The Apple Event
Nothing earth-shattering here. A few good, a few bad, and definitely some uglies.
- iPod touch
- Camera is finally here, but is rubbish. Other aspects are nice, but predictable. Shame it persists with this curvy-backed nonsense, though.
- iPod shuffle
- Screams of “Okay, we screwed up”. Fair play.
- iPod nano
- Dinky. If anything’s going to kill the Shuffle, this will be it.
- iTunes
- That icon is horrible.
- Somebody on Twitter said (apologies, can’t find original tweet to link) something along the lines of: “If you’re going to break UI conventions, you’d better do something stellar”. This is true here.
defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1 - It’s not iTunes X
- iTunes Ping
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The idea of sharing musical taste and consumption info across your social network is not a bad idea, nor is it a new one. Last.fm is clearly the key example of this, but Spotify also does it. Recommending gigs and other artists based on the aggregated information (which is pretty much just an extension to Genius) is also not a bad idea.
Building a completely new social network to do it is bonkers. It’s not even a fallback for those people who have neither {Twitter,Facebook} accounts. Apparently Facebook wanted “onerous terms that we could not agree to” (according to Jobs, via word of mouth) — yet Facebook’s terms are more or less fine for everybody else, including Spotify and the BBC? Something smells fishy here. And, really, no OAuth-based Twitter integration? The iTunes Store is alrightly lightly-integrated with both Twitter and Facebook, so not supporting these two seems a little strange.
- iOS 4.1
- Meh. The bugfixes are the only really interesting thing here.
- iOS 4.2
- This is where it gets interesting, though “November” is now Autumn, apparently. This is the long-awaited unified iOS supporting iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Folders, multitasking and IPv6 are pretty high on my list of “I wish the iPad would hurry up and get these” list. Printing is a big deal. I don’t doubt that there’ll be more stuff.
- Apple TV
Nothing huge here. Certainly not the device certain people were predicting. While it does run iOS — apparently — this is an implementation detail (easiest way to support the A4; porting Tiger to ARM would be No Fun). Still called the Apple TV (no shocker there). On the plus side, it’s a quarter of the size of the old model, has fewer ports, and I suspect runs cooler. Oh, and it’s a fair bit cheaper.
The loss of an internal disk makes sense: streaming (rather than syncing) from iTunes libraries has always worked fairly well on the Apple TV, provided your network wasn’t flaky. 802.11n is a lot more prevalent now than when the original or revised models were released, and it hasn’t lost wired Ethernet.
Even so, if price wasn’t the key factor preventing you from getting one, you’re unlikely to be blown away by one now (unless you live in the US and want a device for Netflix streaming).
Speaking personally, as somebody who does have an Apple TV which sees regular use, the price change has taken my plan of moving the current one into the living room so that the kids can use it in there and getting a new one for the bedroom from “would like to do” to “will probably do”. However it’s worth stressing that we have a vast library of content that the Apple TV can play out of the box already, having spent some considerable time over the past couple of years ripping our entire DVD collection to H.264+AAC MP4s.
Hardware-wise, it essentially does nothing that the old one doesn’t do, and the only significant software change for the time being is Netflix. If you live in the US. Still no 1080p (I suspect that’d be a push on the A4, not to mention streaming bandwidth and the lack of content on the iTunes Store, but even so). Still very definitely a hobby, albeit a cheaper one.
I still think scope for apps on the Apple TV is limited: there’s games, but they’ll need a control mechanism of some kind (conversations at the weekend headed towards a multitouch Wiimote-style device), and there’s VoD. Video on Demand certainly has a market, but I’d much rather there was a sensible way for the device to do that by itself.
