Okay, so Steve Jobs has given us four new iPods, with several variations on color, storage capacity, and other features. The media apparently thought it was a big deal, with cheers and applause throughout the Jobs presentation — but to me, it seemed like very little innovation, and a great deal of incrementalism.

For example, the new “iPod Classic” has 160 gigabytes of storage capacity, which Apple says is sufficient for 40,000 songs. 40,000 songs? Admittedly, that’s an enormous increase over the original iPod, introduced some five years ago, which could only hold 1,000 songs. But guess what: I’ve only got 832 songs on my iPod, and several hundred of those have never been played at all, ever. I realize that the average teenager has a much broader range of musical interests than me, but think about the arithmetic: if the average song is 3 minutes long, then 40,000 songs represents 120,000 minutes of music. That’s 2,000 hours — which means that you could listen 8 hours a day for an entire year (allowing for a two-week vacation from all the noise) before you’d hear them all. Is there really a market for that kind of capacity?

Well, maybe there is. Apple is very proud of the fact that it has sold 100 million iPods, but that’s only a small fraction of the 6 billion people on the planet. Maybe there are 5.9 billion people out there, desperately waiting for the chance to upload 40,000 of their favorite tunes to the new iPod … but somehow I don’t think so. And in any case, what’s next: a vintage-2008 iPod that stores 100,000 songs? Why not a million songs? Sooner or later, Apple will have to acknowledge the reality of the situation; after we’ve downloaded every known video, TV show, movie, and song, what next?

A more interesting feature of the new high-end iPod (the iPod Touch) is a WiFi capability that allows users to download music without being connected to their desktop/laptop computer. Apple also announced a collaboration with Starbucks, which has long been a favorite WiFi establishment for those of us who want to surf the Internet and pick up our email while sipping a latte. We’ll probably see Bluetooth connectivity in the next release, and a variety of additional features that will make it more and more difficult to differentiate between the iPod Touch and the iPhone.

Apple is also working on innovation in the user-interface area; the new iPods have a feature called “CoverFlow” to enable users to quickly flip through one album after another until the right one has been found. And while the user interface itself is dazzling (we iPhone users have been enjoying it for a few months now), it incorporates an assumption that I think is subtly flawed: it assumes that customers are still purchasing, downloading, and organizing their music in collections known as albums. But the music industry has known for several years now that customers don’t really want to buy packages of music called “albums”; they want individual songs, and they don’t want to pay for 11 boring songs in order to acquire one “good” song from an album. In fact, most of us organize our music into “playlists” on our iPods; for example, I’ve got six different “exercise” playlists, depending on how sluggish or energetic (or bored) I happen to feel on any particular day. But I have no way of uploading my own personal JPG images for those playlists; if Apple would let me do that, then the Coverflow user-interface would be a lot more interesting.

Meanwhile, though, it will be interesting to see if all of these new iPods create a desperate desire for the 100 million existing customers to upgrade; I think it will be tempting for anyone still using a vintage-2002 or 2003 iPod, but probably not for anyone who purchased a sleek iPod Nano last year. And for those of us with iPhones, the whole thing is a big yawn.