Yeah, Yeah, New iPods: Which One Is Right For You?

So Apple’s announcement yesterday of a revamped line of iPod surprised absolutely no one, but it’s still worth examining them to see if they’re right for your or anything.
Shall we?

iPod Classic, 120GB hard drive, $249

This is the old man of the group. The iPod classic, theoretically, has enough space for all your music and videos, at the expense of an old school interface and industrial design. No fancy touchscreen, no accelerometer, no nothing. She’s a bare-bones iPod for those of you who need absolutely everything on your person at all times. The price seems about $50 too expensive, especially since it’s nothing more than a hard drive attached to an LCD. Still, she’s not a bad investment.
iPod nano, 8GB or 16GB flash drive, $149 or $199

What the nano should have been last year, the price of flash drives notwithstanding. The larger screen is a Godsend for watching video, and you’re sure to like at least one of the colors. (We’re partial to the silver, for the record.) In all honesty, 16GB probably holds most people’s music libraries, and if not, shuffling around playlists isn’t too difficult, especially with Genius.
This is as close to a universally recommended iPod as you can get. You can’t go wrong with giving one or getting one.
iPod touch, 8GB or 16GB or 32GB flash drive, $229 or $299 or $399

The new king of the iPod family really isn’t all too different from last year’s model. It’s essentially an iPhone without the phone, but one with built-in Nike+iPod for exercise freaks and external volume buttons. If you have a tech-savvy power user in your life, you’d do well to spring for the touch. That you can download and use most of the applications developed for the iPhone is only an added bonus.
iPod shuffle, 1GB or 2GB flash drive, $49 or $69

Meh, the shuffle, in our opinion, is just sorta there. It’s good if all you do is jog around the neighborhood or exclusively want to use your iPod while working out, but we’d be hard pressed to make it our primary music player. Still, she’s damn cheap—who doesn’t spend more than that on booze in a given weekend—, so most people wouldn’t think twice about adding it to their iPod repertoire.
So that about does it. You really can’t go wrong with the new nano, but if you’re looking for more bells and whistles, the touch could be worth a look. Only a small percentage of people should even consider the class, and the shuffle is something of an also-ran.
Apple Store