Astro_Digital said:
I have no doubt in my mind you are wrong but only time will tell.
Other than the four or five people that lurk here saying they need a 160 gig drive I heard of nobody that said 80 gig is too small.
But you make a fatal assumption: that "needed" capacity is a fixed quantity.
Sure, you can bring up anecdotal evidence that no one you encounter feels the 80 gig is too small. I can do the opposite and bring in lots of examples of people who think 80 gig is
far too small.
The point here is that file sizes change depending on encoding methods. Space requirements change depending on shifting usage patterns. Capacity becomes increasingly important as large files like movies become more common on iPods. And speaking of movies, right now iPods are only storing aggressively compressed video. At some point in the not too distant future people are going to want movies with uncompressed video and audio that they can send to a TV. Even 160 gig is a drop in the bucket when it comes to files like that.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking that today's storage requirements will always be the standard. No matter what happens, people will want/need more and more space. By way of example, how many people would buy a flagship iPod if it still came in the original 5 and 10 gig configurations? I remember people saying back then that 10 gig was more than anyone would ever need.
The top of the line iPod has been 80 gig for some time now. The competition already have 100+ gig DAPs on the market. The demand for the largest capacity possible is real. There's really no upper end to the amount of storage that people can use. If iPod was a terabyte people would find a way to fill it up.
