there is no way this is the end of the road for HDD based iPods. you show where in the next 5 years you will be able to produce 160g flash at a low cost to put in an iPod, by the time the touch has 64gb, the iPod classic will have over two days of battery and at least a few gigabyte hard drive. flash is much more efficient, but it costs way to much right now, apple will not replace a 160gig hard drive iPod classic with a 64gig touch, not going to happen, they would be working backwards memorywise
Did I say it was the end of the road? What I said was that the Classic and any further refinements to it
do represent the end of the road for hard drive based ipods.
You are making
BOLD predictions about flash prices in
five years. Do you know how much flash memory cost 5 years ago? 32MB memory cards for digital cameras sold for
one hundred bucks. Maybe you've never heard of Moore's Law? Try to educate yourself, you look like a fool.
As much as you dislike believing it, Apple tends to precede the industry by a year or two on these things. Hard drives are also going to be disappearing as the OS installation partition on many laptops within 12-24 months. The OS will be installed on a 32GB flash disk for excellent battery time and super fast bootup resume behavior.... for those that require more than 32GB of storage they can add a secondary hard disk.
Networks, VPNs, file servers, etc, are slowly rendering the need for massive storage in portable devices redundant.
I've been working in the technology industry for a loooong time and am fairly good at predicting these things. I remember when the 20GB iPod came out and I pointed out that they would have 40GB within 6-12 months. I got heckled pretty good by people that either claimed 40GB was impractical for a portable hard disc, or that 40GB was more than anybody could ever use.
I'm firmly convinced that the Classic is the end of the road for hard drive based ipods. Flash will double or more than double every 12-18 months on the iPod touch. It really won't take long for it to get into large capacities that will satisfy MOST users. For those that want 1TB, they will probably continue to increase storage capacity on the Classic until it is discontinued at some point in the next 2 years or so.
Additionally wireless access, etc, will make it seem foolish to carry massive amounts of stuff to sort through, especially when you can access it from your home system over a wireless network, etc.