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What’s next for the iPod?
I’M in the market for an
iPod, but I don’t want to buy one just before
Apple comes out with a better model. When’s the next
version due?
If you
think it’s tough to play the stock market, try guessing
Apple’s product plans. This company follows its own
counsel and keeps its own secrets, routinely surprising
industry analysts, tech journalists and even the
employees in its own stores with new Macs and iPods.
A
variety of rumor-mongering sites—see, for instance,
http://macrumors.com and http://appleinsider.com—have
sprung up to try to pry these secrets out of Cupertino,
California (to which Apple has sometimes responded with
lawsuits). But keeping up with all of them can become a
hobby in its own right, and their accuracy is often
iffy.
You’re
better off looking at how long a particular Apple
product has been on sale, on the principle that the
oldest models are most likely to be replaced with souped-up
versions. You can read past product announcements at
Apple’s PR library (http://apple.com/pr), and the
MacRumors site also offers a one-page summary (http://macrumors.com/buyersguide)
of the lifecycles of Apple’s computers and gadgets.
That
page suggests that the
iPod Touch and the iPod Shuffle are safe bets
because the former had its memory doubled in February
and the latter had its price cut later that month. It
advises against buying an iPod Classic, but is neutral
on the
iPod Nano. I’m not so sure about that last point:
the Nano should benefit just as much as the Touch from
the declining price of flash memory, so it’s arguably
overdue for a memory boost of its own.
If you
time a purchase incorrectly, you may still have luck
politely pleading your case at an Apple store. One or
two readers have told me that Apple’s stores allowed
them to trade in an iPod they’d recently purchased there
for a new model released days afterward. |
