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It’s the Annual March of the iPods!

Tomorrow, September 1st, Apple holds a music-themed event in Cupertino. The invitations show an acoustic guitar with the cutout in the shape of the Apple corporate symbol. So what does it portend?

The End of the Apple iPod Classic?

I loved my Apple iPod Classic holding all my music with lots of room to spare. So will Apple stop making them?

Prognosticators are divided. The advocates of keeping the Classic point to the niche market of enthusiasts who rip their music in uncompressed or lossless compressed formats for maximum fidelity. They enjoy the all the space a hard disk offers. It would cost a bit more to replace hard disks with flash memory for the same capacity.

The advocates of killing the Classic think Apple wants to make all the devices use flash memory. It’s faster than a hard drive.

What New Features to Add to the various iPods?

Prognosticators believe Apple will bring out a new iPod Touch. The question is: Will it have a front-facing camera so that it can participate in Facetime, Apple’s video chat between iOS devices technology? Have to wait and see. Other suggest that a camera is coming, but only on the rear and recording video in standard definition. So maybe next year for front-facing high definition cameras on the ‘Touch.

What About iTunes?

Apple should bring out a version 10 of iTunes tomorrow, too. Prognosticators have wish lists of new features:

They’d like the whole iTunes for Mac rewritten to speed it up!

They’d like wireless syncing between your Mac and your iPod

They’d like more cloud integration, so you don’t have to store all your music on a local device.

They’d like iTunes to include a separate category for home movies, apart from iTMS bought shows.

They’d like to read the book they bought on the iBooks store for their iPads on their Macs, too. Kindle has apps for both the Mac and the iPad. Why shouldn’t Apple?

We’ll Just Have to Wait.

Tonight is not the night to buy a new iPod. Millions of aficionados and prognosticators will sneak looks at Apple’s presentation or the coverage by various blogs. Sadly, my employer expects me to do non-Apple related work tomorrow, so tune in Thursday for the next episode of the MacValley Blog.