One of the decade's most successful consumer electronics manufacturers, and, of course, one of my favorite companies, has done it again. Apple (AAPL) released its new lineup of iPods last week, and after studying the promotional materials I am ready to declare that they are red-hot and should attract substantial sell-through at retail stores this holiday season.

This was the first total refresh of the company's MP3 player line, and it was very well thought out. There is now an iPod with a fresh feature set for every price point, so whether you're an investment banker with a lot of money to spend or a student on a budget, there's a new device available that is cool enough to make you consider ditching your current player and buying a new one. That is a big, big statement for investors to consider, and it has already caused several brokerage analysts to revise their fourth-quarter earnings estimates upward.

As if Apple's earlier summer release of the iMac and iPhone wasn't enough, Steve Jobs pulled back the curtain and turned some heads with a brand-new item in the line-up called the iPod Touch. This device brings all of the cool Internet-related features of the iPhone to your music experience, allowing users to download songs from iTunes and videos from YouTube off a Wi-Fi network. You can also browse the web on its gorgeous 3.5-inch color screen, and check your email via a "soft" keyboard, or touch screen, that works just like it does on the iPhone. And because you're on a Wi-Fi network and using a new, speedier version of the Safari browser, everything loads super-fast, creating a mesmerizing experience.

Indeed, the user interface and rich functionality of these new devices are going to surprise a lot of people and really raise the bar for competitors such as Microsoft (MSFT), Nokia (NOK) and Sony (SNE). The way that cover art is employed as a navigation device, the ease of surfing to new content and the overall immersion in fast, colorful, high-touch beauty will keep Apple on the cutting edge of design and customer satisfaction. That is, as long as the devices actually work well in practice when mass-produced, and as long as customers are using strong Wi-Fi connections.

One angle that was not well covered in the mainstream coverage was Apple's new deal with Starbucks (SBUX), which actually blew me away. It's brilliant and fulfills a lot of hopes that I had for location-dependent Wi-Fi a few years back. You see, if you take your iPod Touch into a participating Starbucks store, it will automatically sense the song that the store is playing and pop it up on your device on command. In the background, the Starbucks-Apple deal will provide your device with the last 10 songs played in the store. So, if you want to buy the song that Starbucks is currently playing or recently played, you just touch your screen and it downloads onto your device. That is cool!

My 15-year-old son instantly put this device at the top of his holiday gift list, but then realized that with only a 16-gigabyte drive it wouldn't have much room for his large downloaded video collection. So, I think he and others like him will gravitate more toward the new high-end iPod Classic that provides a stunning 160-gigabyte hard drive for $399. I am very curious to see how this battle of the new models will work out, as ultimately the company will have to provide a large-capacity Wi-Fi device so that customers aren't so torn between the two that they end up buying neither. I actually think that a lot of high-end customers will end up buying both.