Fact or fiction: Apple iPhone?

Will new mini-hard drives inside of new lines of mobile phones end up making the iPod a thing of the past. It is beginning to look like a real possibility. After reading through this post from Things that … make you go hmm, I began to see that I might have been right about the iPod all along.

It does makes sense thinking that the iPod’s days are numbered. I was reading (sorry, don’t have the links) that iPod Photo sales have not been as good as expected, though the standard iPods are selling like hotcakes. Apple should be thanking in a financial way Adam Curry, Dave Winer and the rest of the podcasting clan. I just came across this from mobilewhack:

With micro hard drives like the one in the iPod mini making their way into phones, Apple’s fantastic product — which has single-handedly turned the company into a darling on Wall Street — will soon be as obsolete as a QWERTY keyboard in South Korea. Given the choice between carrying two devices or just one, consumers will choose one, and it won’t be the iPod.

I chose to carry fewer devices and took my Apple iPod Photo 60 GB back to the store, unopened. Some people are going to say, are you crazy?!?! but I started thinking about how little I’d actually use it and decided that it wasn’t worth the $710 (bought it with the Apple Care Plan too). I’d rather have that money in the bank working for me than sitting on a shelf collecting dust (most of the time) in the form of an iPod. None of this takes away from my feeling that the iPods are cool. Just not $710 for me cool.