes will be offered in iTunes Plus versions by the end of this year.”

“This is a tremendous milestone for digital music,” said Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group. “Consumers are going to love listening to higher quality iTunes Plus tracks from their favorite EMI artists with no usage restrictions.”

With the release of iTunes Plus, customers can now download tracks from their favorite EMI artists without limitations on the type of music player or number of computers that purchased songs can be played on. iTunes is also offering customers a simple, one-click option to easily upgrade their library of previously purchased EMI content to the iTunes Plus versions. EMI music videos are now also available in iTunes Plus versions with no change in price. iTunes Plus songs purchased from the iTunes Store will play on all iPods, Mac or Windows computers, widescreen TVs with Apple TV™ and soon iPhones, as well as many other digital music players.

The iTunes Store features the world’s largest catalog with over five million songs, 350 television shows and over 500 movies. The iTunes Store has sold over 2.5 billion songs, 50 million TV shows and over two million movies, making it the world’s most popular online music, TV and movie store.

So... are there iTunes Plus videos yet? Movies?

I don't think that there will be an iPod that will go much above 160GB. File sizes are getting smaller, so there won't be a need for it anyway.

i'll let surf monkey tear you to shreds on this one.

capacities on the touch probably won't get up to 64 gb unless it's in December or really late. I think the touch will go 16 and 32.

I can't see a camera at all on the touch.

I'm guessing classics will go 120 and 240 agreeing with whoever said that.
I can't see nano colors on the classic but maybe a RED one.

Nanos will probably be 8 and 16 with the same form factor.

shuffle has gotta go 2gb, it's gonna start costing them more for the 1 gb than the 2 gb.

OR

you could go the fanboy way:

ipod classic TOUCH

ipod touch TOUCH

ipod nano TOUCH

ipod shuffle TOUCH :D

No shredding required. All I need to say is that the exact opposite is true. File sizes get larger all the time, not smaller. Look at iTunes Plus files. Larger. Look at lossless files. Larger. That's the future. Larger files, larger storage.

On iTunes, maybe. If you look at the size of a 40 minute TV show on iTunes, its maybe 500 MB, and look at a 2 hour video that you get from a program that turns DVD-MP4, its also 500 MB. Same quality.

On iTunes, maybe. If you look at the size of a 40 minute TV show on iTunes, its maybe 500 MB, and look at a 2 hour video that you get from a program that turns DVD-MP4, its also 500 MB. Same quality.

Compression technology isn't going to make any major advances though. If people want to compress the crap out of their files, that's dandy. But that's not the future. As storage become cheaper and cheaper, people will move to higher bit rates and eventually to uncompressed files. The trend in file sizes is up, not down.

Yeah capacity will certainly go up if not just for music but for video..I mean 160GB really isn't exactly excessive when it comes to videos..and throw music in and you'll fill it up in no time.

I would say size wise it will not get much smaller. Storage and interactivity will be the next steps to climb.

Next Generation? How about releasing iPods that are fully tested before releasing them. Thats a good idea.

I wouldn't put it past apple to discontinue the classic and made a hard drive based iPod touch.

You must be new here then :rolleyes:

Next Generation? How about releasing iPods that are fully tested before releasing them. Thats a good idea.Yeah, that's all I'm going to wish for in the next generation: They actually work correctly.

If I can manage a 170GB media library effortlessly with a 2G nano and iTunes smartlists, I don't really need the capacities and shiny, I need a device that will actually supersede a 2G nano in terms of daily functionality. Increased capacity and touchscreens are cute, but if they're harder to manage either due to bugs or just plain backward trends in design, who cares?

Which currently cost around $19,000 USD, so forget that within the next, oh, 20 years.

Flash technology is basically being replaced anyway.

I'm curious, what is going to replace flash drives or if you like Solid State Drives?

Samsung is getting ready to release their flash based drives ranging from 4 GB to 64GB. And over the next five year I wouldnt be surprised if these drives go up to 512 GB or larger.

http://www.samsungssd.com/where_to_buy/index.html

ScanDisk had a press release that mentioned their 32 GB flash drive would be initial priced at $350 USD to computer manufacturers. So that works out to be about $11 per 1 GB.

http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressRelease.aspx?ID=3732

So, I guess the future is closer than you think. :cool:

...which is surpassing flash at an incredible speed which will eventually kill off Apple's big idea of flash-based video devices. :D

But no, Apple won't do HD because that means they have to make the iPod Touch slighly bigger.

Tut tut.

are you sure about that surf monkey? some people don't have too much music and can easily be pleased with 8 or 16 GB of space for music and video.

I know that I would be able ot make do with 4 GB of space for ALL of my music and some video. It is not like you need a week of continuous video and all your music on one tiny handheld device after all.

Also many people who have large music collections don't need all their music for a day and easily rotate songs and stuff so I think that the small flash capacities make perfect sense and based on sales, many people agree. Besides flash memory is still increasing in size at a good pace, the only major problem is the shortage of NAND Memory at the moment.

are you sure about that surf monkey? some people don't have too much music and can easily be pleased with 8 or 16 GB of space for music and video.

I know that I would be able ot make do with 4 GB of space for ALL of my music and some video. It is not like you need a week of continuous video and all your music on one tiny handheld device after all.

Also many people who have large music collections don't need all their music for a day and easily rotate songs and stuff so I think that the small flash capacities make perfect sense and based on sales, many people agree. Besides flash memory is still increasing in size at a good pace, the only major problem is the shortage of NAND Memory at the moment.

I am sure about it. Look at the Touch and iPhone forums. Probably the biggest knock on both devices is the capacity. Besides, though you don't think you need more than 8 or 16 gig today, a couple of years from now you'll need three or four times that much. File sizes for music and video are going to continue to go up as people move towards lossless and HD files. Storage capacity requirements will skyrocket over the next few years. The idea that 4, 8 or even 16 gig will satisfy "average" users for any significant amount of time is just absurd. With desktop hard drives swiftly approaching 1tb, it's practically a foregone conclusion that PMPs will follow suit.

Megapixels aren't everything. The more you add to a small sensor, the more noise you introduce to the image. In a small form factor like iPhone, it would be better to focus on quality images than raw file size.
That annoys the sh** out of me when people base how good their cameras are based solely on mp. Who cares about megapixels when your lens is the size of a dime?

Remember though that the files you store on your PMP aren't necessarily only going to be played on the PMP itself. In other words, people are very likely to store full HD resolution video on their portable devices that they'll either stream to a large screen or hook up to an AV connector to watch on a TV or other device. If anything, the "required" storage capacity for video will increase more rapidly than it does for audio. Further, consider the fact that PMPs are designed to use more and more diverse kinds of files as time goes by. Some people already have more disc space devoted to photos and movies than they do music.

So, my point is that you have to stop thinking about the PMP in a vacuum. It's not a closed system. It's a portable storage method for media that you'll use in all sorts of ways. Therefore, there's always going to be a market for bigger and bigger capacity. That's why many people, myself included, think that Apple is taking a pretty big step backwards by offering piddling little 16 gig iPod Touch devices.

But you forget that as I posted before, there is no way that current technology in a handheld device can stream 720p and definitely not 1080p video. The iPod just does not have that kind of processing power, and even if it does in the future, capacity will be much larger by then.

H.264 is the HD standard codec. iPod will play HD files sooner than later. And you're wrong that capacity increases are gradual. Just look at the Classic. A couple of months ago, the biggest iPod you could get was 80 gig. Now it's 160. I wouldn't characterize that kind of jump as gradual.

The next Classic will have a scroll pad the size of that on the nano, leaving more space for a bigger screen and maybe a radio could be added with the ability to record allowing you to make your own podcasts from the radio all on the iPod itself.

Yeah super, it is kinda inexplicable that not ONE iPod thus far has had a built-in radio...I can also see why not, but still. Not ONE model with a built-in radio? Those remotes SUCKED.

If the screen gets any bigger it will be the same size as the iPod Classic.

The market for the Classic will drop, and the price of the Nano will go up.

Silly.

Uhh, they *were* talking about the uhhh, the Classic.

Maybe next time you'll pay a little more attention to the words in front of you before you self-humiliatingly call your iPod brethren silly. You paid money for that monitor.

:)

I misread.

Don't tell me you haven't done it in the past, Mr. Jebus.

Oh, I have. I just didn't call anyone's idea "silly" afterward.

ummmmm go 100GB+ touch! there we're good

In 2008:

iPod Shuffle: Now with FM radio (like in MP3 shuffle player by Foston) and 4GB!!! Price US$79
iPod Nano: Now with FM radio, sound recorder, Wifi, Bluetooth and new fluorecent colours Price 8GB US$149 16GB US$199
iPod Classic: Now with FM radio, sound recorder, transmitor FM, Wifi, Bluetooth. Price US$249 160GB US$349 320GB
iPod Touch: Now with FM radio, sound recorder, bluetooth, camera 2MP. Price US$299 16GB.