The Apple Faithful had one of their revival meetings today, and Reverend Jobs rolled out the new tchotchkes. Chief among these were the new iPod Touch, which is kind of an iPhone without the phone part. They also renamed the standard old iPod the ‘iPod Classic’, which seems like the kiss of death to me.
Jobs emphasized that you can now store 40,000 songs on the 160 GB iPod Classic. That sounds great, but how big is the average music collection, really? I’m not sure how representative this data point is, but I’ve got the 1000th largest collection on MP3 Tunes, out of 90,000 members, and I’ve only got 7500 songs.
The extra storage is for video, obviously, which brings me to my question. Do you watch video on your iPod? What type of stuff do you watch? How long is your average video-viewing session?
UPDATE: You know, a bunch of the usual losers on Digg were complaining that the iPod Touch only comes in 8 and 16 GB versions. An entire season of an hour-long television series is about 8 GB. Do they need the thing to hold the complete filmography of Woody Allen?
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I don’t see the point in video on a screen so small except for short clips.
I could imagine me storing video content on it for playback on my TV though.
I watch a fair number of video podcasts, and I have ripped a few DVDs to watch on my “old” 5G iPod video 30 GB. My music collection is about 50 GB, and I find it annoying to have to split it up. Adding video, stored files, and so on can fill up extra space.
Mostly I think they made the 160 GB version because they could — there are 160 GB hard disks that small now.
I actually do watch video on my iPod and it’s great. It is not usually full length movies (though I have), but more often TV shows that I watch on Skytrain during my commute.
That being said, if I didn’t have a public transit commute I would never watch video on it, other than short clips of my kids to bore people with.
I have 13,000 songs … as you’d know if you ever used that cool simplify media thing you blogged about.
And no, I’ve never watched video on my ipod, though I have two friends who do fairly regularly.
The Irish Revenue Commissioners found recently in favour of Apple’s contention that the 5G iPod had the essential character of an audio player, and thus should be charged 4% customs duty coming in from China instead of 14%, which is the duty charged on video players, that previously the Revenue had deemed it to be. An interesting case! Essentially the arguments ran that predominantly people use their iPod videos to listen to music (arguments such as you can’t take a movie jogging unless you like running into trees) and that moreover good as it in resolution, the screen size was just too small to make it a comfortable device to watch full-length movies on. Additionally, the audio circuitry is state of the art, with a Woolfson processor (a very expensive Scottish made specialist item) for sound and a regular, bog standard video circuit that means the manufacturer’s emphasis is still towards audio being the main reason for customer choice. Even Steve Jobs pointed out that the video is only a nice extra. Most other video mp3 manufacturers like Creative would still be stuck with a higher rate of duty, although it is likely that they pay 10% on the basis that the Zen is also radio-enabled (radios are charged 10% duty). Haven’t noticed the price of the iPod coming down much lately though.
I have a 30GB video iPod, and have spent far too much time moving files between my laptop (which has iTunes) and my external hard drive, and my work computer, so that I keep my iPod refreshed with my latest acquisitions, but still stay within the 30GB on the iPod and 60GB on the laptop. Note that this doesn’t include any of the music off my CD collection. And I do like my podcasts, though I tend to stick with the audio ones.
I’m sure I could use up the 160GB without dipping my feet into the video pool all that often. I’d probably consider it a challenge.
I probably would watch videos on my iPod more, but mine’s from the first generation of the video type, and the battery doesn’t last all that long when you play videos. I’m not sure I could get through a movie on one charge, though I could certainly do an hour-long show.
I think the “classic” really is the last gasp for the disk-based iPod – it only exists because flash is still prohibitively expensive at those kinds of capacities.
On one hand, Apple needs new iPods to have more capacity than old iPods, because more is always better for some people and no-one wants to see any maximum specs going backwards – but on the other hand they seem to have no intention of making the iPhone/iPod Touch architecture anything other than purely flash-based, because it won’t be too far in the future that flash will be able to do it all and take over from disk in the way of all disruptive technologies.
So I figure the “classic” has about two years shelf-life…
The only time I watch video on my iPod is when I’m on an airplane. Since I’m not a business traveler or anything, flights are few and far between. My biggest use of my iPod is that I play it while driving to and from work. My commute is 45 minutes at best, so that’s plenty of time to listen to songs or podcasts. Not the best idea to watch video while driving.
I have about 60000 songs. But I mostly use my ipod for video. I hate the long commute to and from work. This is the only reason I deal with the itty bitty ipod screen. It makes the time go by without always having to have the same conversation with the same people you see on public transportation.