Why You Should Buy an iPod Classic Before it Goes Away

Last week, Steve Jobs took the stage and made an announcement — new iPods were on the way. And not just one or two models either, but updates to the whole line. Available for order in the Apple Store was a new Shuffle, Nano and Touch.
  Conspicuously absent from that list? The iPod Classic. The venerable clickwheel's lack of inclusion was taken by many as a sign of the apocalypse, prompting worry about the potential absence of a high-capacity player. Disaster was averted, however, when a quick message to Apple PR revealed that the Classic was indeed alive and well, though unchanged in capacity or form.  
 
But for a few brief moments, it seemed as if the age of high-capacity music players had come to an end.

Early MP3 players competed for one thing — storage. Flash players offered no more than a CD's worth of songs when the first iPod was introduced, and even hard-disk offerings could only hold a few thousand at a time. As the years went on, this changed, and capacities of 20, 30 or 60GB weren't unheard of. But then, something changed. Consumers didn't want bulky, hard-drive based models. Flash was smaller, more reliable, and used less power. It also cost a lot more, and held a lot less.
 
Today, it's easy to pick up a cheap, 8GB player, but far more difficult to find a capable model over 100GB in size.  Creative Labs has long since ceased production of any music player over 64GB in size, and moved almost entirely away from hard drive based offerings. Archos only offers larger capacity models in the form of internet tablets and slates — far from an iPod-style dedicated player. Other brand name options are scarce, and even the Zune HD only offers a maximum of 64GB, though we can only hope that beefier capacities are on the way.

For music collectors, there's little choice. Flash-based devices have become the norm, and capacity hasn't yet reached the size or price advantages of traditional hard drive-based players. And though you could argue a 64GB option on many players is sufficient for modestly sized music collections, once you factor in videos, apps and games, its clear that space will be eaten into quickly. It's obvious this will change in the future, but for now, there's few solutions left for a capable, single-purpose MP3 player or device.

Of course, it may just turn out that the answer isn't even storage at all, but something else entirely. Services like Grooveshark have proved that the cloud could one day power the next-generation of high-capacity players; storage would no longer be an issue, and our libraries only limited by the size of our musical tastes. However , that's wishful thinking — at least for now — and local forms of storage haven't been trumped quite yet. 

Until then, what's a hapless music lover to do? Stock up on iPod Classics, or similarly sized players — and do it now. If there's one thing Apple's exclusion of the Classic from last week's press conference reveals, it's that the day's of high-capacity music players are numbered. Some people just want to take all their music with them, and a flash-based Touch just wont cut it. 
 
Lead image via flickr user Jonathan Urch.