Apple's Trick to Get You to Buy a Larger iPod

Apple recently announced the availability of movies through iTunes
and I think I've uncovered a diabolical plan of theirs to get us all
to buy new iPods! How? Well, they now offer all of their TV shows and
movies in a larger resolution. 4X by their measurements from the old
format. While this takes considerably longer to download that the
older videos, customer perceive this as a great quality improvement,
which it is.

For those who watch these videos and movies on their iPods, there's
absolutely no perceptual difference in quality. The iPod screen only
shows so many pixels, actually half the amount of the new videos.
People watching on their computers, or through other means will
notice a nice improvement.

Unless I'm mistaken, when you transfer one of the new videos to your
iPod, it doesn't convert the resolution down to better fit the
resolution of the screen. What happens with all the data and extra
resolution that you copy over each time? It fills up your iPod! I
know it's easy to manage content with iTunes, but I'm thinking Apple
knows people tend to horde media. It won't take long for those with
video iPods to fill up those suckers with 250MB half hours TV shows
and 950MB movies.

The proof is in all the freebies they are giving out on iTunes. There
are several new episodes of shows that they entice you with. While
they obviously pay for the bandwidth that episode of your show uses
to download, it pales in comparison to the profit they make on a 80GB
iPod.