You’ll remember that last week in this space I issued a stern warning: “Don’t Buy An iPod This Weekend!” If, by some remotely astronomical chance, and for some unimaginable, illogical, unpreventable, irrational, unthinkable, unfathomable reason, you didn’t read last Friday’s edition of The Times Record, and you drove, walked, rowed, skateboarded, flew, or surfed (either by board or browser) to a place where iPods were sold, and purchased one/two/three/baker’s dozen, you may want to keep the receipt and look closely in the fine print for the “return” policy. Chances are you still have time.

This Wednesday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs addressed a gathered throng of tech journalists to announce that Apple has retooled, re-skinned, revised, revamped, restructured (and some other words that start with “re”) their entire iPod line, of course in time for the holiday buying season.

In related news, on Wednesday morning before the Apple event, Microsoft dropped the price of their personal digital media player, the Zune, by $50, to $199. According to Microsoft, the price reduction was “part of the normal product cycle” and “something we had on the books for months”. Surely it was sheer coincidence that Apple decided to announce new iPods on the same day as Microsoft’s carefully planned price cut. Yeah, right. By the way, the brown-colored Zune, with it’s “massive” 30 GB of storage space and laughable “Welcome to the Social” wireless song “squirting” capability, is bigger, fatter, heavier, and uglier than even the old iPods. But, I digress.

So, back to the reality of making products people actually want to use, which look forward rather than play catch-up. Here’s the straight skinny on Apple’s new iPod family, from small to large.
The tiny iPod shuffle, with its one-gigabyte of flash memory and $79 price tag, receives only new colors, more subdued versions of silver, green, purple, red, and blue.

The iPod nano is completely redesigned, now sporting a brighter, high-resolution 2-inch-diagonal screen to show off the nano’s new video playback capabilities. It’s 2.75 inches tall, 2 inches wide, only a quarter-inch thin, and weighs less than two ounces. Same colors as the shuffle. Battery life: 24 hours of audio and 5 hours of video. Comes with three games. Two models: 4 GB storage for $149, 8 GB for $199.

The old 30 and 80 GB hard-drive-based “video” iPod stays in the lineup, now dubbed the “iPod classic”. The “classic” now sports 80 GB at the “low end” for $249, and a whopping 160 GB for $349 at the high end. Battery life extends to 40 hours of audio and 7 hours of video. Wow.

Both the nano and classic retain the signature click-wheel, but the user interface is updated to enable “Cover Flow” browsing of your album collection. It looks great. Both are shipping today.

New to the family, and due to ship later this month, is the much-anticipated “iPod touch”. Think of an iPhone without the phone. The “touch” is a little smaller and thinner (one-third of an inch) than the iPhone, and sports the same gorgeous 3.5-inch-diagonal display and multi-touch interface. Battery life is 22 hours of audio and 5 hours of video. 8 GB of flash memory for $299, 16 GB for $399.

Like the iPhone, the “touch” can sync to your Address Book and calendar. In addition to playing your music, movies, video, and podcasts, “touch” also has 802.11b/g Wi-Fi connectivity built right in. Surf the web with the included Safari browser or cruise through YouTube videos. And, it does one more cool thing, which is detailed in the column next door.