So, the big news today is the iPod nano, or at least, that's what most people are cooing over at the moment. It's very sexy and does look like an incredible piece of tech, and I'm sure they'll sell bucketloads, but I still can't see a compelling reason to get one if you already have an iPod. Maybe I'm missing something, but colour screens and photo capabilities still seem like icing on the cake rather than must-have features, especially for someone that has a notebook computer. Also, the nano has no TV-out, so you're restricted to viewing your photos on the device itself. So, this is a player to update the product line rather than revolutionise the industry.
The great thing that the iPod nano has done though, is put Apple clearly back in front. The older iPod range is still market-leading in terms of design, but the competition had been closing the gap recently. Apple just opened that gap right up again - in terms of design and desirability, the nano is way ahead of what anyone else is doing in the portable music player space. If you need a new music player and have planty of cash, then you'd definitely have it on your shortlist. Which brings us to the only problem here: price. The 4GB nano costs £179, but a 20GB iPod is £209. That's £30 for an extra 16GB, and if you're at all serious about using it to carry photos and music, that 16GB is going to be mighty handy, even if the unit itself isn't as lovely.
What I was more excited about before today was a new iTunes to see what that would bring. I like the version 5 interface but I am really pissed that it won't connect to my Linux mt-daapd server any more. Why do they feel the need to do that? - it didn't break connections to iTunes 4.9 shared libraries, so backwards-compatibility is not a problem. I mean, if I'm using iTunes to listen to my music at home, why does it matter that the machine serving it is not running iTunes? If they're that bothered, Apple should release iTunes for Linux instead of breaking daapd compatibility. Anyway, rant over, but I'll also say that the new features are a little disappointing - iTunes has been crying out for playlist folders for ages, but other than that, nothing great for Mac users. Windows users finally get calendar and contact syncing to their iPods though, so long as they're using Outlook or Outlook Express. Still, I guess you never know what they've buried in there to reveal later.
What else? Ah yes, the iTunes phone. Why?
Again, maybe I'm missing the point, but there's nothing amazingly great here it seems. I have a phone that stores and plays mp3's, but I have to manually copy files to a memory card. The thing is that I don't use that feature very often because (you guessed it) I have an iPod. So this new phone will let me sync from within iTunes, but that's the only benefit I can see. I reckon this is pilot technology - the thing only holds 100 songs. It's also a way to get at the few people that don't have an iPod.
The long-term goal is probably to build a combined phone and iPod with some decent capacity, but I'm really not sure that combining the phone and iPod is a good mix. PDA and phone? - definitely a good idea; I'm loving my Treo, but I like playing my iPod music through speakers or a stereo in a room with other people. If I have one of these things and someone calls me, everybody has to stop listening to the tunes.
Overall, I'm a bit disappointed. The invite to the event promised so much more, and these are all incremental improvements rather than the evolution or revolution that I guess I was hoping for.
(This post has been an experiment by the way - I'm just looking at the Apple site. No reviews, hype or conjecture, no video feed or Steve Jobs reality distortion field, just what they put on the site. I want to see if my views get changed when I read the hype and see the keynote.)
On another note, I had a thought about why Apple went to Intel recently, and maybe it's just really simple.
Imagine you have a great O/S that is ahead of the competition by miles, that you design and build the best hardware, and that you are using a processor architecture that is superior (at least in terms of first principles, purist design values).
Now imagine that you have also been developing your O/S to run on the same processors as your competition, in secret, just in case.
Imagine that your competitors CPU's are increasing in performance at a faster rate than your superior architecture can follow, and that as a result, your offering is starting to look like it's taking a spanking in the performance stakes. But you know that actually your O/S is better and runs faster than the competition, because in the back room you are running it on the same hardware, and it screams; way faster than it is on the superior, but slower processors.
What do you do? I reckon you do what Apple did.
I would.