Maybe it’s because Apple was relegated to semi-permanent second place status for so much of the 90s and early 21st century; not that they’ve vaulted to first place, but they’ve began to claw their way at the behemoth that is Microsoft. But recently, it seems to me that Apple has been tripping over itself to release all the new technology it can, especially when it comes to their most celebrated and accepted piece of technology in the mainstream, the iPod.

Apple recently unveiled yet another incarnation of their hugely successful mp3 player, the iPod Nano. The last three major versions of the iPod, the original and all its various generations, the Mini, and the Shuffle, at least seemed to have a point.

The original iPod appealed to those who had such a wealth of music (and money) that simple flash-based mp3 players weren’t cutting it anymore. Now, music fans could enjoy all of their 10,000+ songs they had illegally downloaded (kudos to Apple to giving people the option of legally obtaining their favorite songs).

The original was the luxury version of the iPod, and the Mini that followed was the version available to those not so willing to spend upwards of $300 on an mp3 player yet wanted to belong to the ultra-chic segment of society the iPod had created. The iPod started as a cult phenomenon and had expanded to become a mainstream object. At the same time, the gnostics of the mp3 world were buying up Creative and Sony hard drive-based players, secretly laughing at the vast amount of people who had bought an iPod thinking it was the most elite player on the market.

And then came the iPod Shuffle, which carved a whole new niche in the iPod market. Prior to this, the idea was that iPod was best suited to those with a vast music library, had the money to invest in a hard-drive based player and wanted to be able to have complete control over their music. The Shuffle was a flash-based player marketed toward those less willing to spend big bucks or who didn’t need to be in complete control of their music.

Now we have the iPod Nano. The problem with this iPod is that there is no discernable niche that it caters to. The other iPods all had their own populations to cater to. Sure, there were multiple generations of some of the previous iPods, but they were simply labeled as another generation, not a whole new type. The iPod Nano seems to be nothing more than an iPod Mini, slightly redesigned and outfitted with a pretty color screen (which is, well, pointless).

Maybe this issue seems trivial, but I don’t see the point of this new iPod. Apple obviously knows something I don’t. They wouldn’t release a player they think would bomb, but it seems if I were an Apple exec trying to milk as much money as I could out of the mp3-player-buying public, I would space this release more. The iPod Shuffle seems like it just hit shelves, amid comparisons to sticks of gum. Now here’s the Nano, which is being compared to a pencil, just half a year later.

It’s probably about time for the next generation of the Mini to debut, and this is probably Apple’s substitution for that. I can even understand the renaming of the Mini to Nano. “Mini” evokes small and maybe even cheap. “Nano” makes it seem like regular iPod users are the ones getting the shoddy deal, and not vice-versa. And I will admit, it is a beautiful piece of technology, even if I don’t find much point for a color screen. But, and this fear may be irrational, I don’t want the creative juices at Apple to run out because they were spent up designing incarnation after incarnation of iPods. As long as the public keeps buying them, they’ll keep making them, but I’d like some of those creative juices diverted to the computer market, because it’s great to see that finally a player has re-emerged that can potentially bring down the behemoth that is Microsoft.