We interrupt our regularly scheduled discussion of the new features in Apple’s new iLife ’05 suite of digital lifestyle applications to bring you this special report. There’s breaking news coming across the wires of a shake-up in the iPod nation.

No, it’s not an “iTunes music for food” scam, although you can get free iTunes music downloads by finding a winning code inside the bottle cap of certain specially-marked Pepsi products.

This week Apple announced some evolutionary, not revolutionary, changes to the iPod family of products, in order to fine-tune its presence in each of segments of the personal digital music player market.

There were no changes to the recently-announced iPod shuffle, which uses memory called “flash RAM” - the same kind of memory used in digital cameras. Still $99 for the 512 MB model that holds around 120 of your favorite songs in a player about the size of a stick of gum, that weighs as much as some car keys. The higher capacity, 1 GB, 240-song model sets you back $149.

The iPod mini family received the most attention, including the announcement of a new arrival and the departure of two old friends. The new arrival is, instead of a little brother, a big brother. To go along with the current 4 GB (1000 song) version, there’s now a 6 GB (1500 song) model. In addition, the battery life in both models is now advertised to be 18 hours (your results may vary with usage and settings).

Did you just give that special someone an iPod mini for Christmas or Valentine’s Day? Now, don’t kick yourself too hard, because you can’t escape this when dealing with consumer electronics. Apple dropped the price of the iPod mini by $50. That’s right. $199 for the 4 GB model. Now you get 6 GB of storage for what you paid ($249) for that pink (or blue, or silver, or green, or gold) mini just last week or last year.

Speaking of colors, if you have a gold iPod mini, you now have a collector’s item. Gold is out in the new line, for some reason. That’s one “old friend” gone. What’s the other departure? The FireWire connection.

Back when the iPod was introduced, one of its strongest selling points was its use of FireWire. FireWire is almost 40 times faster than USB 1.0, and has been the standard method of connecting digital video cameras to computers since the digital home video revolution began.

Since then, the “Wintel” world has accelerated USB 2.0 to equivalent speeds. The fact is that many PCs now come with a bevy of USB 2.0 ports and no FireWire ports. Since the majority of iPod buyers are Windows PC users, it makes sense for Apple to bundle just a USB 2.0 connector cable, instead of both USB 2.0 and FireWire, as they did before. This is not good news if you’re going to use your iPod with an older Mac, but, as they say, “bidness is bidness”.

The good ol’ original music-only iPod still comes with both FireWire and USB 2.0 connections, but now comes in just one size – 20 GB, or around 5000 songs – for $299. Evidently that’s the sweet-spot size and price for the segment.

To get more storage space, you’ll need to move into two models of the iPod photo. 30 GB for $349 and 60 GB for $449 - both $50 less than previous models. The new iPod photo models can also import and view photos directly from your digital camera with an adapter and software coming available next month.

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski