Apple To Announce New iPods September 9th

Many Apple watchers already have September 9th circled on their calendars, this is when Apple is going to announce some big news for iTunes and iPods. It is expected to be announced that iTunes 9 will arrive and bring BluRay support to both Mac and PC versions of Apple's media playing software. The biggest news that is expected to drop is new iPods to arrive just in time for Christmas shopping season.

Like previous product announcements there is much speculation about what is coming, so I'll wade into the pool with my predictions:

1. 64 GB Ipod touch arrives, 8 GB touch gets discontinued. With competition from the Zune HD the 16 GB touch will need to become the new entry level model and 32 GB will become mid level model.

2. Hard drive based iPod Classic fade away. The original iPod back in 2001 used a hard drive to store songs and since then there has been a hard drive based iPod at the high end of the product line. With flash memory getting cheaper and cheaper and more demand for the iPod touch the time for the end of the hard drive based iPods is coming to an end.

3. A new 'chicklet' type iPod shuffle to replace the 1 GB shuffle. When the 4GB shuffle was introduced (dubbed the chicklet because of it's resemblance to a piece of gum) that the 1 GB shuffle will soon get replaced, by a 2 GB chicklet iPod shuffle or the 4 GB with an 8 GB shuffle.

That's what I think will happen on September 9th