While our Inner Geeks are looking forward to the whole color-screen-iPod-photos-out-to-TV thing (and it's nice that they have something to look forward to, because it's probably really dark and cramped in there), part of us can't help but wonder whether this morphing of the iPod into more of an all-purpose media bank might detract from its single greatest appeal: simplicity. After all, up 'til now, everything about the iPod has always been about the music: a monochrome display; a form factor that screams portability; an interface ideal for music selection and maybe a little cumbersome for anything else. Oh, sure, Apple added notes and calendars and goofy little games and all that, but that stuff has always clearly been "extra," and now that Apple's reportedly giving the iPod a video port and a color screen so it can play in the photo world, too, well, we harbor vague concerns that relaxing the focus on music might break the spell on the buying public.

Spell? Of course there's a spell. For instance, faithful viewer Small Paul pointed out some very interesting data over at MacMinute about the iPod's appeal to the teen market. Apparently analyst firm Piper Jaffray (man, they've sure been showing Apple the love lately, hmmm?) surveyed 600 high school students on a variety of topics, and concluded in a research note that "Apple's iPod is dominating mind share and market share" among that demographic. According to the Piper, 16 percent of the teens already have iPods and a fairly stunning 24 percent plan to buy one within the next twelve months. Considering that only 8 percent plan to buy any other brand of digital music player, Apple's market share among this particular group of teens is going to be a solid 75 percent for another year at least.

So a staggering 40 percent of these teens have an iPod now or expect to have one within a year; that doesn't mean that the other 60 percent don't want one. When asked to list what they hoped to get as loot for the holidays this year, the teens ranked the iPod fourth on their wish lists, right under "clothes, money, and a car"-- which means the iPod ranks just slightly below the teen wish list equivalents of food, water, and oxygen. And get this: the iPod wasn't even a given choice on the survey. It placed fourth under the Holy Teen Trinity of threads, cash, and wheels as a write-in.

That's astonishing in part because while the iPod has been revised a number of times, it's still fundamentally a three-year-old product. Things may have changed drastically since our adolescence in the late Cretaceous Period, but back when we were teens, any product-- particularly a tech one, like, say, fire or the wheel-- that had been around for three whole years might as well have been something your (shudder) parents used. Worse yet, parents are using iPods. So are teens less fickle these days, or is the iPod just such an amazing piece of work that its sheer brilliance is enough to transcend age demographics and obliterate the mental image of their white-earbudded dad air-guitaring to dinosaur rock in his underwear and socks? (For, um, example.)

You know what? Never mind about those "vague concerns" about the photo support diluting the iPod's focus, because with numbers like this, Apple might well be able to turn the iPod into a music-and-food-processing product without losing its stranglehold on the hearts and minds of the buying public. We can't wait to see the holiday sales numbers.