I have a 1gb card in my palm pilot. i have 5 or 6 movies on there, all my contact and appointment information, a boatload of songs... it seems like an inordinate amount of storage. i'll never truly need this.

i have a 40gb ipod, 3/4 full. this seems incredibly limiting and i look at my gf's 60gb one with envy. i may swap the drives.

it makes me think about the way that ubiquitous computing devices have very idiosyncratic qualities. anyone else think that this is weird?

Yes. Very much so.

These storage amounts might be limiting to you, but other people may have different needs. 40gigs of storage for music is most likely more than 90% of ipod users will ever need.

Also, most people settle on a lower quality MP3, and thus can fit more songs into the same amount of space. Maybe you should start ripping in 128 bits?

128???????

Not in this lifetime.

I don't think it's that idiosyncratic. Palm Pilots are pretty boring. You may be able to watch movies at a far reduced quality (in terms of screen size at least) from what you're used to or play the occasional game with it's non-ideal button layout, but that's about it... you've taken it to the limits of your interests. With the ipod, you glimpse the potential of doing something you've always sort of wanted - carrying every song you could possibly want to hear along with you. So your gaseous expansion to fill your ipod's limits is more understandable.

i can't tell any difference between 196kbs and 128kbs.

I am a greedy space whore.
I am going to by a huge drive to use at home, so I can put all my cd's up so my son stops dumping them off the shelves, opening them up, eating the books, and pretending to "dust" the table with the disc.

Well now Apple has done away with the 40G iPod all together. All they have is a 20G now. So if you want more, you gotta step up the iPod Photo, which is now 30G and 60G (someday). Unless you go down to the iPod Mini. And no one wants that.

20gig rio's fine with me for a while. my new 250 gig hard drive should last a while too (it's currently half-full with only mp3s).

This makes me think that you have pretty crummy PC speakers. The difference between 128 and 196 is a big one. I can't tell any difference between 196 and anything higher, though.

I've all the storage you guys need, and two convenient locations in beautiful Jonesboro, Georgia.

classic.

Yeah - I wish I had saved up a bit more for the 40G instead of my 20G...

Spent the last week re-ripping my stuff to AAC 128 - haven't noticed that much of a difference, and I'm saving a buttload of space...

I have my 60gig Ipod just under half full.

I used to think I would never need more than the 80gig HD that is in my computer. Now I also have a seperate 120g FW HD.

Where will it end?


I look forward to the day of affordable Terabyte Storage. )

40G on an iPod seems like a lot, even for me, to have on it at any one time. It's not enough to put everything on there, but it seems like almost too much to really effectively manage and update. It's a moot point for me, though, since I can't see ever justifying buying one.

It's amazing how fast I can use up 100G of storage at work, but that's a different story, I guess.

I can't currently tell the difference between 128 and 196, but that's because I'm using my laptop speakers as a stop-gap solution until I get some real speakers. I'm still ripping at 196 because I hold on to the hope that someday I will own top notch speakers that will knock my socks off.

Yeah, I think's LAME's -alt-present-standard setting (which is VBR at around 200) is the best compromise between sound quality and space IMHO.

68.44 GB of tunes on my share. 20 GB iPod, which is actually closer to 18.5 gigs of usable space. I pretty much clean it out and refill it every week. It works, though.

I can store hundreds of CDs in my Geo Prizm. Unfortunately, my car stereo is broken so I can't play them.