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The camera on the iPod Nano is kind of neat, but HD is all the rage now - so is VGA video really going to be that useful?
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All the rage? How so? Are we seeing it put in several devices this summer/winter? Yes. Is it a rage in that consumers are demanding it? I don't see it yet. Home TV/theatre: yes. Recording, distribution, and playback on small devices or docked devices: Not seeing much demand and not seeing it being the determining factor in purchase choice even when it is available. I imagine quite a few will be seduced and could regret it when they start choking their device's capacity or try to upload... (wait, the Zune doesn't have a camera so it won't be uploading video to social networks anyway) ...download a purchase or sync in a rush. And a very small group that understands it, demands it, and can deal with its effect on capacity, network activity, and battery life -- but only a very, very small group -- not a raging hoard.
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The good news here is that by eliminating the 16 GB iPod Touch, Apple is forcing people to make a $100 price jump, and at retail that's a huge jump. 16 GB is enough storage for a lot of people, so the Zune HD has an opportunity to steal sales from people who want more than 8 GB, but aren't willing to spend $299.
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This is Apple's gambit that its lead in apps, ubiquity, Store, etc... justifies the $80 price difference. Even if Zune sales increase a thousand fold, that only takes 10% of the market away from Apple.. for ONE specific device at ONE specific price point.
Of course, still having a very-low-end (shuffle) and low-end-but-pretty-amazingly-featured (nano), and mid-range-high capacity offering (classic) means that Apple still dominates at essentially every price point (and, yes, will nudge many customers into either a cheaper model (8GB touches are gonna sell! Maybe surpass nanos.) and also quite a few into a more expensive, upsell device). (And I didn't even mention the iPhone itself.) And...
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I'm really surprised that Apple can do a 64 GB iPod Touch for $399, but I guess with their massive purchasing power on Flash memory they can do what no one else can do.
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It's not just that they are the single largest consumer of Flash. That higher price point 32GB has a nice margin that is feeding the 64GB model. Again, the 8GB is going to sell! For all the people that want 240GB, there are 10x many people who will say: "for $20 cheaper, I can live with the 8GB touch, with all of the advantages of the touch, over the HD."
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Sure, the 32 GB and 64 GB versions are faster (welcome to the world of platform fragmentation Apple!), but still no microphone, no camera, same screen resolution, no HD anything?
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Bet half the Zune owners upset by the abandonment of the 120 would have compromised with a 64GB Zune HD but now... maybe have to seek an alternative or wait a few months.
As for fragmentation, the sum of the iPod line has embraced fragmentation for quite a while. Pointing out iPhone/iPod touch fragmentation is silly in comparison to Microsoft's mobile strategy of supporting every device price point and form factor.
Even when it came to music player fragmentation, Microsoft managed three years of a device that only evolved generationally by two years... six years after the device had been introduced and 2 years after several platform/form factors had stabilized (Remember when 1.8" HDDs were a hot market? You know, even after 60% of all iPods were already Flash, but the stock prices of HDD manufacturers fluctuated on 1.8" HDD announcements? Now Apple is one of the only buyers.) And as soon as the first wave of real hardware fragmentation (when they couldn't just look and see what others had already done before them) hit the Zune team, Microsoft abandoned all other models rather than support the one to three year old devices.
So we'll see who does the better job of managing fragmentation. Fragmentation has to be embraced rather than scorned or mocked or feared if you want to move forward technologically -- you also have to compromise and backport when possible as a supplier and compromise and give up on some features as a consumer who may not upgrade with each new release.
Microsoft has a tiny and not really great history here (if only looking at music players) and a horrible strategy that stagnates growth looking towards the future (WinMo + Zune/XBox Marketplace strategy). What was it? Four, five feature updates? That justifies abandoning two devices, two and three years old at most, in their entirety? Just because you can't backport a couple of hardware features?
Also, I think I'll know if an app needs a video camera or not.
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I don't know what the numbers are, but given the way Apple ignores the Classic (hell, even the name tells you that...) I don't think they're big sellers. It seems like Apple is keeping it around to keep some people happy, but are there a lot of those people? I'm not so sure...
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Apple sold more than 22 million iPods last Christmas quarter. If the classic was 5% of that (maybe, probably not, but not far off either), in one quarter classic sales are in the range of all Zunes annually. Repeat:
all Zunes
annually. In one quarter. From an antiquated component that yields high margins. Keeping people happy or keep making money?
As for the naming (which I don't think matters to Apple's strategy beyond basic marketing), just imagine in two years or so, a decade after the first iPod, as Apple is fazing out classics and maybe other models, but celebrating the birthday of their iPod and... The iPod touch simply becomes the iPod. Can we be certain that Microsoft is still making a hardware device called the Zune for the holiday season 2012?
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The Zune software should work OK with Windows 7.  I imagine Apple will have Windows 7 compatibility working OK by October when Windows 7 officially comes out.
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Not only is iTunes 9 compatible with Windows7, it's faster, and supports new Windows7 features like the jumplists in the Task Bar; they just are not advertisizing compatibility with an OS that is not widely available on the consumer market yet.
Just some perspective.
As for the quality of the apps, and I can't believe I'm defending Apple here, but it's not all fart apps. 
One Thought
HD has the edge
Hybrid Mode
