Crunch Down: iPod Touch Second Generation

Apple positioned the iPod Touch as the iPhone without the phone and its price point made it a highly appealing gadget to own. After a drastic price cut and important hardware updates to the iPhone, Apple gave Touch owners the shaft and left it on the back burner for a bit before tossing it off as a clearance item for students who bought a new Mac. Although not as competitive price wise with the iPhone, the new iPod Touch matches up evenly in the price per gigabyte department. Besides a big price cut, the iPod Touch that acted as the iPhone for those not ready to commit has remained mostly unchanged.

Well of course Apple is going to spruce it up a bit and obviously find some way to trim off a few pounds and make it even thinner than the last version so much so that you’d think the fruit named company was making pocketable katanas and not music players. At least you can load up your Mortal Kombat sound clips while you play with that Lightsaber App and pretend you somehow possess the ability to cut through solid objects with a handheld brick, after all that was the focus of today’s event, how the iPod Touch suddenly gained these awesome gaming capabilities everyone neglected before. That was of course after Stevie J put the emphasis on how fucking thin it was.

To pull off the thinner profile however, required some borrowed design techniques from the Touch’s brother, the iPhone, and now sports tapered edges making you think it looks thinner but still retains enough room to pack in speakers and a Nike+ receiver. Oh yea, that was probably worth mentioning at some point but now that we got that out of the way we can oogle at the one feature we’ve all been waiting for: stainless steel backing. No longer will you have to fret about scratching the back of your iPod, that way when your homie wants to check out that poppin’ YouTube video of Lil’ Wayne doing whatever it is he does you can do a bodacious slide down a desk without it getting scratched and he can listen to that pumpin’ bass being pounded out by that iPod Touch without dealing with mucky earbuds.

Besides the tapered edges, another “I want to be just like my big brother when I grow up!” moment was shared, Apple tacked on a chrome border. Just when you think that they wanted to do away with scratches by placing a stainless steel backing, they plop back to where they were and made it an abrasion magnet all over again. Speaking of going back to square one in design, a slightly recessed earphone jack is now included. Bet you didn’t see that coming eh? And you thought Apple had that awful idea killed dead did ya?


Now pricing, the most important part because the screams of your wallet can only be endured for $300 which is just what you’ll pay for a 16GB model if you don’t need that other cooler iPod that makes calls and whatnot. Another $100 more and you’ll double your storage to 32GB but if you want to cheap it out, the $229 8GB version will work just fine. The more boring details of course, 36 hours of battery life for audio, half a day more wasted listening to bad Green Day and 30 Seconds to Mars songs and 6 hours for video watching should you have the urge to load up some Linkin Park music videos and sulk around while you’re at it.