The brand new market

is in ipods.

With one or two quick moves from Apple over the past few months, they’ve created a gigantic opportunity to anyone with a little talent for engineering and a mailbox. Let’s take a page out of the console book.

When the xbox came out oh-so-many years ago, one of the first things any self-respecting gamer wanted to do was play DVDs without needing the seperate and expensive “DVD expansion kit.” The answer? Mod it, of course. And you know, as long as you were at it, why not just put another hard drive in there? Why not code the system to copy games to the new hard drive? Wait, you can play games without the disk? Oh, how about a new user interface? New background images?

You want it? You point your browser here. You want it done for you? They do that, too.

Of course, most people know this already.

But Apple has done something great: they have sold thousands of iPod Photos with no video support. Engadget did a feature where they tried it the soft way, but I guarantee you there’s a way to rip the thing open or replace the software and do it the hard way. If you get that done, I betcha there’s a ton of people who’d pay you $30 to biggie-size their ‘photo.

As for me? My ipod’s four years old. It plays music, sure, but damn am I tempted to drop waaaaay toooo much on a shiny new (black!) ipod. Grrrr…

[ Edit: Ye gods! Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon at the same time! ]