Ten years ago today, on October 23rd 2001, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod at a press event on Apple’s Cupertino campus. (Here he is doing it.) It made the news, but didn’t feel like an epoch-shifting event at the time. It was. And to celebrate the iPod’s first decade, our tech historian and oddity collector Benj Edwards has found a dozen iPod-related curiosities–ones involving dentistry, weaponry, and a whole lot more.

View iPod Oddities slideshow.

People have been expecting Apple to kill the iPad Classic–the last model recognizable as a direct descendant of the original 2001 iPod–for years. Now TUAW is reporting that Apple may discontinue it, along with the iPod Shuffle. If the company’s iPhone event next week also touches on iPod-related news, we might get the news then.

(My classic-style iPod and I were inseparable for eons, and I once looked down at the iPhone because of its comparatively small capacity–but it’s been a long time since I’ve so much as booted up an iPod. Do you use one?)

Thanks to everyone who entered our drawing for the new Tapper World Tour game and an iPod Touch to play it on. And congratulations to John Erickson, whose name came up when our random-number generator had done its magic.

Speaking of Tapper, I had fun last week meeting Don Bluth and his longtime artistic associate Gary Goldman, the creators of Tapper’s visuals and the animation for two iconic 1980s arcade games: Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace. (That’s Bluth and Goldman in the photo above.) I wrote about Bluth’s take on his videogame work over at Techland.

Predictions on the demise of the iPod Classic usually don’t come around until September, when Apple updates its line of media players, but the timing’s off now thanks to suspicious supply issues at major retailers.

The unfortunately-named Apple Bitch reports that Apple’s iPod Classic is out of stock Best Buy and Amazon, and the Apple Store is shipping the media players a bit slower than usual as well. CNet adds that Target and J&R are also out of stock.

It could just be a random supply glitch, but the other two possibilities are more intriguing: Either Apple is about to refresh the iPod Classic with a bigger hard drive, or it’s discontinuing the iPod Classic altogether.

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I’m sorry I wasn’t at Apple’s music event today to cover it live. I had fun watching it via Apple’s live video stream from the lobby bar here at the Grand Hyatt in Berlin, though. (I give the experience a B- from a technical standpoint: Eighty percent of the time, the stream worked well, fifteen percent I got audio but the picture froze, five percent it misbehaved in other ways. Then again, I was on iffy hotel Wi-Fi, so the glitchiness might have been on my end rather than Apple’s.)

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Quite a few people — including myself — thought when Steve Jobs walked off the stage saying not a thing about the now aging iPod classic that it was the end of the line for that model. That is not so: Apple PR has confirmed that the classic line will live on, keeping the same price and capacity structure as it has now, but with no yearly refresh like its counterparts.

Such a move is quite unusual for a company that typically lets none of its flagship products go more than a year without some type of redesign or rework. But it’s also telling — Apple likely thinks the days of the classic are numbered.

As it stands right now, Apple is unable to offer a high-capacity flash based iPod as flash memory prices are still too high. Remember that the iPod classic has a maximum storage capacity of 160GB at $249: the highest capacity iPod touch comes in at 64GB, but has a fairly prohibitive $399 price tag along with it.

Not a good deal for those of us with insanely big digital media collections.

It is quite possible that Apple is hedging its bets that flash will continue to drop in price allowing it to offer a comparatively sized iPod touch in the near future. Also, there is not much more that the Cupertino company could do to the design other than add multi-touch — but the touch line is the future of the iPod so why bother?

I don’t fancy myself a Apple prognosticator but I would venture an educated guess that the classic has only a few more months left. It just so happened that the market didn’t cooperate with Apple’s scheduling that it could have announced a phase out at its September music event. It is coming though, and likely very soon.

What will Apple announce at its music event? By noon or so tomorrow, we’ll know all there is to know. Let’s wrap up the period of blissful ignorance, rampant rumors, and informed speculation with our traditional Technologizer community predictions.

As usual, I surveyed you guys and asked you to give your best guesses at what the news will involve. For questions in which you could choose only one answer, whatever answer got a plurality of responses counts as the prediction. For questions that let you choose multiple answers, any answer that more than fifty percent of you chose counts as a prediction. (I’ll note the percentage that chose each answer).

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Earlier today, Jared wondered what the chances are that Apple will retire the iPod Classic at the music event it’s holding next week and replace it with 128GB iPod Touch. Jared explains why it’s unlikely that Apple will be able to introduce a 128GB Touch next week. That would presumably argue for the continuing viability of the Classic, which packs a 160GB hard drive.

But wait. I try to avoid making Apple predictions, but the company could make an end-run around the limitations of flash storage. Here’s how.

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With iPod sales down for the last two years, predicting the death of iPod Classic is now an annual tradition.

Business Insider’s Dan Frommer is the latest journalist to question the iPod Classic’s future, ahead of Apple’s September 1 music event. The usual arguments apply — without Wi-Fi, apps or a touch screen, the classic iPod is looking pretty stale — but his prediction hinges on whether Apple will introduce a 128 GB iPod Touch this year. After all, the current iPod Classic’s hard drive holds 160 GB of media, and retiring it doesn’t make sense unless another device can take the high-capacity throne with flash storage.

I’m with Frommer’s logic all the way, but I doubt that 128 GB flash drives will even be ready in time for the next iPod Touch.

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I just got an invitation to an Apple press event in San Francisco on September 1st. Here’s the art–either the company is finally making its long-awaited move into the guitar business, or it’s scheduled its traditional September iPod launch.

Sadly, I won’t be covering this particular Apple event in person. (I have a good excuse: I’m going to be in Berlin at the IFA tech show.) But I’m curious about just how significant the news will be. New iPods are a given, and there are rumors of an Apple TV replacement and a seven-inch iPad. As is my wont, I’ll ask you for formal predictions shortly before the event, but any initial guesses and/or hopes?

Over at Wired News, Brian X. Chen has posted what’s probably not the only article we’ll see in the next few days that juxtaposes the words “Zune” and “failure.” Brian talked to a bunch of Microsoft-watchers, and the gist of their consensus is that the fact that the Zune isn’t a true software platform sets it up to bomb.

I don’t agree that it’s destined to tank–I’m guessing that Microsoft would be thrilled if it sold half as many Zune HDs as Apple sells iPod Nanos, and the Nano is even less of a software platform than the Zune. But yes, the iPod Touch is core to Apple’s future, and there’s no way that the Zune in its current form is core to Microsoft’s fate. Even in a best-case scenario, it’ll just be a neat media player that sells well.

(Speaking of the Nano, MKM Partners’ Tero Kuittinen has an interesting suggestion for Microsoft in Brian’s story: Lower the price of the Zune HD so it’s a cooler, more powerful alternative to the Nano rather than a more limited iPod Touch rival.)

Anyhow, I bring this up mostly because I’m interested in what you think…

Weird but true: For Apple, 2009 has turned out to be the year of inner beauty. Most of the company’s new products, including the iPhone 3GS and the latest MacBooks, are virtually indistinguishable from their predecessors, but which pack meaningful improvements inside. The trend continues with the fifth-generation iPod Nano. For the first time, Apple’s annual reinvention of its most popular music player isn’t about aesthetics–in fact, the new Nano is the same size as the old one and differs visually only its slightly larger screen and slightly smaller clickwheel, the camera on its backside, and the slicker and more vividly colorful (and, I’m hoping, more scratch-resistant) finish on its aluminum case. But the latest Nano carries more new features than any of more outwardly revised predecessors.

In fact, this is the first Nano that feels a little less like a music player and a little more like a Swiss Army Knife. Much of what Apple has added has nothing to do with music: The Nano is now a video camera, a stand-alone voice recorder, and a pedometer. And the major new music feature–an FM radio–is so retro that I’d long ago assumed that Apple would never add one to one of its products. Like most Swiss Army Knives, the new Nano doesn’t match every single-purpose product in every respect, but the improvements add up to a fun upgrade that retains a logical place in the iPod family even in the era of the much fancier and more versatile iPod Touch.

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Today, Steve Jobs and company announced iPhone OS 3.1 (Genius mixes, ringtones); iTunes 9 (iPhone LP content, iPhone app management, fancier syncing, media transfers, new look); cheaper iPod Touches with more capacity; iPod Shuffles in new colors with a lower starting price point and a stainless steel version; a capacity bump for the iPod Classic to 160GB; and an iPod Nano in fancy new colors with with a video camera, FM tuner, voice recorder, and pedometer. It also gave a bunch of iPhone OS game companies a chance to show their new wares. Oh, and Steve Jobs returned to the stage and Norah Jones sang a couple of songs.

Seems to cry out for a T-Poll:

On my way into this morning’s Apple music event, I told a fellow attendee that those of you who participated in our survey yesterday had collectively predicted that Apple would announce an iPod Touch with a camera and a version of iTunes with social networking features, and that Steve Jobs would make an appearance. “I think they got two out of three right,” I said. By which I meant that I thought the Touch and iTunes predictions were spot on, but that Jobs would most likely not preside.

Turns out that you did get two out of three right–but you were right about iTunes and Jobs, and wrong (like most everybody else) about the Touch. You were also wrong (like many folks) about the iPod Classic being discontinued, but it was a squeaker: 51 percent thought it was toast, and 49 percent rightly believed it would stick around.

Only one other thing came to pass that you thought wouldn’t: An overwhelming 75 percent of survey-takers predicted that there wouldn’t be an iPod Nano with a camera. Apple, it turns out, thought otherwise.

Okay, so those results fall short of being uncannily accurate–at worst, they’re comparable to those of most big-time Apple pundits. You guys ever thought of doing this for a living?