In less than 15 minutes (10 a.m., San Francisco time), Apple Inc. will begin hosting a special media event that has “Let’s Rock” as its tagline. The “Let’s Rock” event has been heavily hyped since its announcement exactly one week ago. The tagline and the familiar silhouette that accompanies the invitation suggest an iPod related event. A refresh of the current lines of Shuffle, Nano, Classic and Touch had been expected and is inevitable since they have already shown their age. Except for Shuffle, I have had owned either previous or current models of all the other iPod lines. I currently own the following iPods:

I never saw the need of a Shuffle because even cell phones made couple of years ago could do a much better job than any Shuffles had been able to do. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple drops the Shuffle line completely.

I have owned 2 previous generations of the iPod Classic when they were still known as just the iPods.

I still own a 5th generation iPod Classic that I take advantage of its 60GB capacity to store most of my iTunes music library. Its capacity is not big enough to backup my iTunes library of both videos and music though. It is attached to my car stereo most of the time. Until price of flash memory comes down significantly coupled with significant increase in capacity, I think there will still be demand for the iPod Classic. So I hope a new Classic with at least 250GB capacity will be released today.

Pictures purported to be that of a real Nano 4G started popping up all over the Internet last week. Those pictures conveniently confirm the drawings of the unconfirmed Nano 4G that had surfaced since July. The Nano line is the only iPod line that I have owned all the generations.

If those rumours of a vertical Nano with 16GB hold true, the Nano 4G will be the first of the Nano family that I won’t be interested to own. I want a Nano iPhone!

It has also been rumoured that the iPod Touch family will undergo some minor cosmetic changes that come without increased capacity beyond its present 32GB limit. With iPhone 3G availably widely at contract prices that are way below that of the iPod Touch, I doubt if a minor facelift and price cut would be enough to attract buyers.