Apple has a media event later today (10am PDT), and is likely to be announcing new iPods today, along with possibly some iPhone news (2.1 firmware). iTunes 8, and other rumored stuff.

Live news feeds are here, or here.

Whoo hooo! Let's ignore the mac users! (Sorry. My powerbook self-destructed, and my macbook pro money is burning a hole in my pocket.)

Latest rumors say the nano's getting accelerometers so it can transition to landscape mode for videos, along with other cool probably useless tricks.

An ipod touch classic that falls under the back to school promo will get me down to the apple store today to buy a macbook. I'm not holding my breath.

The various pictures floating around of the allegedly new Nano don't look very suitable for landscape though.

Why's that? If those images are accurate, with the nano held vertically the screen is taller than it is wide, unlike all nanos and classics before it. It stands to reason that you'd want to watch videos in landscape (ie: holding the new nano horizontally).

Hrm. Looked smaller in the pics I saw before. Guess it is okay.

Looks like 2.1 is scheduled for Friday for iPhone users, though no mention of the push service. I wonder if that got delayed. Overall, nothing really big out of the event, and as expected it was only iPod related.

Another year, another round of iPod updates, and another batch of features left out of previous models. In a way, I do like that MS keeps revving the firmware on their entire family of products. At least the iPhones are being kept in the upgrade loop for now.

Oh, and it looks like Apple is going to seriously try to compete in the handheld gaming market, with this comment out of Jobs during the keynote "It's the best portable device for playing games."

I assume that it'll be in a similar fashion to how even a couple of percent of market penetration is counted as a big success like the iPhone?

Okay, I thought I'd write down my thoughts on the event as I read Engadget's live blog. As you might expect from me, I'm underwhelmed. I'm sure I'll start getting blasted for any number of the following (some of it is admittedly nit-picky):

Thoughts as I read the live blog:

- I'm just not into the whole "suggest other songs like what you're listening to." I think it's pretty obvious that this is first and foremost a means to push more music sales.

- Is that the only new thing in iTunes 8? 7 saw far more than that between point releases, like iPhone support and the apps store.

- $2.99 for a single HD TV show? Seriously? I still maintain that everything in the iTunes store is twice as expensive as it should be.

- Poor Steve, looking seriously frail. That procedure really caused havoc on him. Hope his malnurishment issues get straightened out.

- Neat, new nano looks just like the spy shots. Has an accelerometer. The only thing that worries me is the curved screen. The addition of the curve and glass covering mean that I suspect it'll have some pretty bad glare issues, but I hope I'm wrong. I just think the curvature will make it hard to tilt it out of glare...

- And of course the oval shape instantly creates a whole new market of accessories. Hopefully dock inserts are being made for all those docks that have them.

- Are they STILL using Napolean Dynamite for these things? I like that movie less and less with every mention of it. I'm sure there have been other cult movies in the last four years. Juno comes to mind as a good recent one. I'm pretty sure it's in the iTunes store...

- The same applies for Beck's "Guess I'm Doing Fine," except that I LOVE that album. Still, it's going on six years...

- Nice battery life on the new nano

- Wow, that's a lot of colors. Pretty wild.

- I agree with Engadget, those included $79 earbuds are really driving the price up. Would be nice if they'd release a version without them, since I'm sure there's a lot of folks out there with their own headphones.

- Some very nice minor updates to the Touch. I like that they put the speaker in. 802.11n would be nice, but probably tough to include.

- I'm still nowhere near sold on games for the Touch and iPhone. I need physical controls. I really want to hear real-world reactions to that virtual D-pad in the Fifa game. Still, impressive graphics - NFS looks really good.

- "It's the best portable device for playing games..." Um, again, I think this is extremely difficult to claim. It doesn't even have games that use the touchscreen to the best effect.

- Jack Johnson. Might be the biggest iTunes seller ever, but I could care less.

- That's all? Okay...

If you take out all the filler, you see how Apple can create a spectacle around one new product, an (IMO) minor addition to iTunes, and a slight revamp of the Touch. I'm not complaining about the event because I was expecting more, I'm complaining because I feel that if you're going to have an event like this where supposed "journalists" clap and cheer for everything you announce, there should at least be something big to share.

And that's another thing that bothers me. Journalists shouldn't be cheering for product releases. I thought they were supposed to be objective.

Anyway, let the flames commence...

*edit*
One more note on the Touch and iPhone as gaming devices: it's true that they have better graphics than any other portable gaming device out there, and the power inside to match, but I think the press is forgetting something: the DS and the PSP are nearly four years old. That's ancient. All I'm saying is: watch out, Apple, you don't want to be another Dreamcast.

I agree, completely underwhelming and given the drop in share price, the market seems to agree to.

Steve Jobs looks worse than ever, this is only going to fuel rumours that there is something serious going on with his health.

I guess 28% US smartphone marketshare, and 6.5% worldwide marketshare (from Feburary 2008) isn't a big success in your mind for some reason. For an initial product launch, I'd say that was pretty good. And no numbers have been released yet with the 3G now rolling out to a much larger worldwide audience.

The iPhones are selling at a much quicker pace then the iPods did at their launch. But, I suppose the iPod isn't a success either

Welcome to the UK. Hope you enjoy your stay. Sorry everything is crazy expensive on the iTunes store.


Do you still get the bundled dock insert with Nanos?


What are they included with?


Volume controls on the side of the thing are the big thing IMO. Having to yank it out of your pocket to adjust the volume is a pain.


Yeah. No real buttons is a big thing for me. I doubt it'd make even a tiny dent in Nintendo's revenue but its probably some worry for Sony since the iPods/iPhones are more aimed at the higher end expensive market.

It may be powerful and have a nice touchscreen display but if your games are crap then its still pointless. The PSP has nice hardware and it has hardware buttons but they're still nowhere near what Nintendo have achieved with significantly less.


Who?


Apple have a knack for getting its to be blunt fanboys all into a frenzy over pretty much nothing.

No. I mean how originally it was that if they even captured a few percentage of the worldwide phone market then they'd be happy. Not that I don't think that they've been successful.

Well, the rumors can't get much worse than a report that he was dead...

Actually, people already know about his health issues (that they know at all was a bit of a controversy too). He looks like that because of the "Whipple" procedure he had done, which apparently has a side effect of either malnourishment or malnutrition, I can't remember which one, but I think it's the latter.

I'm not really feeling the new iPod Touch except for use as a development platform. I really thought it would bundle GPS. That would have been quite killer, but I can understand the desire for Apple to have a larger gap between the iPhone and iPod Touch.

I can't recall how Apple positioned iTunes 7 when it launched 2 years ago, but I definitely recall that the reason I liked it (and started using it) was due to all the small changes that weren't actively marketed, such as the ability to readily group tracks into Albums when viewing.

Versions of iTunes prior to 7 were pretty much a complete nightmare for managing a large music collection. I'd dare to say practically useless in fact.

I'm hoping that there are similar subtle changes to iTunes 8 in addition to the big-story stuff that everyone saw in the presentation. I can get "Genius" recommendations from Last.FM already.

I haven't finished downloading 8 yet, but I'm getting a little worried they may have removed some functionality going by the couple of screenshots I've seen....


Oh, and while I didn't watch the press event or even read about it live, Jack Johnson is awesome. I'd have a very hard time believing he's #1 on any iTunes lists though as I was under the impression he was relatively unknown (not much of a following in the US as I recall)

EDIT: Damn, I got Rick-rolled by Apple. The iTunes 8 download link netted me a copy of iTunes 7.7.1. Argh, 55MB for nothing.

Seems he's popular all over the world. God knows why.

The first I'd heard of him was on all of Sonos' marketing images. His album was used on the controller for a long time as the default image. Coincidentally, the default image on their current marketing materials now belongs to an album by G. Love, a friend of Jack Johnson and artist on Johnson's own label.

I started listening to him only because of the airplay some of his songs from the Curious George soundtrack got in Portugal (while I was on vacation). I recognized the name and had some additional listening time when I got back.

In addition to a few nice interface tweaks in iTunes 8, Apple also messed up a few things for no apparent reason.

The good:
-The list view can now show/hide the album art which used to require 2 different views
-You can now set the Sort tags when multi-editing metadata (the UI used to only appear when editing a single track)
-New grid view

The Lame:
-Some items in prefs have been moved around for no reason
-When multi-editing tracks, the compilation tag is now on an OPTIONS tab, a different place than when editing a single track
-A number of other tags on the options tab should probably be on the primary info tab to make for faster editing
-New grid view has no sorting options (it has options for what to show, just not how)
-New grid has no options to change the displayed cover size
-There's a "video" tab when editing metadata for files that are not video files
-No new metadata supported (I'm really after TLAN ID3 for Language and proper multi-genre support)
-Genius requires an iTunes account

The Windows x86 version link gave me 8.0. Not tried the OSX one.

From what I can tell, these earphones aren't packaged in with anything. You have to fork out another $79 for them.

Meanwhile, Apple supposedly announced that the iTunes Store now had TV shows in HD. I punched it up on my AppleTV and, while the NBC shows are now up, and the icons for them say things ("Now in SD and HD"), there's no "buy now in HD" button anywhere to be seen. One can assume this is going to be rolled out soon.

I "successfully" downloaded iTunes 8 from Apple, which then required me to update my Quicktime to version 7.7.5 or something along those lines.

If I try using either the Genius feature or the iTunes store, my iTunes is consistently crashing, so that's not terribly encouraging. If I turn all that crap off, it otherwise seems to work.

About 60 seconds after I wrote about getting the wrong iTunes version, I tried again and Apple's site had been updated with the new file.

After reading a bit more about the new touch I'm even less impressed than initially.

Major features that didn't come to the touch:

GPS
Camera
More storage - I was expecting a bump to 64GB on the top end

I certainly didn't expect them all, but thought at least one would be forthcoming.

I might pick up an old one as a development/test machine since I don't really have a need for a portable audio device unless it can hold my entire library. I also don't have a need for a photo viewer that has no way to take photos or pull them from a camera or camera card directly. Moving photos from your computer to the touch is only semi-useful. To tote around to show other people snaps. Not as functional as the device could be with a more convergent design.

I think Apple were content to let this thing just keep on going (don't mess with a good thing) and hope to really exploit it as a vehicle for the AppStore. You don't need the major features I mentioned to make this into a killer handheld gaming device, albeit one without any hard buttons. Plenty of opportunity for a large number of killer applications and utilities as well, even without decent location services.

Still would have been nice to see a 5mp image sensor and flash on there though.

I think that was one of the biggest things missing from the iPhone 3G.

This alone makes the upgrade for me.


The options are there, they're just not in the same place as the "what" options. The "how" options are over in the "View" menu.


There's that little slider in the upper right for changing size (like iPhoto).


That one definitely looks like a bug, but on the plus side you can now change the file types that iTunes thinks something is. For example, I can download an MP3, put it in iTunes, then change the type to "Audiobook" and have iTunes treat it like an audiobook. This previously required AppleScript hacking or something. The big missing feature here now is that I still can't change a Podcast to "Music" or vice versa.

iTunes has always been a huge interface mess, and this update fixes a few inconsistencies, but probably adds just as many more.

I didn't expect GPS or camera, but I agree that more storage would have been a good thing. I, too, have no use for a device that can't hold my entire music collection. I guess the problem is that solid-state memory is still expensive these days.



Or which doesn't EXIF-rotate the photos properly when they're sent to the device. This is STILL A BUG that I can reproduce over and over again. I'll try again with 8.0 (which is downloading in the background right now) but it's not promising.

Strangeness: I plugged my iPhone into the computer to sync and charge, then went to bed. While falling asleep, I heard the chime of my Mac rebooting. This morning, iTunes is up again, and it's complaining about tunes of mine not actually being there, while in fact they were.

Very strange. There was no evidence of what in the logs. It was just humming along like normal and then there were log events for the machine while it was rebooting.

My only hypothesis is that something went wrong with my external Firewire drive. That could have caused iTunes to be unable to find the music files and could also have induced the reboot. The state, in the morning, was that all of the files that were to have been synced had a "!" next to them, even though they were all there. Click on one and it played the track just fine.

iTunes, naturally, once it decided the files were unavailable has no way for me to have it do a bulk rescan or anything. (Does it?) Nor will it bother to check again if I try to sync again. *sigh*

What is odd about the new prices is the difference in how much Apple is charging for more space. I'd imagine the same flash chips are going into all three devices.

8gb Nano to 16gb Nano = $50
8gb Touch to 16gb Touch = $70
8gb Phone to 16gb Phone = $100

After watching the event and playing around with iTunes 8, I'm looking forward to using the Genius feature on the phone. Pandora has been great for playing "I'm in this mood" music when I have WiFi, but on the go being able to do the same with my collection will be handy. I could do similar with a bunch of playlists, but having it done on the fly and automatically is really useful.

Still nothing about 2.1 for the iPhone including push service or not.

I'm having some issues with iTunes 8 and Vista. It seems the USB driver it uses is a bit weird and causes mysterious crashes. iTunes 7.5 worked perfectly.

Marketing I guess.

The iPhone and iPod touch are different though in how they have their flash. The iPod touch has space for 2 chips on the PCB. The iPhone has space for only 1 chip on the PCB. Apple buys prestacked (like the old manual empeg RAM upgrade) chips directly from the manufacturer along with the regular single type. This is the reason why the iPhone is 1/2 the capacity of the iPod touch.

The Nano and iPhone I'd assume use the same arrangement of chips and types so there shouldn't be actually any technical reason why its an extra $50. There is a technical difference between an iPod touch and an iPhone however.

Don't even get me started on iTunes inept file tracking and scanning "abilities."

iTunes is decent and does quite a bit very well, but there are subtle problems that can become major issues for some people. I've been bitted quite a few times with it not knowing where some files were located. There was no way to fix other than to manually point it to the correct location for each track, one at a time.

There was also no way to get it to do a complete scan to tell me which tracks had this problem. Only by clicking on a track would it scan and then display the exclamation point. With 20k tracks this means I had anywhere from 1 to a nightmare-level of tracks it no longer knew the location for. My only choice was to toss the whole DB and just drag all the files over to iTunes again.

This has happened multiple times and each time there was no change to the drive the songs were on. This may be exacerbated by not keeping tracks on the local HD. It's happened on an external drive as well as a network share (whose mount point looks just like any other drive to most applications).

I used to also keep the iTunes database (yes, I know that's a misnomer) on the external/network drive with the music so that I could access it from any Mac by pointing iTunes on that machine to it. This worked very well for a long time with the music connected to another Mac on the network. Connected to a Windows machine not so much. The datafiles are also not compatible with the Windows version of iTunes, including the hard-paths it records for the music.

I've resorted to just keeping the iTunes DB local to the machine that's to run iTunes and the music where it's always been. Let's see if that improves anything. The issue with this setup is that when new music is added to the music drive every iTunes installation that access it will have to re-add the entire drive and discover which songs are new and which it already knows about.

Interested in any tips if anyone has better ideas. It takes a long (long) time to populate iTunes with all my tracks the first time around. I'm about to do it tonight before going to bed for the new iTunes 8. I just wiped the DB last night.

Can't iTunes access other running iTunes instances?