Yes, those were the words on the cover of Newsweek magazine this week, the subtitle to a photo of Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ smiling face next to the next (fourth) generation (4G) of the world’s most popular personal digital music player, the iPod. The 4G iPod comes in two “sizes” – 20GB and 40GB. They’re both a “silly millimeter” slimmer than their 3G predecessors, and sport a slightly larger version of the touch-sensitive-do-everything-with-one-thumb Apple Click Wheel controller introduced on the iPod mini.

Two complaints about the old 3G iPods (battery life and price) are addressed in the updated version. Apple claims that software, firmware, and battery size improvements in the 4G iPod will yield a 50% improvement in battery life, up to 12 hours from the previous 8 hours. Apple also dropped the price of each model by $100. The 20GB iPod is now $299, with the 40GB model at $399. The 4GB, multi-colored, business-card-sized iPod mini ($249) line remained unchanged.

There are a couple of minor software improvements as well (which are not backwards-compatible with earlier models, sadly) – a “Shuffle Songs” option, which plays your music in random order, and the ability to create multiple On-The-Go Playlists for grouping your favorite songs while you’re “on-the-go”.

What about that old icon – the Walkman? Sony recently announced two new iPod pretenders – a 20GB Walkman NW-HD1 (another catchy name for a Windows PC-based product) and a 40GB “VAIO Pocket Player” (now stop snickering). They’ll be $100 more expensive than the 4G iPods for the equivalent storage sizes, and will be available in August.

Sony claimed in their initial press releases that, while the 20GB iPod could hold but 5,000 songs, their new 20GB NW-MD1 player could hold 13,000 songs. Many tech pundits praised the NW-MD1 as the long-awaitied “iPod Killer” that would put Apple “back in its place”.

Not so fast. Turns out the fine print in the Sony information contained a note: “13000 songs based on encoding in Sony’s ATRAC codec at 48 Kbps”. Let me translate this for you. Apple’s claim of 5000 songs is based upon music encoded at 128 Kbps. Remember from our previous discussions that the higher the bit rate (Kbps) the better the fidelity? Which is better? 128 or 48? You do the math.

Also note that Sony’s new offerngs will only play music encoded with Sony’s proprietary ATRAC codec. Did I hear the “Ghost of BetaMax Past” go whistling by?

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski