Steve Jobs made an appearance at the Apple ‘It’s only Rock and Roll’ event to rapturous applause and even used his catchphrase ‘Just one more thing,’ albeit only to launch a camera on the tiniest of iPods.
He personally talked about the new iPhone OS 3.1 which now points its ‘Genius’ function, a key recommendation feature, at the new App Store. It simply makes recommendations based on what you’ve already bought so that you can navigate through the 75,000 applications more easily.
Steve then threw out a load of numbers at the crowd in that way he has, saying Apple has sold over 8.5 billion songs, but pointed out that it was even more amazing that the system had over 100 million accounts on iTunes, each with credit card data stored.
He then came back to the Genius idea, and showed how it was being applied to creating Playlists called Genius Mixes, by drawing on all the libraries of music and songs which have been filed with iTunes. He likened it to an genius DJ that just keeps playing songs from your library that just go together. Really it is just a copy of the Sony SenseMe feature on Walkmans, but Apple lovers won’t know that, and won’t care.
He listed other features such as better syncing, better ways to manage home screens, storing apps within iTunes on your device, but the whole event was really about evolution and not the revolution that everyone hungers for and expects at Apple.
Jobs introduced home sharing of songs across multiple devices, and although we thought that home music sharing already existed in iTunes, now it will move to drag and drop. He added the thing that he has always fought against, iTunes LPs. But made them appear to be an innovation, like Apple invented albums, rather than caving in to the wishes of music labels. Apple LPs come with the music, photography, liner notes and essays, which is how he positioned them as a feature.
He then handed over to Phil Schiller to talk about iPods and the numbers came out again, with 220 million iPods sold to date, and a 73.8% market share in portable music players. 20 million iPod Touches have been sold, and with the 30 million iPhones that is 50 million devices with access to the App Store.
One of the best illustrations was a graph that showed 21,178 games available on the iPod Touch while only 3,680 were on the Nintendo DS and 607 on the Sony PSP. Then came the games company representatives, Ubisoft, Tapulous, Gameloft and EA who each promised and showed new games, while EA promised the highly rated Madden NFL 2010, on the iPod Touch.
The new announcement here was the iPod Touch price going down to $199 from $229, but coming with twice as much memory at 8GB, there’s a $299 version with 32GB and a $399 device with 64GB. It has a faster processor (didn’t say which) and will now run Open GL graphics. And there was a bigger iPod classic at the same price, $249.
The iPod shuffle had lots of new colors and fell to $59 for the 2GB version and $79 for the 4GB.
And that’s when Jobs said his one more thing and added a video camera to the Nano (not sure how many megapixels yet, but expect it to be low, perhaps 1 MP or even less). Apple pointed out that rivals like Flip charge $149 for a 4GB version and said that Apple would offer an 8GB for $149, and 16GB for $179 available immediate. Jobs said that Apple had sold over 100 million Nanos and that the new ones would comes with Genius Mixes, a built in an FM radio, and a pedometer (measures how many steps you take) which can sync with Nike exercise products, as well as increasing the screen to 2.2 inches.
All in all that must be one of the most disappointing Apple product line refreshes, with nothing revolutionary, but you won’t hear any complaints from Apple fanboys, who are all delighted to see their god back in the chair and he probably has more goodies for us in the near future.