iPod-The 5 Gig Floppy Disk: Who gives a crap about syncing with iTunes? The whole point of the iPod is that it's a 5 Gig hard drive.
Just like a mobile hard drive I want to connect it to other computers, like my Sony Vaio, which has firewire built in just like my iBook and G4 Cube. I want to connect it to my car so I not only have my music on the road, but also ny phone book that will be used by the car's cellphone, my GPS maps with my preferred routes are stored on it as well. Most of all I want to connect to other iPod's. I'm sure we can find a way to turn the 'jog wheel' into a useful interface for whatever software we'll have to hack apart on the inside.
I live 5 minutes walk from my office in Amsterdam. To send a 500 Megabyte file via my 'professional' ADSL connection (520Kb/sec upstream), any file, be it a DivX or mp3 collection or even a photoshop file, would take me considerably longer than just zapping the file into my iPod through its firewire port walking and reversing the process at the office. I could even walk backwards with my eyes closed and still beat the network transfer time not to mention cost.
Perhaps this is where the path of personal data is taking us. I believe Apple is right on the mark when it comes to mp3s. It's certainly a lot sexier to talk about moving your music data than your spreadsheets. But there is in essence, no difference.
This brings me right back to my Last Yard theory with a new twist; Drip the data onto local storage medium as a background process. Nothing fancy. The twist is that the local storage has just become mobile. Not because we couldn't make small hard drives, but because we couldn't convince consumers to carry hard drives around. The iPod's design and initial data transportation use will change that. Now we need to do create as many interfaces as possible to connect to these mobile storage devices.
Hey Remember how popular floppies where before we had office networks? Its the same bandwidth issue, and until we have wireless connections that equal fiber in speed iPod is it. [Adam Curry: CurryDotCom]