The iPod touch sure does look beautiful. Do I want one? Yes...yes I do. Will I get one...no. That's just one of the annoying things about being an EcoGeek. I get all fanboy about this stuff and then I'm all "but do I really need it?" And, of course, the answer is "no."

But the iPod touch is exciting for one ecogeeky reason. Apple has made an extremely important decision. Instead of going 80 gigs or even 160 gigs with a traditional hard drive, their new awesomest iPod is flash based.

Until now, the leading iPod has always been a hard drive model. Hard drives are inefficient and use a lot of difficult to acquire, difficult to recycle metals. Flash drives, on the other hand, consume much less power, and contain much less metal. They also have the pontential to be much more long-lived than traditional hard drives, which still use (ugh) moving parts.

Solid state is the way to go, and I think Apple's decision to go all-out with a 16 gig solid state drive, instead of a 160 platter drive is a very big deal in personal media. What's more, it could turn out to be a very big deal in computing in general. I've been waiting for the switch, and I think this may be the beginning.