Apple unveils 64GB iPod touch with faster processor for $399 - Page 7

iPod Touch = iPhone - lousy contract - GSM module.

You can polish the pig anyway you want it. But it is not a PSP or a Nintendo DS. I wanted to develop termintator vision apps on the iPod touch as a hobby, now I have to buy an overpriced POS.

OK, people read this and be clear.
Comparing the iPod Touch ( 3rd gen ) to the iPhone ( I'll take the 3GS as an example. )

iPod Touch does not have
- Phone.
- Camera + Video recording.
- GPS.
- Compass.
- Some apps work only for iPhones.
- SMS/MMS.

These are significant enough features ( save the compass ) to acknowledge that the iPod Touch is not just an iPhone without a phone. The other factors are big and these draw a clear line between iPod and iPhone. If Apple made the iPod Touch exactly the same as the iPhone, only without the phone, this would diminish their iPhone marketshare and sales! The iPod Touch is significantly cheaper than the iPhone too! In my country, a 32GB iPhone 3GS ( Cost of phone + Contract ) costs as much as a 17"Unibody MBP while a 64GB iPod Touch would cost 6 times cheaper! The iPhone is a portable computing device that can make calls. The iPod Touch is just a hand-held device that is significantly weaker in terms of features than the iPhone.

In conclusion: the iPod Touch is the poor man's iPhone. Those who cannot afford the iPhone/ are using another phone buy an iPod Touch as it's OS is very similar to the iPhone and can give them an "iPhone-like" experience. I speak based on personal experience. I have a 32GB 3GS and an 8GB Touch and the Touch is significantly weaker than the iPhone.

AN iPod Touch IS NOT = iPhone WITHOUT THE PHONE!

Jobs explained to Pogue at NYT why no still photos on nano, and why it's not coming anytime soon. He said video sensors are very thin and fit in nano. Photo sensors are not, and do not fit in nano. I don't know if it's to be inferred that the photo sensors are supposed to be for higher resolutions or not.

Of course, Jobs doesn't ever tell the whole truth to the media. So take it for what it's worth.


The FM tuner has pretty much been available on the chips used in iPods pretty much since the days of the mini. Apple just chose not to use it and not to put in the receiver support. It does make you wonder why they added it now. Were they responding to customer interest (i.e., the gym folks who want to hear what's on the TV)?

btw, Jobs also said to Pogue that touch doesn't have video since Apple's goal was to make it cheaper. So did Apple spend the engineering resources to put a camera in the touch? Maybe not, and as you said, the camera problem rumor had to do with nano still photos, not touch. It's plausible that Apple only spent limited engineering resources on the touch this cycle, as it is has always been their habit (on both Mac and iPod) not to do major refreshes every year. (We get speed bumps in intervening refreshes.)

Looked at another way: In Aug 2008, it costed $199 to buy an 8GB nano. In Sep 2009, it costs $199 to buy an 8GB touch.

There is progress, just not as much as we want. (I too was waiting for the touch with camera, and was very disappointed.)

Depends on what people mean by "average". Is it the mean, or is it the median?

In any case, average has very little meaning. There is clearly some subset of iPhone/iPod touch users that are buying lots of games. It might be true that on the whole, iPod touch users download significantly more games than iPhone owners. (Apple knows this type of data through its iTunes account data but they haven't publicized it.)

Of note, Apple said it now has over 100 million iTunes accounts with credit card numbers. That number seemed stuck at 70m for awhile, but it's surged during this past year.

Edit: OK, I tracked back, I see what you mean.

Amen. Most commenters on these websites, including bloggers themselves, have no idea how long it takes to make a product, or to write production-quality software.

It was reported that it took 9 months to make the original iPod, and that was considered highly remarkable. And that iPod had very small production volume, compared to what Apple today has to manufacture and distribute before it makes its announcement. The lead times are way longer now.


It is possible that the rumor was right, but it referred to something that happened months ago.

I almost ordered a 64GB from Apple.ca yesterday with the engraving "Insert GPS here ->"

I was kind of hoping the new 64GB will have a GPS. One can always hope, right? Oh well. With the upcoming Tom Tom add-on it will make the Touch THE iPod for me. No internal mic is fine with me - it is technically not a phone and the remote has a mic in it anyway so it is good for Skype. No video or still camera? Not high on my wanted list but is a nice to have I suppose. No 802.11n is ok... not many access points around have it yet and "g" is more than good enough for a lot of stuffs. It looks like the new Touch models are just stop gap products waiting to be updated soon A bit of letdown but it is ok... money saved (for the "iTablet" )

Don't want a Classic... not another hard disk based iPod. But 160GB is nice for my Apple Lossless rips. They could have put a FM receiver in the Classic, though.

But I guess the new Nano is pretty nice... time for my wife to ditch her 2G Nano.

May be I will sign up for a 3GS when they updated the line with a 64GB model for all the features, esp. for the GPS. It is just a matter of time and you know it

Or, wait for the "iTablet"... I'm sure Apple is up to something for that line.

Excellent point!
I agree that FM on any device is a waste of money.
FM is now essentially corporate owned playlists, with the exception of NPR, which I get on the excellent NPR app... wifi.

That might be so in the US, but the rest of the world is a pretty big market. Some people have noted that sometimes TV audio in a restaurant or gym is piped out to FM.

It's probably not a lot of money involved either, FM is built into a lot of chips, it would probably cost more to get the chip without FM. I wouldn't be surprised to read it only costs a nickel per unit to hook up and control.

You see that is the way that averages work, that means some people have downloaded less than 36, probably 0

You may want to look up the dictionary or something, the average is the mean, the median is the middle value (or the average of the two middle values in the case of an even sample of data)


the average has very little meaning? ok then...

The Touch lacks built in controls for certain games, but there are a lot of aspects to the Touch that make it better than the PSP or DSi. Not just HW, but with the way games are created. And there is also the added use of having an iPod built in which may be appealing to many. I dont think its a better gaming device, but it may be a more appealing gaming device because of the areas in which it does excel.

If we did a poll right now how many games has the Touch/iPhone sold compared to every game on the PSP and DS. Granted the, those other systems likely have richer, more complex games but they tend to cost more, too. Nintendo has taken the first step with the DSi but they may be a little too late to compete. No worries, Nintendo has fallen out of favour many times and has always managed to find a way to jump back in.

Now that there are APIs for the 30-pin connector as well as Bluetooth for iPhone OS X SDK, we should be seeing some very nice D-pad controls that fit on the Touch and add some additional options, like a nice camera and/or a larger battery. I know some people that have been eagerly awaiting this option.

As a Touch owner, I can tell you what attracts me to the device isn't the games (though there's some fun ones), its the fact I actually have a useful internet widget in my pocket. Capacitive touch screens are the first interactive technique that lets a user access the internet (the REAL internet, not stripped down "mobile" internet) with a small device and not be a total pain-in-the-a$$ to use. My biggest gripe about the Touch using the 'net (and I would guess this applies to the iPhone) is the cache is WAAAY to small. Too many page reloads for no reason.

And that's the killer app for the Touch. I have a PSP, Tiger Woods is fun, and it accesses wi-fi like the Touch, but what a useless thing it is to navigate a web page, or check the weather, or use Google maps, anything like that its just useless.

To compare, the Touch is a competent games tablet and a very competent internet tablet. The PSP is an excellent games tablet and a useless brick as an internet tablet. In sum, it makes the Touch a more desirable device for all but hard-core gamers and I think that explains the appeal.

As an engineer, I know average is the mean, and not the median. But people all over, especially journalists or marketing folk, use the word to simplify the explanation of different things.

Speaking of dictionaries, I think you mean "median" not "medium." We all do it, lol.

With the iPhone on v1.x I found that I could leave Safari and come back without the page relaoding, unless it was a very large page, I had many pages open and.or I accessed too many large apps while I was away from Safari.

With the iPhone 3G on 2.x, having the same CPU and RAM as the original iPhone I found that every time I came back to Safari the page would reload. Even switching pages within Safari would cause a reload. That was only less annoying than the constant Safari crashes. It may have been a memory leaked but it was nonetheless annoying. When the v3.0 Beta hit I noticed my 3G would not reload Safari every time I left and came back. With the 3GS this became even better, allowing me to have more pages open that were not reloaded. I attribute this to the 3GS having 2x as much RAM as the 3G. Id wager that the new Touch will have the same 256MB RAM as the 3GS making the page reloads less likely.

Can you give some more detail regarding what you mean by "but with the way games are created"

The DS and PSP are designed as gaming machines from the ground up. The Touch cant compete with them when it comes to raw gaming power with the best set of controls (namely, a physical D-Pad and buttons) available to the user and an SDK that is designed specifically for gaming. But the Touch does offer plenty of processing power, internal storage and network capabilities that allow for developers to utilize a very mature APIs that can assist a developer in creating a very robust game very quickly and at very little cost to the developer and to the consumer.

The App Store recently turned 1 year old and we already have how many games available? How many does the PSP and DS have combined? How many Touch games we think are as good as a select DS or PSP game is irrelevant if there are enough games that are good enough to attract users away from those devices if the Touch also has features the others dont.

Its not likely that any convergence device like the Touch will ever beat a dedicated handheld gaming device, like the PSP or DS, in raw game play, but it doesnt have to in order to eat away at their sales.

How does that differ from developing on the PSP, or the NDS? Surely they have development tools with a mature API set as well?


All the iPod touch games so far are small, and cheap, they don't measure to the games available on the PSP or the NDS (I am not saying there isn't crap games on either of those platforms because there is), but they are generally longer in game play. If those (non Nintendo or Sony) developers move across then either the games will become longer, and more expensive, or the gameplay will drop.


How can you measure that though? Did the people purchasing the iPod touch want it for games, other applications, a touch screen iPod, an internet tablet?

I'm sure those other kits are quite mature. As an aside, one thing they aren't is cheap or easily available for good comparison. The PSP dev kit is apparently $1500: http://www.pgnx.net/news.php?page=full&id=17150

It looks like PSP was $4500 earlier on, and they've dropped the price twice since then. I can't find solid info on the DS dev kit, but it looks like a few thousand dollars, assuming you can get one.

It's pretty hard to do a comparison when all that info is locked away. For all the complaints of the Touch being a closed platform, game system platforms are at least as closed.


I think that's an unfortunate side-effect of the downward price pressure of the app store. A $3 game probably doesn't justify the development effort of a $30 game, even if a greater percentage of it might go to the developer in the case of the app store.

You are clueless dude. The App store has 21000 games of which zero are fart apps since the fart app is entertainment. If you have played games on an Itouch or Iphone you might realize it is a decent gaming system. The graphics on the 3GS exceed the capabilities of the DS and PSP so your issue is obviously with the controls. I would hate to bring you to earth but the DS and PSP analog controls leave much room for improvement so we will see where on screen controls take us.