Did anyone else miss the bit in Steve Jobs announcement of the new second Gen iPod Touch where he explained that the new Touch would be incompatible with large numbers of third party speaker docks, including premiere devices such as the Bose Sounddock ?

You did ? So it wasn’t just me then ? To be honest I am astounded that this fact seems to have largely escaped the Apple blog network and the mainstream gadget press, because personally I think this is a REALLY big deal ! The Apple Support Forum has a long thread where many disgruntled customers are venting their displeasure after spending a lot of money on second generation iPod Touch and Bose speaker combos only to find that when they plug in the iPod they are greeted with the message “CHARGING IS NOT SUPPORTED WITH THIS ACCESSORY” !

From what is said in the thread it appears that the dock connector on the new iPod uses pure USB charging whereas the original model used a hybrid USB/Firewire charging arrangement hence the accessories designed for the first gen iPods will no longer charge newer models. This means that there is NOT going to be a software update that will fix this, and many customers will find that their older speaker setups will NEVER work fully with their new iPods.

On a personal note I convinced my sister to shell out for the new iPod Touch from her birthday money and so this weekend she tripped off to the local Apple store where she parted with a pile of cash for the iPod and a Bose SoundDock only to find that the two devices are really not meant to play with each other. I feel responsible for her now having a partially working solution, especially as I initially advised her that it would “probably be fixed in the next software release”. I have now advised her to return the speakers until a fully compatible model is released.

Apple have really disappointed me with the latest updates, not only has my first gen Touch been broken, but it now seems as though Apple have decided to purposely re-engineer the dock connector which I for one thought was a “sort of standard” without so much as a passing mention.

Somebody should get a rocket for this !