The iPod lineup hasn't gotten a significant hardware update since 2012, if you can believe it. For the Shuffle and the Nano, this isn't a big deal; dedicated music players stopped evolving pretty much the minute the iPhone started to go mainstream. For the iPod Touch, it was more unfortunate—it's a fully-fledged iDevice and one of the cheapest entry points into the ecosystem, so saddling it with the same Apple A5 SoC as the iPhone 4S for three years was rather unfortunate.

That changes today. Apple has just updated the entire iPod lineup, including new colors for the (essentially unchanged) Nano and Shuffle as well as a significant internal overhaul for the iPod Touch. It picks up a 64-bit chip and an 8MP camera, both of which should make it run iOS 9 and future versions much better than the previous Touch.

All the new iPods come in Space Gray, silver, gold, pink, blue, and red enclosures. The gold color, new to the iPod lineup, looks like the same finish used on iPhones and iPads and MacBooks. The pink, blue, and red shades all look darker and more saturated than they did before. The new iPod Touch runs iOS 8.4 and costs $199, $249, $299, or $399 for 16GB, 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB. The 128GB option is exclusive to Apple, which means you won't find it in a Best Buy or Wal-Mart. The Nano costs $149 for 16GB, and the Shuffle costs $49 for 2GB.

On the outside, the new Touch is near-identical to the old one, but it gets a big upgrade on the inside. The aging Apple A5 SoC has been replaced by an Apple A8—the A8 made its debut in the iPhone 6 last year and it's a monumental CPU and GPU upgrade to the A5 (Apple's release claims they're eight and ten times faster, respectively). It also doubles the RAM to 1GB and adds a 64-bit CPU architecture and support for the Metal graphics API. It includes the M8 motion coprocessor as well, which is capable of basic step, distance, and elevation tracking.

The camera sees a decent bump, too, from a 5MP sensor to an 8MP sensor. The last four generations of iPhones (from the 4S to the 6es) have used 8MP sensors so we can't immediately say which one it's the most comparable to, though we'll be spending a lot of time on this in our review. It includes Burst Mode (introduced on the iPhone 5S) but it appears to lack the two-tone LED flash of the iPhone 5S and 6. The lens also appears to protrude from the back of the device, like the current Touch and both iPhone 6es. Finally, the new Touch is missing the small camera loop button from the fifth-generation Touch, either to simplify manufacturing or save room inside the case.

The new Touch keeps the same 4-inch, 1136×640 screen as the old one, which makes a certain amount of sense; an iPhone 6- or 6-Plus sized Touch would be more expensive to introduce and might begin to butt up against the iPad Mini lineup. It also gets an upgrade to 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1.

On paper, there are just a couple of obvious disappointments. First, there's no TouchID fingerprint sensor—this is an entry-level device and not including one probably helps Apple keep the price down, but it means no fingerprint-based authentication or Apple Pay support. Second, it still starts at 16GB, though it's nice to see a 32GB tier available for $50 more and we like the 128GB option given the death of the 160GB iPod Classic last year. As good as iOS 9 will be for low-capacity devices, 16GB still feels too light.

The other thing Apple doesn't address is how the dumber lower-end iPods will carry on in this post-Apple-Music world; for now the Shuffle and Nano are still married to the older buy-music-and-then-you-own-it model with no end in sight.

Though the iPod Touch has faded from importance as smartphones and tablets have become more prevalent, it’s still commonly used as an iOS development device or as a way to give an iPhone-sized experience to people who don’t want an iPhone-sized price tag or contract. Bringing support for 64-bit code and Metal to the iPod Touch makes it more useful for developers, while the speed improvements will make it a better buy for consumers.

All the new iPods are available today from the company’s online store. We’ll be giving the Touch a full review when we can get our hands on one—its components are mostly known quantities, so we aren’t expecting many surprises.