If the latest Apple evt was any indication, the hard-drive based iPod has fallen out of favor with Steve and co. The company has done away with the "chunkky" iPod classic model and opted to only sell the slimmer, 120 GB model. This also leaves us with just one iPod left that uses an actual hard disk drive for storage, rather than solid-state flash memory chips.

It would certainly appear that the disk-based iPod is setting up to go the way of the ball-powered mouse and ResEdit, but the question is why.

The immediate response would be that hard drives are a dying medium, particularly for media players, where the old head and disk model doesn't go well with such things as jogging or rushing up stairs. Some people are now even speculating that a large-capacity solid state model is in the works.

I wouldn't be so sure though, even with the recent price drops and breakthroughs, an 80 GB solid-state hard drive still runs about $600. Nobody is going to pay more than a few hundred dollars for an iPod these days, and most within the industry still think it will be at least a couple of years before SSD's become cheap enough for use in consumer products.

What we could be seeing, however, is the death of the large-capacity iPod. Ever since the nano hit that 8GB mark, it has wiped the floor with pretty much every player, and it's not just because of the pretty colors. There's only so much music you really want in a player, and a few thousand songs is more than enough for most people.

I myself find my old 20GB iPod more than large enough, and have so for four years, barring a couple reformats that lead to reloading my library.

There is the video aspect, but even then, there are only so many moments in a day when you want to watch video on a 2.5 inch screen, and not nearly enough to warrant loading an extensive library on your iPod.

Perhaps Apple has found that, for now at least, anywhere from 8-32GB is enough for just about everyone, and the era of the ever-expanding iPod is slowing.