1. How about doing away with the chrome back? Choose, say, three colours, one of which is black, and have them just one, solid piece of anodised aluminium, front(around the screen)and back.
Not sure if you're familiar with machining/assembly processes, or if you've ever cracked open an iPod, but there is
very little space inside. Machining a solid aluminum case with a total of 4 holes to less than a millimeter thin in a) expensive and b) time consuming. Not to mention I have no idea how you'd automate the process of inserting the hard drive (which is wider than the screen, so you wouldn't be able to fit it inside using this method) and the circuitry.
2. Make the screen BIG. At least the same size as the Touch. And yeah, make it a touchscreen as well.
Just buy an iPod touch? Again, this comment shows an ignorance of the engineering challenges associated with designing something of this nature. Touch screens require a sensor underneath the screen, which in turn adds more to one of the dimensions of the product. Since the only place to put the hard drive is underneath, you can't add capacity without making the thing thick, heavy, and therefore undesirable.
3. So we have a Classic, with a full-size touchscreen. What has that lost? The Clickwheel of course, which I still feel is a more intuitive interface than the touch.
Why waste time creating a virtual click wheel when that would take up a very large portion of the huge screen you're advocating for something that you can do with the touch of your finger? If it's so intuitive and you want it there all the time, then why have a full-screen iPod?
Give me another couple of hours playing around with ideas and I could come up with a few more.
Please do...
The point is, if Apple gave a damn about the Classic format, they would have put the required effort into it, and it would quite easily have developed into a very desirable iPod, that would I believe have shifted serious units.
I think it's an oppurtunity missed. But what the hell do I know?
Honestly I think your only complaint is that you can't fit all 200 GB of your music onto your iPod at once. I still find it mind-boggling that people think that they listen to 200 GB of music randomly and that somehow 120 GB (or 160 GB) worth of space is insufficient to hold the music they listen to the most frequently. Here's an idea: In iTunes, sort your music by Play Count and delete the stuff that has a blank in that column. I'm willing to bet that with a sufficient number of cuts (played 1 time, 2 times, etc) you'll be able to bring your iTunes library down in size very signficantly.
The iPod Classic is fantastic; unfortunately, I think it has become the red-headed stepchild that Apple neglects.
