Apple Announces iTunes 7, Movies, Set-Top Box 710
necro81 writes, "As anticipated, Apple announced several additions and upgrades to its iPod and iTunes lineup. The iPod now comes in an 80 GB model, with a $50 price drop for the 30 GB model. The 2nd generation iPod Nano harkens back to the iPod Mini with metallic, multi-colored shells (though as diminutive as ever) and comes in an 8 GB model. The Shuffle has been completely redesigned and shrunk down to the size of a matchbook. All of this comes with the release of iTunes 7, which includes support for downloading full-length movies from iTMS." All 75 movies initially available are from Disney-related studios. The new iTunes will download cover art for all the songs in your library, no matter where you got them from, as long as you have an iTunes account. (A confirmation dialog says: "Information about songs with missing artwork will be sent to Apple. Apple does not keep any information related to the contents of your music library.") There's a new album-cover browsing view of your library. And Steve Jobs gave a sneak preview of a project code-named iTV: a Mac Mini-like wireless set-top box. Engadget has a blow-by-blow of Steve Jobs's presentation.
Shocking Interface Change (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Big question... (Score:5, Insightful)
Two reasons. One: we love new iPods. and Two: Apple nearly wrote the book on this sort of marketing technique, and we still love to fall for it every single time.
Baby Steps (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I liked the old nano... (Score:4, Insightful)
The War for the Home is Over: Apple Won (Score:1, Insightful)
Let's review, shall we?
In short, in anything in home entertainment that requires a real user interface, Apple has already beaten the competition so soundly that it is hard to see how they will recover. Apart from the XBox 360 line (still a money-loser, though they might finally eek out a profit if Sony doesn't get their act together), Microsoft is completely absent with viable competitors. With $349 for an 80 GB video iPod, does anyone think Zune, due in November, is going to be anything but dead on arrival?
Game over, Man.
-Crow T. Trollbot
Re:How Much Space (Score:3, Insightful)
Hear hear! Tech is boiled down so freaking much for most people, it makes me mad. I can remember having this conversation about 20 times in the late 90's:
Person: How many songs can you put on a recordable CD?
ME: CD's hold 80 minutes of music, so it depends on the length of a song.
Person: But how many songs is that?
Me:
Re:Shocking Interface Change (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I liked the old nano... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Another expensive Christmas (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Another expensive Christmas (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Smart, Apple, very smart! (Score:4, Insightful)
With iTunes 7, Apple will now let you get the artwork for your entire music collection, even if it wasn't bought from iTMS. This means that Apple has now given you a reason to willingly tell them about your entire music collection, effectively letting them get the information they want about your musical tastes. Very smart!
Re:iTV (Score:3, Insightful)
Ripping DVDs is still illegal in the USA which is Apple's biggest market. If you do the ripping, you can add the DivX (or another quicktime supported format/codec) of a DVD to iTunes.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How Much Space (Score:5, Insightful)
They really should also market the raw capacity in GB on the Apple Store page. Maybe before the number of songs. In bold.
Re:iTunes 7 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
A dock isn't so bad if you have a desktop computer, but with a laptop that moves around a lot, it's suddenly a third component to keep track of, where you really only want two.
Gapless != overrated (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Gapless Playback! (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks! That's good to know!
(Time to go bust up all those "joined" tracks on Dark Side of the Moon tonight. ^_^)
Re:DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
What is it about the 4th and 5th generation iPods having vastly different system architecture that eludes your grasp?
Re:Gapless Playback! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why not?? Xbox360 + MCE= iTV (Score:4, Insightful)
Xbox 360 breaks the metaphor. Ok, so I want to buy a movie. I plug in my xbox 360 (wait...isn't that for games?) then I go to the movie store on the xbox. I browse and press download. Ok...where are my movies living now? On the xbox? Uhhh..ok...but what if I turn off the xbox?
A savvy user knows the answer to these questions. Of course the xbox is just like your pc, and I'm sure the xbox movie download will work great. But the issue here is that the experience seems a little more confusing, just a little harder to deal with. And that is a major marketing hurdle. Tivo and Apple overcame consumer resistance to tech that savvy people were never afraid to use. The Tivo is so easy to deal with the consumer loses their fear of using a computer to record shows, which sounds too complex. The previous barrier to mp3 player adoption was the complexity in sorting music and getting it on the device. Apple combined ideas and features everyone else already had in a way that wasn't too indimitating for average users. Now, in the consumer's mind an ipod is something they can use. Apple comes around with a thing that is like an ipod for your tv. Easy. The consumer will not be afraid of this because they already have an idea of how this works (of course, they are wrong about that, but that doesn't matter). It will make sense to people, the fear of complexity is easy to overcome here. Microsoft (or sony or amazon or whoever) has a major hill to climb. The first user objection to the Amazon system is "how does it get on my TV?". The objection to the xBox 360 is that people think of it as a game console and using it to download movies is going to sound complex, even if it isn't. Most consumers didn't want Tivo because they hadn't seen it and it sounded too hard. Tivo caught on once enough people had it that people could see how easy it was and lose that fear. So like a sibling poster said, the major innovation here is marketing, followed up by products that deliver as promised. Apple marketing convinces people that they CAN use an ipod. Then the product actually is easy enough to use that it meets this expectation.
Let's be serious...microsoft does not have a reputation for ease of use.
Re:I liked the old nano... (Score:5, Insightful)
Baseless paranoia? Why, mod it up, of course! (Score:4, Insightful)
Upgrade your old videos? (Score:5, Insightful)
Shouldn't compare Microsoft MCE to Front-Row (Score:5, Insightful)
Front-Row is a product designed to be turned on and used with a remote with 5 buttons and no skills. The iTV (!!) box is designed and marketed to be plugged in to a television and used with no skills. It is also sold specifically to be attached to a TV to watch movies, it is not bundled into a general purpose PC guerilla marketing style by PHBs that mistakenly believe that once the user realizes he has a media center on his desktop that he will move his PC to the living room and attach it to his television.
In comparison, MCE is something that is really only owned accidentally by people who don't even know they have it (because it was bundled with their PC from Best Buy), it requires the PC to be near the TV rather than on a desk and requires the user to know how to configure it and operate it with some crazy 300 button remote control (exaggeration, but the point is clearly made). It would probably require a class to get a user comfortable with the relationship between and configurations of MCE and Microsoft Media Player (and the derivitaves such as Amazon Unbox). It really doesn't matter if MCE can do any of the things that Front-Row does (which it really doesn't because Microsoft doesn't use zero-conf [bonjour] and whatnot). The simple fact is, it is not designed or marketed in a manner that will ever be used that way by the common man.
To say that something *can* be done is not the same as saying that people *will* do it. You *can* write an assembly language CGI script library for publishing a Blog site. But I doubt you *will*...
Re:Gapless Playback! (Score:2, Insightful)
Sound Check is just a normalizer, right? It goes through, finds the peak volume, and then amplifies everything up to the point that it's 0, right? Well, Mastering houses, as well as recording studios, normalize everying, anyway! So unless you're consantly listening to stuff put out by VG Remix kiddies or local garage bands who don't know what their doing, Sound Check is pretty worthless anyway. Sure, on a concept album, there might not be a peak in a particular track, do to the whole album being normalized together, but the difference is going to be about 1db-2db tops.
My Advise: turn Sound Check off, it's pretty useless for MOST music listening applications.
Re:DRM (Score:3, Insightful)
But you are still missing the main point. My original point, and the only one I have towards the OP is that his complaint about the new features on the IPOD make no sense. itunes has nothing to do with the point I was making to the OP.
No DVD burning??? Meh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, one of the supposed improvements to the new iPods is that the screen is now 60% brighter. Is it just me or was the iPod screen already extremely bright, almost too bright? 60% brighter and I'm not sure I'll even be able to look at it. Fortunately they have the brightness control.
I agree with engadget - I'm pretty underwhelmed by this. I was hoping they'd have a bigger screen. Is the increase from 60gb to 80gb really going to sell anybody on this? Something makes me think not.
The decrease in price is pretty cool, but isn't that a tacit admission on their part that the improvements on their own aren't worth buying the 5.5G? If the improvements were good they wouldn't have to lower the price.
The Nano's, however, are nice. As is the shuffle. The shuffle is pretty badass given how small it is, like a lapel pin. And I like the return to multicolor that they lost when they discontinued the Mini.
Still, there is no reason at all for me to upgrade my iPod from my 60gb 5G, even if I did have the money. And I think this may leave them vulnerable to Microsoft, whose player will have a bigger screen.
Overall, my reaction is "meh"...