I'd like to see the iPod mini get a capacity boost to 10 or 15 gigs. That would be excellent.

Here at work these last two weeks, there are two guys from our Tokyo office camping out in the cube next to mine. They have these little Panasonic "Let's Note" laptops, with what look to be 12-inch screens. They're probably no more than 15mm thick when closed.

Anyway, a tiny hard drive would be just the thing if Apple were developing a thinner, lighter PowerBook.

Hm... not sure those little hard drives offer the level of performance a Powerbook would need. Especially a liquid cooled dual-G5 one.

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Dirt Road wrote:
Here at work these last two weeks, there are two guys from our Tokyo office camping out in the cube next to mine. They have these little Panasonic "Let's Note" laptops, with what look to be 12-inch screens. They're probably no more than 15mm thick when closed.

Anyway, a tiny hard drive would be just the thing if Apple were developing a thinner, lighter PowerBook.

Apple makes computers?

Seriously, though...this looks like the companies are just being reluctant to make the purchase "official". It still looks to me that they're going to be upgrading the iPods to possibly 20, 40, and 60GB.

Nice thought, though. I PowerBook or iBook "mini" would be very cool.

How about a smaller, slicker, cooler (both kinds) of iMac. Currently the two biggest parts in the iMac are the CD and the hard drive. Shrink the HD and you have more design flexibility especially if you were to also use the slot loading CD from the PowerBook.

A 60g HD iPod, big freaking deal! Who cares? You think someone is going to carry $2000, $3000 to $10,000 worth of downloaded music? First, who can afford it? Second, you can only listen to a certain percentage of your total music anyway. If you're a professional who needs these capacities, I might understand the hoopla.

Statistics show no more than 5- 7% maybe 10% tops, listen to their total collection of music on an average 500 songs. So, to listen to about ten percent of your music collection you would need at least 3000 songs. I cannot for the life of me understand some walking around with music blaring into their ears 16 hours a day and to carry essentially $3000 dollars worth of music! I think only a very few people could afford such a thing and are either young, ( under 30), affluent and WAY TO much time on their hands.

Hell, Apple needs to push the envelop further than just putting in a bigger albeit tiny HD. That's a bunch of smoke. if the 60g HD is a the purported "vPod" then I too would be "pissed" at Toshiba" for letting the cat out the bag. But, i doubt that is what is happening.

Ron Silver

Thinksecret.com is reporting that apple is mighty pissed off that Toshiba basically pre-announced the 60 GB iPods. This "announcement" from the US division is basically damage control in response to apple flame emails.

Unfortunately, the deed is done. 60 GB iPods are DEFINATELY in the pipeline.

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You think someone is going to carry $2000, $3000 to $10,000 worth of downloaded music?

There are other uses for iPods besides storing and listening to music. I'm hoping that the 4th generation iPod will include a card reader, better than Belkin's if possible, that will make the iPod an ideal mobile storage device.

If Think Secret is right and Jobs is upset with Toshiba, it better mean more than just a 60 gig iPod. Not that Jobs should listen to me, but if the big announcement is simply a capacity increase, even if it is a "new generation" iPod, so what? Hardly earth shaking news and certainly not worthy of "Just one more thing" type announcements. I hope he wasn't pinning a keynote on that!

But then, if this is something more than a capacity increase, anticipation sure has been heightened, IMHO.

Joe Futral

Yes, do YOU really want to be carrying around 10, 15, 20, 40+ gigs of your files, where it can be easily lost or stolen? The last time I checked, Apple "sold" nearly 100,000,000 million iTune songs and sold about 3,000,000 iPods. That translates to about 33 songs per iPod about. Right?
To ME, that miniscule average number of songs on each iPod is an abysmal marketing failure!

Apple needs to push more songs and open the iPod into a more versatile electronic gadget capable of both audio and video with MORE accessories to truly make use of these huge mini HD capacities. 60 gigs for music and walking around with valuable files, please that's far too preposterous to even believe. Talk about a distortion reality field!

Ron Silver

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Guest wrote:
Yes, do YOU really want to be carrying around 10, 15, 20, 40+ gigs of your files, where it can be easily lost or stolen? The last time I checked, Apple "sold" nearly 100,000,000 million iTune songs and sold about 3,000,000 iPods. That translates to about 33 songs per iPod about. Right?
To ME, that miniscule average number of songs on each iPod is an abysmal marketing failure!

Your conclusion is completely full of, er, holes. Example: My wife has an iPod mini. It's nearly filled and, somehow, none of the music on it came from the iTMS. How can this be? Simple: It's all been ripped from CDs we already own. Eventually, we'll get around to getting stuff from the iTMS, but at this point we don't need it. Marketing failure? Try again.

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Guest wrote:
Second, you can only listen to a certain percentage of your total music anyway.

Ron Silver

True you can only listen to a small percentage of your music at any one time - BUT - which percentage? I want to have my my WHOLE collection of music (1000+ CDs) not so I can listen to it ALL, but so I can listen to ANY of it I want.

I find it unlikely that the average person has 60 GB of music they absolutely HAVE to have with them at all times. Space on the iPod is becoming less and less of a selling point for me. Certainly, if 60 GB is available, and they restructure the iPod line so that it doesn't cost more, then by all means apple should go for it. But apple really needs to start offering more reasons to shell out money for high-end iPods other then just the amount of space on the drive. Prime example: once everybody has an iPod (which is fastly becoming the case), I don't see them shelling out for a new iPod if all they're getting is more space (iPod mini aside, which has a pathetic amount of space anyway).

Rule #1: If you provide the drive space, the user will fill it.

60Gb in an iPod won't ever go to waste, since it doubles nicely as a external FW drive. If you look at it with that perspective, even 60Gb is pathetic when most of my friends have Macs with at least half a terabyte worth of storage. MORE is NEVER enough!

Actually, I'm hoping that Apple throws us a real curve this summer and comes out with something totally unexpected... a 60Gb iPod is too obvious! I wanna see FOUR of these little drives inside a Powerbook running as a RAID! Now THAT would be news!

-Ken