Making the iPod family, all over again

All right, that may not be what you're thinking these days. But that is what Apple was thinking when it intro duced its annual revision of the popular iPod family last week. Over all, these music/video players have shrunk in size and price, but have grown in capacity, features and number of models.
The baby of the family, the screenless iPod Shuffle, is almost unchanged. It's still only about one-inch square, with a spring clip. It still holds about 240 songs, but now comes in five brushed-metal color finishes.

The full-size iPod has had a visit from the brushed-metal makeover fairy, too. Its face now comes in silver or black brushed metal - the first major departure from the iconic acrylic façade that has served it well since 2001.

This model, now called the iPod Classic, is the only iPod containing a hard drive. It's for people who want to transport big music or video collections - or who want to use the iPod as an external computer hard drive.

That prospect is easier to imagine than ever now that the hard drives in these iPods hold 80 or 160 gigabytes (for $250 or $350).

Wait a minute - 160 gigs? That's bigger than many computer hard drives. It's enough to hold 40,000 songs, which would take about three solid months to play. If the battery could last that long, that is; Apple clocks the larger model at 40 hours of music playback, 7 hours of video.

Stir the stew, surf the Web

Dream kitchens may soon include a computer along with the latest refrigerator or oven. That way people gathered at the family hub can satisfy their digital needs along with nutritional ones.
Hewlett-Packard's new TouchSmart IQ770 PC ($1,699 at Circuit City) is designed for that kitchen of the future, where people turn on the computer along with the coffeepot, and then check the screen for the weather, ball scores and the family calendar as they breakfast.

The calendar on the TouchSmart is easy to use. Entries can be written on the touch-sensitive screen with a finger or stylus, or entered on a keyboard, so that everyone knows what's ahead during the day, from the dentist at 9 am to the PTA at 7 pm.

The computer also has a high-definition TV receiver, a DVD player and a 19-inch screen that moves up and down as well as tilting, so that people having a snack at the counter or a nearby table can watch their favorite show or video. Putting a computer in the kitchen is not a new idea. Neiman Marcus, the department store, included an ad for a Honeywell kitchen computer, priced at $10,600, in its 1969 Christmas catalog, said Dag Spicer, senior curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

The ad featured a woman in need of a computer to manage recipe quantities and carried the slogan, "If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute." But Mr Spicer said the marketing campaign failed. "As far as we know, Neiman Marcus didn't sell a single computer."

The latest generation of kitchen computers may be more successful, and not just because the ads are less patronising. The difference instead may lie in the spread, and speed, of broadband connections and the way that, in turn, is changing people's computer habits.