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9 sept. 2009

Stevenote 2009.08

Well? Well? What did I tell you? That was the most minor iTunes/iPod event you could have imagined, and Steve Jobs was there. Of course Steve Jobs was there. Damn, you people are stupid. Why do I even bother talking at you?

 

iPhone OS 3.1

I’m not really interested in Genius for applications, because it will by principle only recommend popular applications that I’d already have heard of by word-of-mouth and through blogs, but the update is welcome in that it enables app management in iTunes 9, and that’s a godsend. Drag-and-drop with multiple selection, the ability to reorder whole pages at once… but I guess they won’t have gone so far as to let you hide the iPhone’s default apps you don’t use, will they?

I’m just confused about the mention of ringtones: weren’t there already ringtones on the iTunes Store? Oh, right, maybe you couldn’t buy them straight from the phone. But did Jobs actually dare say that $1.29 is “a breakthrough price”?

 

iTunes 9

So you had Party Mix, then there was iTunes DJ, and now the Genius Mixes… uh, it’s become a little mixed-up, don’t you think? My guess is that there’s an engineer somewhere in the iTunes department who just wants this automated playlist management to work, and will throw every name and every algorithm at the users until one sticks.

Similarly, Home Sharing strikes me as a weird “other way” to do something you could already do (remember you could already install iPhone apps onto several iPhones and iPods from one iTunes), but I guess it’s mostly useful for laptop users — although for that usage I think it would be much more interesting if the laptop behaved like an Apple TV when seen from another computer’s iTunes.

Don’t care about iTunes LP, but I’m not much of an iTunes Store customer anyway; I find it interesting that they’d call it “LP,” as it definitely makes sense, and sounds okay, but harkens back to such an obsolete object that a huge number of buyers actually won’t have any idea what it’s supposed to mean. But how isn’t iTunes Extras — bringing the whole DVD purchase experience to the Store, with real content rather than just pretty photos you could have found elsewhere — a bigger story?

The addition of wishlists and gifts is amazingly belated, yet welcome; but wasn’t there this whole buzz about how iTunes 9 was going to become actually social? I’m sorry, somehow I don’t consider spamming your Facebook and Twitter friends particularly social or, you know, innovative.

 

iPod touch

Blah blah blah great device blah blah success story blah blah hi, I’m an iPod, hi, I’m a PSP — it’s a shame that the Mac/PC ads have been such a success, because they encourage Apple to go on comparing their products with their competitors’, and that’s a really annoying habit. I’m no Sony or Nintendo apologist but, come on, comparing the iPhone OS game catalog with that of the PSP or DS? Is this Apple saying that quantity trumps quality now?

And wait for the cherry on top: presenting in an Apple keynote a Halo clone that uses two on-screen virtual sticks as a control mechanism. Oh, yeah, please do tell how much better that is than Resistance on the PSP. On-screen virtual sticks. By the way, where the hell are those battery+sticks attachments we all expected to flood the market after the release of OS 3.0?

$199 for 8GB is nice, and a 64GB version sounds extra-nice — but you’d better not miss the fact that, unlike the higher-end models, the 8GB Touch doesn’t have the same CPU/GPU upgrade as the iPhone 3GS, which makes it a really bad value proposition when you know there’s a $299 32GB model with twice the power.

 

iPod classic

I still think they should Touch it up but, like I said, it would have been silly to kill it (just like it would have been silly to kill it last year, when everybody said they would, and maybe the year before, I don’t remember). Talk about “the iPod touch as the best netbook,” if it was available with a 160GB hard drive.

Oh, wait, I know why they don’t offer that: it would be less expensive than the 64GB, and possibly the 32GB Touch. And that kind of math is okay when you’re selling the MacBook Air, but it doesn’t work so much with the more general public. (Actually, I checked, and the Air is only available with a 120GB hard drive or a 128GB flash drive, so even in that case it looks like they’re actively avoiding the ambiguity.)

 

iPod shuffle

Yeah, please do keep repeating that the absence of controls on the device makes it “the easiest to use” — that’ll make it true. Straw on the camel’s back, presenting a slide of one of those giant pairs of headphones, with a remote on the cord. Nevermind that the headphones are probably ten times the cost of the Shuffle, why won’t you just offer it to manufacturers as an embeddable solution already? It looks so ridiculous to have that thing be so much smaller than whatever you plug it into.

And ch… ch… chrome? Oh, sorry, that’s polished stainless steel. For a second there I thought it was a chrome finish.

No, seriously. Chrome is back in?! (And it’s even an Apple Store exclusive. What. The. Hell.)

 

iPod nano

Positioning the Nano as a competitor to Flip’s device is a pretty interesting idea (and claiming to cross over into new markets did work quite well for the Touch as a gaming platform, evidently). But the video isn’t widescreen, let alone HD (it doesn’t look bad, though, as long as you don’t want to watch it on your TV), there’s no mention of still photos (no wonder, with the resolution being so low), and the ad presents it as the most awkward video camera a human being has ever held. I’m sure you could hold it by placing your fingers on the top and bottom edges instead, but then I guess it would too easily slip — and, when push comes to shove, you just can’t make good video with a device too light and too small anyway. Still, it does stand a chance of being a hit… well, at least until YouTube’s video players default to HD.

I’m really surprised that the rumor of an FM tuner turned out to be true (how about the other devices then? I wouldn’t mind getting FM with “live pause” on my iPhone). And it’s interesting that the new Nike+ system is presented on Apple’s site, but wasn’t talked about in the keynote (or did I miss something?).

Ah, and it’s chrome, too. Yeesh.

 

The missing link

No camera on the iPod touch, then? There’s no choice anymore but to believe the more recent rumors about Apple having technical difficulties and being forced to pull it, but it still boggles the mind — how hard could it be to integrate the same sensor as the iPhone in the Touch? Or is the iPod actually too thin? That’s just weird.

I can’t imagine they’ll wait a full year to add photo and video capability, so I guess the inevitable conclusion is: do not buy an iPod touch until they update it.

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Doug, il y a 5 ans :

I was really disappointed in the lack of Touch camera, but most disappointed in that the Classic "boost" isn't a boost at all. When they first released the "Classic" they had two models- 120 and 160. Then they axed the 160 and now they make it the only Classic? That's not an improvement at all.

And iTunes 9 is almost guaranteed to be Carbon and not Cocoa, which means another year+ until that gets fixed.

garoo, il y a 5 ans :

Ah, yes, but they killed the 160GB because it had to be thicker, but now they could fit it in the same case as the 120GB. And that's important. To Steve :)

xavier, il y a 5 ans :

when i eard about genius for apps, i said to myself : "it better show me free app, because i mostly have free apps and only bought vital ones". Well.... it does not, i just activated genius on my iphone and it only shows paying apps. They really are getting to far with that appstor promoting.

garoo, il y a 5 ans :

I felt that it gave me a reasonable mix of free and paid apps. Checking right now, I have more than 50% free apps in the list. Maybe the algorithm has decided it's time you fork out your credit card number. (And I'm saying that as a joke, I just think it's a coincidence. By the way, the list changes every time you display it; better luck next time, maybe.)

xavier, il y a 5 ans :

nice to know that it's updated eveytime you load the list, i will give it another try !

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