Next-gen iPod Touch to bring capacitive home button, 128GB?

April 5, 2011 By Molly McHugh

Get your skepticism ready: A supposed iPod Touch image has surfaced revealing a lack of buttons and massive amounts of storage.

Take the following information with a grain (or bucket) of salt. A supposedly “leaked” image of an iPod Touch with a capacitive home screen button and 128GB of storage is making the rounds. 9to5 Mac claims to have originally received the photo some time ago, but decided against posting it since it seemed so terribly illegitimate. But the site has given in and put it up now that the tech community has caught wind of the apparent device.

In the name of tempering cynicism, here is why this doesn’t seem impossible. Back in January, rumors about Apple planning to eliminate buttons from its devices hit, and sources said the company eventually wanted to phase out the home button altogether. There was also an Apple patent that revealed the company was looking into developing its own “smart bezel” technology, making it function like its interactive touchscreen.

More importantly, here’s why we’re extremely skeptical. 128GB is twice as much storage as the $399 iPod Touch, and that jump seems downright unnecessary. There’s also the fact that iOS models wouldn’t display the data capacity the way it does in this image.

If you want to believe this could be a reality, we’ll refer you to the supposed 64GB iPhone 4 that surfaced in China last month. There was never any definitive conclusion to its existence, but a hands-on demo and multiple reports of their circulation in China were at least mildly convincing.

Either Apple really wants to throw insane amounts of data capacity into their coming iOS devices, or it has scrapped the idea entirely and the prototypes are still being passed around. Or, of course, this iPod Touch image is the work of some shoddy camera and editing work. Check out the rest of the pictures below and decide for yourself.

Showing 2 comments

Robert Burnham at 7:59am 6th April 2011 I own a 120 gig Zune and I love having that much space. Once I started ripped music files as Lossless WMA files, the extra storage space really came in handy. Between that and the podcasts, I have 60 gigs of files on it. Since Zunes are apparently being discontinued, I may one day have to consider other options for portable media players, and the 64 gig iPods just aren't enough. I like having some headroom, and 128 gigs would be plenty. That said, I hope I never have to buy an iPod again. I tried an iPod Classic for a few months, to give Apple a fair shake. The scroll wheel is terrible, as is iTunes. I would imagine the iPod Touch has a better interface, but there's still that iTunes problem.
Stephen Masiello at 11:08pm 5th April 2011 I'd rather have them put the iphone camera into it and couldn't care less if they have to make the device thicker to fit it in.