Apple's said to be putting the finishing touches on a lower-capacity, flash-based iPod to appeal to customers with not much money and not much music, but what about those customers with more money than God and a CD collection with its own noticeable gravitational pull? Because while we were surprised by the number of letters we got from viewers upset with Apple for putting 60 GB drives only in the iPod photo (because they needed all that space for music, didn't mess with digital photography, and didn't want to pay $100 extra for a color screen and photo features they'd never use), we're flat-out flabbergasted by how many people have since been asking when Apple's going to get around to releasing an 80 GB iPod, or even a 100 GB one, because 60 GB just won't cut it.

Now, we're certainly not going to claim that it's impossible to have 80 GB of music, or even 80 GB of legal music; even at 128 kbps, that's what, roughly 2,000 albums? That's a lot, sure, but it's totally within the realm of possibility for a music lover. (Heck, if you collect David Bowie discs, you're practically halfway there.) And a serious music lover willing to shell out crazy ducats for a ridiculously roomy iPod is probably far more likely not to be encoding his or her music at anything as low as 128 kbps anyway. For total quality freaks, an 80 GB iPod could probably store something like 400 albums in pristine Apple Lossless format. Suddenly the whole prospect starts to sound a little more reasonable, right?

Note that we said a little more reasonable; there's still something just a wee bit sick about an iPod packing as much storage as the top-of-the-line Power Mac from just three years back-- or, for that matter, today's entry-level Power Mac G5. But there's no doubt it'll happen eventually, although we've got some bad news for the impatient pocket audiophiles out there: it's going to be a while. Faithful viewer mrmgraphics sent us an article from The Mac Observer reporting that Toshiba, Apple's current iPod drive supplier of choice, has formally announced an iPod-friendly 1.8-inch drive with an 80 GB maximum capacity. Unfortunately, it won't hit mass production until "July of next year," so for at least the next six months, you're just going to have to struggle on with the measly 60 GB you've got now. We know, we know, life's a grind. Deal with it.

So, 80 GB next summer, most likely. We've actually heard from people claiming to own dedicated iTunes servers with half a terabyte of music just looking for an iPod burly enough to handle it. Sorry, folks, but the best you're going to do in the short term to take that collection with you is to strap an Xserve on your back and plug it into a Really Long Extension Cord™. But check back in a year or six, mmmkay?