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Apple Announces New iPods, iTunes 10, Social Network, AppleTV
Steve Jobs gave his iPod keynote this morning. He started with iOS 4.1 and Game Center which will be coming out next week. iOS 4.2 will add printing to the iPad and will be out in November. The new iPod Shuffle has buttons again, and costs $49. The new iPod Nano has a tiny multi-touch screen, and an FM radio, and starts at $149. The new (thinner) Touch has the iPhone 4 screen, an A4 chip, and FaceTime over WiFi, starting at $229 for 8GB. They all ship next week.
iTunes 10 looks the same, but adds a social network called "Ping," which basically looks like Last.fm integrated, and should be out today.
AppleTV is updating: 1/4th the size, no purchases — only rentals. 99 cents for TV rentals (ABC & Fox), Netflix on Demand built in, and for $99.
You can stream from your computer.
OT:
I liked that quote so much, I had to look it up. According to Snopes, Jed Babbin said that.
Carry on.
Let's face it, most of us are scoffers. But moments before zero hour, it does not pay to take chances.
You do realize that AM stations, by virtue of being much further down the RF spectrum, have a much, much bigger range, right?
AM radio requires a special ferrite bar antenna, which won't fit inside a small device (and give decent reception). With FM, they can just use the headphone cable as an antenna.
I suppose. For me -- and I'm really invested in Apple hardware, both for myself and my family (5 mac users) -- there's nothing here of interest.
The iPad (which yes, we own two of) still lacks cameras and IR emission, needs a flat, un-wobbly back, still has enough wasted sq inches of bezel area to fit an iPod Touch into, still is bound to AT&T, still is too low-res to properly display even 720p, still lacks CF, SD and USB connections, still syncs by cable, still charges by cable, and still has a paltry 512 mb of memory, which, when they eventually get around to implementing multitasking, means that what you're actually going to get is something on the order of windows 3.1 multitasking with a few services, not actual task switching, etc. And it still costs *way* too much.
The iPhone... still bound to AT&T, still missing features other phones have had for quite some time. Can't use it here because of the AT&T monopoly, so it isn't worth anything to me.
Mac Mini... from a $499 (barely) entry mac with a great footprint to a seriously overpriced block that eats way more desk space...
Still no reasonable desk mac or straight up tower mac (not talking macpro... talking *reasonable*.)
Still got those OSX widgets stuck back on an invisible screen, where they're utterly useless to us... (luckily, there's Yahoo Widgets, which actually work like you'd want them to)
The iPod Touch... mm, nice new display and camera, they almost got me there, but considering the ios4 fake multitasking... I'll wait for one with a couple gigs of memory and some better battery technology so the thing can *actually* multitask.
Aperture still doesn't support stacked plugins... and we're on major release 3... oy. Likewise, Logicpro... still buggy as heck, still hasn't been updated.
And as for trying to sell me 99 cent TV shows... now that's simply straight-up funny.
Honestly, I think they're losing it. I have money, I like the gear, and it doesn't even seem like they are *trying* to get me to hand it to them.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You said:
``It's better than many point and shoot cameras''
According to:
http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/specs.html
it has ``still photos (960 x 720) with back camera''
If it had the same camera capabilities as the iPhone, I'd agree --- but either those numbers are wrong, or it's seriously crippled as a camera.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Anyone with VLC could have watched the keynote. Apple was using standard RFC-standard HTTP video streaming. Microsoft hasn't implemented it on Windows yet — what do you want them to do?
No comment.
The Apple TV hasn't ever done 1080p. Anyone who cares already knows that. And very few people have the bandwidth to stream 1080p anyway, so who cares?
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
The reason is the way it's packaged on the iPhone is the GPS/GSM chip is integrated.
Don't new TV's basically have "AppleTV" built in? Newer Sony TVs (and I imagine other brands) can stream from computer (DNLA), stream from Internet (including netflix, with Hulu joining next month), can play pictures/movies from USB storage... what else does AppleTV do?