Product Reviews

If your only purpose in buying a new iPod is to play music, then the classic is for you. No fancy gimmicks here: just 120GB of hard disk, a 2.5in colour screen and a Click Wheel. There's enough room on here to store even the beefiest of digital music collections and the roomy hard drive means you can afford to be liberal when choosing a bitrate for encoding. In fact, we suspect that the classic will be most attractive to those who have music collections encoded as Apple Lossless, or high-bitrate MP3 or AAC. For many music fans, the loss of quality that results from

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encoding tracks at anything between 128Kbits/sec and 192Kbits/sec is unacceptable, so the ability to store several thousand songs with much larger file sizes will be appealing.

It's regrettable, then, that those same people will have to budget for a decent pair of earphones, as the ones supplied with the classic are the same as those with other iPods and don't do the player or the music any justice whatsoever.

It's also disappointing that Apple has decided to drop the 160GB model of the classic. The reason would seem to be pure economics: it can squeeze a 120GB hard drive into the same case as last year's 80GB model, but keeping the 160GB version would have meant keeping the fatter case and with such a small differentiation between the models, it probably wasn't worth the cost of manufacturing two different cases. The good news is that this 120GB model is only £20 more than you would have paid for an 80GB version a few weeks ago.

The classic remains the only real option for music fans for whom audio fidelity is the chief concern, and for that reason, if no other, we hope that it remains in the iPod line-up for years to come.