First off, all this comes from a great web article I read and I should be shamed for not being able to provide the link.

Let’s talk about power consumption.

Power consumption for 160GB hard drive (vs a flash drive). Power for an all-screen device that owners may want to use to watch movies. Power for the radio devices (WiFi on the low estimate and cell radio, WiFi and bluetooth on the high estimate).

Now let’s talk about (sloppy) use case scenarios.

You wake up in the morning and take your iPod off the charging device and listen to 15 minutes of music on your way to the gym. Then you listen to 45 minutes of music at the gym. Then you go to work and listen to 6 more hours of music. You listen to another 15 minutes of music on the way home.

7.25 hours of hard drive spinning and earbud-powering time.

Also during the day you do about an hour of surfing the web via your iPod (during lunch or checking how a site looks on your iPod or showing someone how fun it is or just for the hell of it).

1 hour of screen-intensive and radio communications time.

Then over the course of the day you watch about an hour of video (last night’s TV episode, Your Great Movie, whatever)

1 hour of screen-intensive + hard drive powering time.

So over the course of the day your iPod power consumption habits break down like so:

8.25 Hours of hard drive platter spinning
2.00 Hours of screen very bright use
1.00 Hours of radio communications use

Imagine now the battery required to sustain this usage. Now slap that battery onto a slightly thicker iPod Classic (gotta give room for the full screen all the way down the form factor).

That’s the real problem, the battery.

Or the user behavior. Maybe you can change your habits such that you don’t mind limiting yourself to a mere 14GB (the OS and the marketing math must take up something of that 16GB drive right?) of data. Apple hasn’t changed user behavior before though so maybe no dice. ;)

I’m going on and on in a comment and it’s your blog, sorry for that. Great post.

Try doing THAT with the iPhone or iPod touch!

I have July 21, 2008, the date my contract with Sprint expires, marked on my calendar… in the days leading up to that magical date I will see whether an iPhone is right for me. I hope another, greater revision of the iPhone comes out by then, maybe even with the hard drive capacity you’re talking about.

> She wants the iPhone and asks for it by name, like cats do for Meow Mix.

Not to quibble or anything, but cats ask for Meow Mix by name because the default sound they make is “Meow.”

I have a hard time believing your toddler’s default sound is “iPhone” (though, since she is your daughter, maybe it’s not out of the question). ;)

Someone told he thinks ipod hard drives are basically dead. And from now on its going to be only flash. I guess next year’s ipod models will tell…

But since the iPhone already has Wi-Fi… how about adding a “special” Wi-Fi (noooo… don’t think Zune here… pleaseee! ;)) that would integrate with both iPod touch and iPhone’s…. :o (just thought of that as I was writing the problems with BT).

Jeffrey, I sincerely don’t think a HDD-based iPhone would EVER come out. But SSD are getting bigger (and cheaper) by the day… Wait a few years and you’ll have your wish of a 160Gb iPhone come true! :p (by then, HDD-based iPods would be carrying around 750Gb HDDs anyway :p).

Cheers

Life

Not a day goes by that I don’t plug my iPhone into my Mac to charge – it just takes a little pre planning to make sure I have what I want, when I want it.

And I agree 100% about going from the iPhone UI to anything else, it’s just too amazing.