The reason you are freaked out is because you do not know perhaps the best way to get a lot of video onto the iPhone. Pick your favorite video, and find out its resolution - divide width by height to get the aspect ratio. Divide the aspect ratio into 480 to figure out the height of the video, perhaps 480x260. Then, load up iSquint and go into advanced options, enter that aspect ratio and then 64kbs for the audio (sounds fine since it's AAC) and 256kbs for the video. In the main menu, select h.264 encoding. The finished product will be about 200-300mb and have plenty nice quality for this purpose. With this technique i may be able to justify having only a 4gb iPhone. Six videos with this technique, full length films, take up 1.5gb. 1.5gb of music (at least 300 songs) also. 1GB reserved for photos and system stuff. It would be enough to get by, while 8GB would be a luxury. With 8GB, you could easily get in an entire season of a primetime show, perhaps 600-800 songs, and all the personal data you needed. In any case, the key is proper encoding of your media and also the understanding that it is foolish to carry more media than what your lifestyle demands and your battery can support. You don't honestly need to tote around 10 full length movies and 20+ hours of music. If you are a serious mac user then your macbook/pro probably rarely leaves your side, and so you're never too far away from a larger repository of media. Remember...it's a phone that will entertain you for 6-12 hours if need be (international flight perhaps or car trip) but nobody is really going to jack into this device like the matrix for a full week, so demanding 16gb of media is excessive although it would be nice. I only ever like about 10% of my library at any given time, so the iPhone is fine for me. I have not decided on which model, but I have agreed that the 8GB is highway robbery. 4GB of flash is worth nothing...a 4GB SDHC card goes for $30. If they had given me a measly card slot, for $50 I could have added 8gb. Sigh.
