I’ve just finished watching the webcast of the recent Apple press event announcing the company’s new media offerings.
Where Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote, with a fizzling Leopard preview, was extremely disappointing, this latest showing is extremely solid. Not jaw-dropping, but pleasing. What we see here are timely incremental upgrades to product lines or functionality that we’ve already got in today’s products.
The Highlight
For me, the big surprise today was the announcement that you can now buy games for 5th-gen iPods from the iTunes music store. They’re mostly puzzlers, including Bejewelled, Tetris, and Zuma, but you’ve also got Pac Man and some other action-oriented titles there.
With Apple’s massive share of the digital music player market, this could be big. Apple now basically has a handheld gaming machine, and I expect that the iPod’s gaming capabilities will only get better with time. Apple has an opportunity here, too, to branch out into distributing games to the desktop, if it can figure out a way to integrate install and streaming processes for larger games into its iTunes software. This is something that could blow Steam, Gametap, and XBox Live Arcade out of the water, if Apple can do it right. A cross-platform game development library and distribution system could make Apple PCs more attractive for gamers, while diminishing the importance of Microsoft’s DirectX even on the Windows platform. Exciting stuff. Time will tell whether Apple can actualise the potential of today’s understated addition to the iTunes store.
iPods
The hard-disk based iPod models now have 60% brighter screens, lower price points, and the 60GB model’s been replaced with an 80GB one. All 5th-generation iPods (that’s all iPods with video) can now play some fairly decent-looking games. New iPod models have some search features. New iPod Nanos are higher-capacity, aluminium-cased, and come in bright colours (if you want). The iPod Shuffle is now little more than a tie-clip, which looks like a good thing. Good stuff, and since Apple only just recently gave me a new (but not a new-new) iPod with video, to replace my broken iPod Photo, I’m sure I’ll be positively blown away when, in the distant future, I decide to upgrade again.
iTunes
iTunes 7 is out, and where the move from 5 to 6 brought very little improvement, this feels much more significant. There’s a new download manager for incoming podcasts and so on, long awaited album-cover views, the ability to manage your iPod settings from a nice interface within the player window, and Apple’s bought and integrated 3d-accelerated cover-browser Coverflow. It’s kind of a shame, actually, because I never really liked Coverflow. It’s flashy, but not terribly useful. An album cover viewer is far more useful for navigation if you just lay the covers out flat, as Amarok does (screenshot).
Apple will also be selling feature films through iTunes. Not a big surprise. Though it’s terrible that we have to be saddled with DRM if studios are going to release digital distribution rights to stores like iTunes, Apple’s doing a great thing by improving people’s ease of access to large archives of music, television, and film. So, the film archive’s not very big yet, but it will be.
iTV
Apple’s got a networked media player designed for hooking up to televisions in the works, to come out in Q1 2007. It uses the Front Row interface, and costs way too much (US$299). Nice, but I won’t be getting one at that price.
iTunes Australia is finally out. But tracks are $1.69 each, and albums are at least $16.99. When I lived in Melbourne, I used to buy CDs from Dragonfly Discs. There, I could buy classic CDs like David Bowie’s Low for $15. On iTunes Australia, Low is $17.99.
Now, why would I buy Low from iTunes Australia?
At Dragonfly, for A$15 I could get a CD with track listing and booklet that
- I could rip at 320kbps, in any format I want
- and copy or burn to CD as many times as I liked
on iTunes, A$17.99 would buy me an album of DRM protected files, sans physical CD and booklet, that
- only come in a very lossy 128kbps bitrate
- can’t be copied freely without stripping the DRM
- can only be burned a limited number of times
Why would I want to buy music from iTunes Australia, then?
I understand that this is probably the record labels’ fault, and not Apple’s. Come on, music publishers! Wake up! People won’t pay for digital downloads if they can get the same thing or better from a discount CD store, or by going to a peer-to-peer service to get a non-DRM’ed file for free.
It’s worth noting that in the United States, iTunes users pay a lower price in Australian dollars. The present iTunes pricing of US$9.99 an album comes out at A$13.32 at today’s exchange rate. At that price, I’d consider buying from iTunes Australia. But for now, it’s out of the question.
At least now I can use my Australian credit card to get an iTunes account so I won’t be constantly nagged to sign in while listening to previews on the iTunes music store.
Today, Apple released iTunes 6. This is the most gratuitous major version bump I’ve ever seen.
Sure, new iPods came out today that play video. It’s about time. And the iTunes music store also carries short films and TV shows now. But little has changed in iTunes itself. iTunes has played video for ages, and the store’s been selling music videos for some time.
And let’s not forget that iTunes got a major version bump from 4 to 5 just a week or two ago. To go to six, now, with so few changes in between, is just ridiculous.
