Alaerian said:
Here's to hoping that the iPod Classic has a long life ahead of it!
For your sake, I hope you're right!
I certainly couldn't care less, but it doesn't affect me one way or the other, so more power to you.
To explain my reasoning a little bit more, though, the way I see it, based both on what people are buying these days as well as what new products Apple *and* other manufacturers are coming out with, hard-drive-based players are on their way out. Nobody really wants one (which by "nobody" I mean your average everyday Joe Consumer). HDD technology as a *whole* is on the way out, even. And just like the floppy drive before it, Apple (along with the rest of the industry, I'm sure) is slated to ditch mechanical and failure-prone magnetically-charged spinning discs and wholeheartedly embrace solid-state storage across their entire product line as soon as it is practical to do so (cost comes down, etc.)
It will take a while for this to happen in desktops and laptops since capacity is still king in both of those markets. But as we are already seeing to a great extent, this will happen in portable/hand-held devices first, where flash memory simply makes way more sense (power consumption, durability against physical shock, and so on, all at the cost of capacity in the near-term which most people deem to be an acceptable compromise for hand-held devices). The only reason that the iPod Classic line used hard drives originally is because it has only been fairly recently that flash memory has become anywhere close to an economically-viable design choice for consumer products.
Now, let's talk about iPod Touch for a moment. For the iPod Touch line, Apple has demonstrated that they prefer, for the sake of simplicity, to keep all current offered models at $400 and below, and to offer 3 different capacities at roughly $100 apart; so there are (roughly) $200, $300, and $400 price points for 8, 32, and 64GB respectively. Remember, though, that when the iPod Touch was first introduced in 2007, the three models were priced at $300, $400, and $500 for 8, 16, and 32GB! Within the span of 3 years, the top model has vastly increased both in feature count and in raw computing power, has doubled in storage capacity, and has had its price DROP BY $100! That's only in 3 years' time!!
Like I said in the other thread that you quoted yourself in,
Apple is not the type of company which takes pride in past accomplishments. They are not a company of nostalgia. In fact, if anything, they are anti-nostalgia. All they care about is what they can make succeed going forward. And once a product has outlived its usefulness, they are going to ditch it, sure as the sky is blue. Again, we've seen them do it before to products that were a core part of their business or that they had a hand in innovating: the Apple II (you think I'm kidding here, but that line got upgraded many times after the introduction of Macintosh, and there were many who didn't want it discontinued; it was a staple in many businesses and in the education sector, even throughout the 90s), floppy disc technology, translucent candy-colored all-in-ones, MacOS Classic, and the PowerPC, just to name a few. I'd argue that mechanical hard drives are on their way out, and with them, classic iPods. Apple already ditched the iconic iPod shape and controls on the most recent Nano, which I think tells you something.
Now, it is possible that they *could* decide to keep the iPod Classic alive by outfitting it with flash memory instead of hard drives. But if they did that, and tried to keep it at its current capacity level, it would surely (at this point) increase the cost of the device to the consumer from its current $300 price point, so on top of the change from HDD to flash, Apple would need to then expend additional resources to distinguish the iPod "classic" from the previous model in ways other than storage technology, in order to justify the higher price...I would argue, from observing how they tend to go about product revs, that from Apple's point-of-view, the customer needs to be able to see and discern a *tangible* and *practical* difference from the old to the new; they won't limit the set of changes to something as abstract (to the consumer) as internal storage technology.
Keep in mind that my argument was that the Classic will get axed *when* the Touch finally hits 128GB, and not that this would happen in a year. I didn't say that it will be next year; it might not be. What I will claim is that the Touch will *not* hit 128GB *until* Apple can offer the 128GB model at the same price point (or less; remember, there have been price drops) as the current top-of-the-line 64GB Touch. Once this happens, that means that there will be, at MOST, a $100 price difference between the iPod Classic and the latest iPod Touch at 128GB. Given this fact, dollars-to-donuts Apple will drop the Classic and spin it as "yeah, it costs $100 more. But look at all that you get for that extra $100! It has a HUGE screen, which is WAY better to watch video on than the Classic. It's a powerful, wireless pocket computer! It has the best iPod experience to-date with its multitouch display controls, it's a super-hot gaming platform, it's an e-book reader, it's got the App Store, and gives you a fully-compliant HTML5-spec web browser wherever there is Wi-Fi!" Not to mention that, because the storage is solid-state, it will be infinitely more rugged. Apple will use all of this to claim that the Classic is "dead-end technology" and that a multifunction iPod pocket computer doesn't cost much more but is able to DO a whole lot more.
You know I'm right.
-- Nathan
EDIT: I stand corrected on the current iPod Classic price point; I just looked it up, and it retails for $250, not $300. Hmm. That might change things a little, but long-term I don't think it does much to weaken my hypothesis.
First, flash storage prices can only continue to go down from here, especially as it becomes a mass-market phenomenon. So I don't see any price hikes for future iPod Touch models (Apple wouldn't do that to themselves, especially since any price hikes would reduce the price gap between the largest iPod Touch and the cheapest iPad even more, which wouldn't look good), and there is a great deal to make me hope that more price cuts could be on the way in the future (in part because of point #2 below).
Second, flash storage is continually getting larger, faster, and cheaper, while I would wager that virtually NO research and development money is being applied toward iPod-sized hard drives in the same way. That's not to say that hard drives as a whole are not currently enjoying advances in technology; on the contrary, we see that they are. I mean, good grief: 2TB+ is ridiculously cheap these days! But the iPod Classic employs a special, tiny 1.8" drive that really doesn't get used in any other industry; in fact, I'm pretty sure that Apple is Toshiba's (the manufacturer of the Classic's HDD) biggest customer for the things. I highly doubt that we are going to see capacity advancements in these kinds of specialty hard drives, because what would be the incentive? The only company buying them is Apple, and once flash gets to the point where it is as cheap as those drives for the same amount of storage capacity, then it's over.
