I have a 160GB iPod Classic. It holds approximately 1/3 of my music collection. That’s just mp3s. This doesn’t include audio book, FLAC or wav files, or miscellaneous audio files. JUST music. I’m past the point of wanting to continually load/unload songs from my iPod.

There is no solution forthcoming.

I have searched high and low for the scrap of a hint of a rumor that Apple is working on a larger iPod size. Not only could I not find a single whiff of a clue as to if/when a larger iPod would be released … I found quite the opposite. It is entirely possible that Apple is phasing out their classic model in favor of the much smaller capacity touches, nanos and iPhones.

To Steve Jobs et al, I have a simple, basic, one-word question: “WHY?!”

I mean, really … who amongst us anymore has a scant 160GB music collection? Anyone? No? That’s what I thought. Not to mention that iTunes has an incredibly robust and rounded-out video library. Those take up tons more space than does a single song. So why the seeming slide backwards in the size department?

Let me pose this question: What if size really didn’t matter?

For all you female readers, I’ll give you a moment to quit your snide snickering. Done yet? Good.

Fact: Apple is buying up property left and right: old HP campuses, private land owned by old people (Fullbrights, anyone?) … what do they plan on doing with all that land?

Fact: Apple is moving away from the classic iPods with the larger storage capacities in favor of the smaller, slimmer, slicker looking iPhone and Touch devices.

What if capacity were no longer a necessity?

What if all your media resided “in the cloud?”

Think about it. It wouldn’t matter what capacity your device has: it would pull it ALL from a cloud-based location. All of the sudden, your 160GB iPod is moot.

Or is it? What about those who don’t have access to their “cloud?” Hikers? Anyone going “off the grid” is going to have a difficult time accessing their media content.

So in a nutshell, I went from being super-down about the classic line going away, to realizing what the potential reason for its demise is and actually getting excited about the prospects, to being upset about the whole “cloud” concept and not having access to all my music and stuff in a localized location. Interesting.

To be fair, most of these thoughts are based on articles that have been written in the last few months. This is pure speculation on my part, paired with the speculations of others who have written on similar topics. Will we see the end of the iPod classic? I bet we do. In favor of smaller-capacity devices? It would certainly seem so. Will it matter if iTunes goes cloud-based? Who knows?