John Gruber over at Daring Fireball weighs in on the speculations circulating about Apple releasing a flash-based version of the iPod. He thinks the predictions made by most are based on an artificial distinction between hard-drive and flash-based digital music players:

The problem with this logic is that “hard-drive players” and “flash-memory players” aren’t actually product categories. Storage mechanisms are implementation details, not features. I’d wager that the vast majority of iPod owners have no idea whether there’s a hard drive in their iPod.

Likely true. Gruber goes on to assert that making a low-capacity, cheaper version of the iPod would be uncharacteristic for Apple because it would undercut the high quality of the iPod brand. It does seem to be moving in the wrong direction to take a fantastically engineered device and dumb it down to appeal to that market sector that evaluates price alone as the only factor in purchasing. I mean, Apple may as well start selling PCs, in that case. ;>

The point of this is to emphasize that “flash-memory-based”, in and of itself, is not a feature. If Apple is making an iPod significantly smaller than even the Mini, it might not be particularly cheap. And if they’re making a cheaper iPod with significantly lower storage capacity, they’re risking the iPod’s hard-earned reputation as a terrific gadget. Apple has never indicated that they intend to corner the entire market for MP3 players — just the market for good ones.

No matter what the case, if there is a flash memory iPod in the pipeline, the fact that it uses flash memory is the least interesting part of the story.

Least interesting to the consumer, for sure. But endless fodder for the pundits. :) One fine point of disagreement: Gruber thinks ‘mini’ is as tiny as Apple could go: “if Apple intends to produce iPods even smaller than the Mini, what will they call them? iPod Tiny?” I think there’s a more obvious name for the mythical device: iPod Micro.