Apple Brings Color to Refreshed iPods
Apple has merged its two full-sized iPods, dropping the monochrome version of the popular music player and unveiling a single iPod Color lineup. The 30GB iPod also got the axe, leaving only 20GB and 60GB iterations, complete with ability to view album artwork, photos and playback slideshows.
The new unified iPod Color also brings to the table a new Podcast menu, bookmarking support for resuming a podcast and the ability to display podcast artwork.
"By simplifying our iPod lineup to include 20GB and 60GB models with color screens and the new Podcast menu, iPod and iTunes provide the world's easiest and appealing way to discover, subscribe, manage and listen to Podcasts," said Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of iPod Product Marketing.
As hard drive capacity continues to increase, Apple is ostensibly pushing users to the larger iPods, which means more space to purchase music and download podcasts. Despite its 300 percent size differential, the $399 USD 60GB iPod is priced only $100 more than the 20GB player at $299 USD.
In addition to the new iPod lineup, Apple introduced an updated U2 Special Edition iPod with color screen and dropped the price of the 1GB iPod Shuffle to only $129 USD.
Both the 20GB and 60GB iPods are immediately available worldwide for both Mac OS X and Windows. iTunes 4.9 is required to take advantage of the new podcast support on the players.
Those with older iPods not ready to upgrade can download the 2005-06-26 iPod Software Updater.