I’m joining the rest of the hordes…
…in saying some stuff about the release of the new iPod lineup. While I will contest that the shuffle still is, and will always be, utterly useless, the rest of the lineup looks pretty solid. Apple’s managed to extend video playback across all of their players now that the nano is sporting a bigger screen. The classic looks nice. 160GB of storage is totally ridiculous in a good way. You have to understand that I thought I had a lot of music with around ~1500 songs (6.10GB), so something like that would give me nigh-infinite expandability. I’m a fan of quality materials, so I was pleased to see the move to an all-metal casing for the classic. Should be a bit more damage resistant as well.
The real kicker here is the touch, and after hearing on digg that it runs the same apps as the iPhone, I’m sold. A great music/photo/video player coupled with WiFi, an awesome interface, browser, and potential for SSH and other nifty apps is a winner in my book. It has great potential as a thin client! The 16GB of storage doesn’t bug me, as all of my photos and music could fit on it with room to spare.
Also, I hear that Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to iPhone owners, offering $100 in store credit to everyone who bought an iPhone before the announcement yesterday. There’s some good PR for you.
Obligatory jab at Microsoft: The Zune came up today in our conversation during MK399 - Marketing High Tech Products and was met with a fair amount of snickering. “It would be good if you could find another Zune user to share songs with!” said the audience. I didn’t think it was a bad device when it was launched; it just didn’t do enough to differentiate itself from the competition.
Also, I finally managed to get ActiveRotate working on my tablet, which re-orients the screen based on how you’re holding the machine. No more manual rotating when I go from laptop to tablet mode!
The Shuffle is kind of cool. It’d be handy for, say, putting a “Jogging Music” playlist on. I wouldn’t buy it and another flash-based player, but if I were to just get one, or if my other one were a disk-based one, I’d certainly consider it.
The 160GB classic is just obscenely large. (Not that I’m complaining!) I have a 30GB iPod and kind of chuckle at the little bar graph of how much I’m using — I have 4GB of music and maybe half a gig of movies (TV shows).
The iPod Touch is definitely spiffy. I don’t get the people complaining about 16GB of storage. (Especially flash-based storage.) Although an iPod Touch (and an iPhone) with the classic’s 160GB disk would be incredible! (There was some complaining that there’s no ‘best’ iPod right now — you could get the Classic if you want lots of space, the Touch for the interface, the Nano for the small size…)
The $100 in store credit is a decent compromise, although not as good as just refunding $200. (But then again, what Apple did was just sound business practice — extracting maximum consumer value…) I’d have handed out $201 (not a typo) in iTMS gift cards myself.
I almost feel bad for the Zune. It’s probably a good device, but it has so many things wrong… Including the orgasm [NSFW?] installation picture, their upside-down logo [NSFW], and the fact that it’s… Brown. BUT, it does seem kind of slick, and the FM tuner is a good idea. Overall, I’d call it a good idea but bad implementation.
n1zyy
6 Sep 07 at 8:15 pm