You're right it is about the conjoint benefit. But from a marketing standpoint I don't see anything I'd like to trade off. This is an exchange not really an upgrade. Battery life is already pretty damn high on the iPods, with the direction the company's going with video HD size will start to seem smaller and smaller fairly quickly. I don't know for sure but I'd be guessing that's where a lot of consumer-placed utility is going to be.

And yes. There are other things to consider from a technology perspective. I was just trying to speak to the marketing side of things.

Yes, but from a marketing standpoint the mini and the nano were not really marketed as the same product. They were marketed as two different brands serving a similar niche. You can't really do that with the iPod.

As kind of a restatement of my own words you're right. It is possible. But it seems to me to be an unlikely option. The technology provides no obvious consumer benefits. In fact from a consumer standpoint it seems like a downgrade. The only way you'd see a switch like that being a good idea is if it facilitated some other more obvious benefits that were clear and/or marketable to the customer base. The switch from mini to nano can be seen as one of those switches where the size drop (and remember the most popular mini size was the 4g model not the 6 by a long shot... Not to mention that they never really marketed the HD size as much as the price and form factor) was justifiable.

I really don't see that kind of change occuring with the regular iPod. It's the foundation brand, and as such needs to remain relatively steady in the minds of the consumers.

That's my take at least.

There's no way this will happen. From a marketing perspective it would be a huge SNAFU to take a next generation product to market that has less space than the model before it. I don't care what the benefits would be from the geek (read: not average consumer) perspective. When flash memory gets to the point where it could surpass the current model's capacity while not being astronomical in price, then it will be a possibility.

Final Link Ends Here With Free Software

http://sillysoft.net/ahl/

Comcast

Wow :-0