Before you right now is one of the prettiest, and most glaring, examples of planned obsolescence.

This is the iPod Touch.

Apple released it without a hard drive, so that you only have up to 16 GB of memory on it. Meanwhile they also released an iPod Classic that costs less but features ten times that amount of memory storage.

Why did they do this? Because they’re dumb?

No, because they’re very smart, and they think you are dumb. They know they’ve sold so many iPods that they’ll soon reach the point of saturating the market. Only a while ago their iPod Video with the 80 GB hard drive was the ultimate iPod, and anyone who owned that — they had the ultimate, so why should they ever buy another one?

Think about that. If Apple truly released the ultimate iPod, everyone would buy it, they would own it, the demand would be satisfied … and Apple’s sales would flatline.

In order to keep up their outrageously successful sales, they need you to always want the bigger, better iPod. And so, they design them with outrageously effective planned obsolescence.

The iPod Touch is such a obvious example of that, they should use it as a picture to illustrate the term in a dictionary.

They know they’ll sell millions of these to all the people who’s phone company can’t handle the iPhone, because everyone wants the cool new interface. But if they’d put a 160 GB hard drive in it, it would have become the Ultimate iPod. So they’ll sell as many as they can, and then, after they’ve figured out another MUST HAVE feature, they’ll come out with the 160 GB iPod Touch, but then not put in the MUST HAVE feature … and they won’t put that feature in until they’ve figured out the NEXT one.

Because, they never want to come out with the ultimate iPod, because they will always want you to buy the latest and greatest one.

You might as well have them set up a yearly service where you pay $399 a year and get the latest, greatest iPod automatically.

Call it the “iPod Subscription.”