
There were two groups of people who were upset to hear Apple’s announcement of new iPods on Wednesday: The poor schmucks who paid $600 for an iPhone, only to see the price drop by 30 percent in two months, and the poor schmucks who make Microsoft’s Zune. The Zune’s main innovation was its Wi-Fi capability — which lets you share songs between Zunes, if two Zune-equipped people somehow manage to meet — and Apple just trumped that with the iPod Touch, which are equipped with Wi-Fi that actually allows you to buy songs from the iTunes Music Store.
But it’s frustrating that the highest capacity iPod Touch holds a mere sixteen gigs, making it an unlikely choice for hardcore iPod fans. The so-called iPod classic now tops out at 160 gigs, but with no Wi-Fi. Why? To get above sixteen gigs or so, you need to switch from flash memory to battery-draining hard drives — and presumably, the combined battery burden of Wi-Fi and hard drive was just too much.
It’s cool to be able to buy music almost anywhere, but in the end, today’s iPod and iPhone selection still represents a compromise, limited by current technology. Ideally, you’d have a eighty-gig-plus iPod or iPhone that would allow you to surf the web and buy tunes at high speed wherever you are — but free Wi-Fi everywhere is just a fantasy, and the iPhone isn’t even capable of running on fast 3G phone networks. Another dream: Imagine paying ten dollars a month for an iTunes subscription — all the music you want, streamed wirelessly, anytime. Give Apple (and maybe a competitor or two) a couple more years, and we might just get there. In the meantime, as singer KT Tunstall told us yesterday at the Apple event, the iPod Touch is “a nice piece of kit.”
UPDATE: In an open letter on the Apple site, Steve Jobs defends his iPhone price drop but offers a concession to disgruntled consumers — $100 credit toward the purchase of anything at Apple stores. “Details are still being worked out and will be posted on Apple’s website next week. Stay tuned.”

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