Steve Jobs took the stage in San Francisco and made a slew of announcements today. New hardware. New software. The whole spectrum. I was at the event - my real time notes are here and my pictures are here. The bottom line: Improvements were made to the existing line of iPods but no serious modifications were announced (like a rumored touch screen iPod), Apple now has movie downloads and Apple will launch a new hardware device called iTV (not the final name) that will bring iTunes to the living room.
Here’s more detail on each announcement:
iTunes 7 With Movies
iTunes 7 is available now. Steve Jobs announced that over 1.5 billion songs have been purchased and downloaded on iTunes to date. Every major network now provides television shows to iTunes, and over 220 shows are included (it took Apple one year to get to that point).
The biggest change is that movies are now available for download. Only Disney units are participating: Miramax, Pixar, Touchstone, and Disney. Movies are available at time of DVD release. 75 movies are available now. Prices: $12.99 for pre orders and during the first week of release, $14.99 for new releases after that. Library titles are $9.99. Same use rules as tv shows - so no burning to DVD.
A number of games are also available through iTunes, available on the iTunes site and store.
Also, tv shows (and I believe podcasts) can be subscribed to instead of simply syncing on the iPod. For example, just the last ten episodes of a show can be placed on the iPod, so older shows are auto removed as new ones are added.
iTunes has significantly better organization now, too. Cover art will auto download for all songs, even ripped MP3s, as long as you have an iTunes account. They are including a new interface to allow people to scroll through artwork, organized by album name or artist, to find songs quickly. When you see the album you want, all songs appear below for that album. I have a bunch of pictures of this but you have to see it scrolling to really appreciate it.
iPod Updates
Nothing too important to note here. The big iPod is not physically changed much, although there are new standard earphones and the iPod is now available with 80GB of storage. Prices have dropped with the 30 GB iPod at $250. 80 GB model is $349.
New Nanos and Shuffles were released. The Nanos basically doubled storage capacity for the same price, now up to 8 GB. Lots of new colors to choose from, but the 8GB only comes in black.
The shuffle has been completely redesigned (see here and here) and is less than half the size as before. 1 GB option only now, and it’s $79. It comes standard with headphones and a dock.
All models have brighter screens and longer battery life.
iTV
This is the big announcement, along with movies. iTV is a new hardware device that is connected to the home network via wifi and to the TV. It basically brings iTunes and iPhoto content to the TV, and works with PCs or Macs. It will be available starting Q1 2007 for $299. Pictures of it here, here and here. Given the large library of television shows now available on iPod, this device is a serious alternative to Microsoft Media Center. One thing that isn’t clear is whether iTunes will allow the addition of ripped DVDs as it does with music. That would make the iTV a much more useful device.
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Lol! Apple Screwed up their page with an IE only page! Finally , IE gains market value for once!
Screenshot
http://blog.franc-design.com/?p=23
Looks like the iTV is a bit of an Media Center killer. I believe I heard that it will be Windows compatible, and from the pictures it looks like it does the whole pictures/music/movies dance, but know Apple it will be a much more straight-forward experience.
Hopefully this version of iTunes won’t corrupt my CD-ROM drivers like the last release did…
I hope that you won’t have to stream everything through iTunes. While iTunes is helpful in organizing my music collection, I would findit annoying to have to stream ALL my media content through iTunes. Do you have any idea what the plans are for that Mike?
Apple had a ton of buzz and didn’t live up to it; The Ipod Paridigm is leaving, Apple must move on to something while still improving Ipods; They should have release what they have today, plus announced a new line of product…
Apple isn’t going anywhere …..and with a price drop they have only furhtered the distance that MS is going to have to travel with their player.
They have tightened the intergration from tv>pc>ipod …..who would have guessed that Apple would have become a content provider.
interesting announcement ……having installed the new itunes….simpley great.
When can i have my itv ……
seamless intergration ……what the masses have been waiting for …..they are going to be offering video on demand faster then cable companies.
cheers
scott
i cant believe this is all they announced… very dissapointed.
Apple what ever happened to the real innovative announcements you use to make..
We knew all these things were comming!!!
uh. what about games on the ipod? they’re changing the ipod from a passive experience (music) to an attention experience (movies) to an active experience (games).
rolling through their device functionality like that is pretty huge.
m3mnoch.
I’m also interested in the iTV, although at $299, it’s the same price as an Xbox 360 core, which can be an MCE extender. Sure, the iTV has built-in wifi, but I’ve found that there is too much interference in big cities to stream high quality video over 802.11. Still, I’d love to see Apple’s try at a clean, integrated, system that allows me to watch downloaded digital video on my HDTV… I download music videos/trailers/etc on Xbox Live Arcade just because it looks so good.
@liquidboy - I like how you’re disappointed because some of the rumors turned out to be true. Is it Apple’s fault that people were leaking their plans before the event?
I’m most excited about the changes to iTunes (one of the most used apps on my mini and Macbook). They’re taking huge steps toward becoming fully integrated in the home entertainment market. I thought the announcements were far from disappointing.
looks a lot better than the $149 mediaMVP from hauppauge. but at twice the price?
Wow. This “announcement” was so lame it hurts.
ITunes Movies with only Pixar films? Helloooo, children/families aren’t bloody likely to use a computer to watch a movie.
An expensive contraption to bring pics and music to the tv? That’s been an offering from MS for *five years now*. It’s nice to know that Apple is *finally catching up.* Innovation my ass.
It looks like Apple is over the hill (again). They had one of their brief spurts of success, stuck with it for too long, and are back on their way to years of oblivion…
Unless iTV can replicate the power of MCE or XBMC, I don’t see it gaining much traction outside of the Mac crowd. If its restricted to iTunes/iPhoto, it sounds kinda useless compared to the alternatives.
XBMC for life.
I knew Apple wouldn’t release movie downloads without a hardware device to play them.
Without CableCard, a TV tuner, a hard drive, and compatibility with all video formats, this is a non-starter.
Well, really disapointing this time: http://www.baubels.net/blog/?p=103
I don’t understand. This post was already posted. Plus, what does this have to do with web 2.0?
Crunchgear must be having trouble. Plus Marshall posted the last one, this is Michaels Version. He was there in person.
this is not a media center competitor. anyone who thinks it is either doesn’t understand ms media cetner or doesn’t understand the itv. the itv product delivers media from itunes. media center does this as well but it is only a small part of media center. the main advantage to media center is the tv contorl/digital video recording/time shifting functionality. itv doesn’t even have a tv tuner in it - and anyone who thinks they can get all their tv needs from itunes is off their rocker, very rich, or both.
not sure if this is really all so great. the ipod and itunes work, because they make it easy for users to seamlessly transfer content from one device to another. that was 3 or so years ago.
over time content gets more, thus filing and organizing more complicated - and apple has not been able to fix this. itunes is becoming a more and more bloated piece of software that for me is becoming close to a black hole to pour my music into.
the only way to keep up with my albums is to create a playlist for each of them. why not adding simple finder integration as an alternative? why is the library so high maintainance? what’s spotlight for in this context anyway then?
integrating (buying) coverflow is a good idea and very much needed - whoever is reading this and has not tested the standalone app before should go to versiontracker or macupdate and give it a try (you can not download it directly from the developer’s site anymore since apple bought the product) - the effect of using it (and i mean fullscreen) is like you can see again after having turned blind for years.
if we all take a step back and look at digital music, the core to what it comes down to is: music has become extremely portable and fluid BUT has degraded to a line of text in some list on a screen. what coverflow is giving us back is at least the visual aspect of browsing music - remember? racks, jewelcases, papercovers, artwork? but we’re still missing haptics then.
so this is nice. but when looking at the actual implementation of coverflow in itunes (and no, i do not know anyone of the guys who worked on coverflow) it lacks basic features that make this so great: fullscreen mode, filtering what actually is shown as an album (set to a minimum number of tracks or duration) thus you end up with tons of placeholder artwork for single songs and due to legal implications i guess the artwork gathering does not really work. the “original” did it all by itself and nearly complete (amazon, google images and wikiopedia integration) - itunes only offers what the store has on the shelves.
oh well. from a design perspective i’m not sure what apple is up to. why is every “iApp” starting to spin off in its own personal look&feel corner? i don’t get the differing highlight colors and who ok’d the buttons on the bottom chrome? they all look like disabled buttons.
what i actually wanted to say though… iTV. nice. but we’d all be wrong assuming that this will allow us to stream every media format we have on our machines than content coming from iTunes or iPhoto. 300 bucks for the missing link in a closed system? no thanks. allow me to stream everything i play in quicktime player and i’m sold - this is what everyone if waiting for. otherwise this thing is use- and worthless.
cheers, real
My goodness… how incredibly lame (and disappointing).
$10-$15 for a limited selection of obnoxiously-DRM’ified movies?! Can’t burn them to a DVD? Don’t come with DVD extras?
Let’s compare:
- GUBA: 99 cent rentals. Sure, that’s not “purchase” but I could watch the damn thing every quarter for 3 years for the price of an average iTunes movie purchase.
- Half.com / ebay: $5 DVDs +$3 shipping or so. $8 to *own* the DVD that I can play anywhere.
So explain to me again, why any rational person would buy movies from this store?
Mind you, I’m guessing much of the suckitude is due to the backwardsness of Disney (along with other movie studios). And, true, it’s not nearly as uber-lame as Amazon’s offering. But still, the buck stops with Apple on this one.
seriously - what was wrong with the old one?
http://images.apple.com/home/2.....050111.jpg
is killing the USB stick feature and putting it on a jeans jacket cool?
http://static.flickr.com/89/24.....9d.jpg?v=0
buy buy buy
Cool, now I can watch exciting Disney/Pixar Movies on my tiny Video iPod Screen.
Early rumors had iTunes Movies streaming to iTV from an “iDisk-like storage component hosted by Apple.” Any mention of that?
@19 and 20
I agree with both of you. MS Media Center on Vista Is far superior than this.
And the Itunes 7 player. The Album art and description is acomplete rip off of WMP 11. God. And the colors are a rip off of Vista’s transition. Now who is copying who? Unbelivable. Not only that. Itunes took up 100mgs of Ram, and 45% CPU usage to get those god damn Album art. And my system has 1GB of Ram and a Intel M 2.5 Ghz Processor. Now, what god damn sense to have your player running at 100 Mgs of Ram? We need something simple and Elegant along the lines of Winamp which only used 5mbs of Ram. And 16 Mbs of Ram when running a movie. What is the god damn probalm doing that?
And BTW, I drool over Vista’s interface. Michael I saw your new Apple workstation, first off.. Why switch now before Leopard is out?
Secondly, I think you made amistake dude. I will never switch to apple for one reason alone. I cant do cross platform programming. Doing only PHP isn’t my idea of groovy flexibility ^_-.
I think the iTV announement is huge. Think if they build enough of a hard drive into that thing it could potentially download movies and TV shows off the network.
This could become a huge threat to Comcast On Demand, Netflix and Tivo at the same time. Not to mention eliminating those online movie websites like Movielink, Vongo etc.
I dont think this is simple extension of iTunes to the TV. This is a much broader play, which can threaten the current archaic TV distribution mechanisms.
This could truly enable the Long Tail phenomenon on the TV. Keep an eye on this.
Abhishek
Rig your dsl piped laptop up to your big flatscreen TV and dial up YouTube.
I Watched 2 hours of old rock band videos last night. Marvellous……and its not that I wouldn’t pay - you (literally) can’t buy that stuff!
Oh…and search on “Spitfire” and play the clip with the announcer in the field….very, very funny
Sitting on my long tail…….
People who know what XBMC is or that the 360 can be used as a MCE extender aren’t part of the demographic that Apple is targeting with the iTV. It’s not for you.
I think Steve is blowing it with a purchase-only offering. Movies are *very* different from music. Most people watch most movies once. The benefit of online distribution is immediacy which is only important for rentals. DVDs will remain a superior option for purchases (quality, reliability, extras). A Blockbuster and/or Netflix-style rental option is required for this to have appeal. However, as long as the competition remains Windows-only, they will go nowhere as well.
@Adam, the $0.99 rental rate at Guba is just a promotional rate to drive up usage. They are losing money on every rental (their admission, also). So it’s not sustainable. “Retail” rental download costs are closer to $2.99. I know this, I work in that industry.
Overall I like iTV. I think it’s really going to realize the vision of the integrated desktop/living room which has been talked about for the last decade or so.
Apple is really expanding its quasi-monopoly. It’s interesting how Microsoft is perceived as an imperial mega-corporation, while Apple is “hip’n'cool”, user-oriented, non-corporate, blah, blah.
But in fact Apple and their iTunes/FairPlay is a completely closed system so no 3rd parties can participate in this environment. It’s the worst monopoly I’ve seen to date by any tech company. And barely anyone is raising a fuss.
It’s a complete PR coup on Apple’s behalf.
However, this closed system allows for Apple to make nicely designed and interoperating devices, that are well QA’d and tested. This has always been a bane for Microsoft: they keep their systems open, which lead to a lot of shoddy 3rd party device manufacturers that are pushing barely tested drivers and app software.
In the end, it’s all about leverging one’s position and Apple has put themselves into a solid position. However, Hollywood may not be such a pushover as the music industry was. But, I could see Jobs, with the “hip” image that be carries, that this would be a good avenue for Independent Filmakers/Distributors.
This is really just the beggining, folks.
Ripped DVDs? Probably … you can do it in front row already …
http://www.flickr.com/photos/i.....073730258/
Maybe i am wrong but I cant imagine it being a true profitable success. I dont know all the details but that is alot of money for an online dvd movie. Now if you told me that if i go to my friends house and could access the movie i bought at my home, we might have something. When it comes to movies people have more of an affinity to collecting them and displaying them than music. If u are shelling out that kind of money do you want it too sit as bites on a Hard Drive and not be able to take it in the car for your kids or your friends house to watch. 2 years from not HD players will be half the price they are today. THe DVDs available will be in the thousands. How is apple going to transfer movies that are 20 gigs over our current broadband. Better hope for net neutrality. Why would i pay that kind of money for a standard that is getting more and more outdated by the day. We will be passing a point of no return much sooner on DVD’s than we did with VHS. Netflix is still the way to go or cable on demand.
Some of you all are totalling missing the point. iTV is a simple to use, elegantly styled computer that connects to your TV and doesn’t look like a computer.
That only Disney is participating is neither here nor there. There were only about 5 programs available when iTunes offered TV shows, but now they offer over 200. Sometimes you can’t begin with everyone participating.
I like DVDs and I love the extra content. At the same time, there are a lot of movies that have content that doesn’t interest me. I don’t need the commentary for something like “Pirates” or “Bewitched”. This is the instant gratification that Half or Netflix can’t provide. Sure you can buy it cheaper elsewhere, but this meets a different need.
I’ve got a toddler. Sometimes he’s a little less than gentle with his DVDs. Run everything off of iTV, and I don’t have to worry about what he can do to the player or the discs because I’ll download it through iTunes.
TV tuner? Today you’d use Miglia or El Gato and with iTV it would be a kludge. We’ll see what hapens when vendors have a few months to think about this. I love my TiVo, but I’m looking at $800+ to buy the new HD version. _That’s_ a product I don’t think is going anywhere.
Give the hating a rest; the product isn’t out yet, and you’re likely to be surprised. Just as we’ll be surprised by the new features and tighter integration of Vista MCE.
What are the chances that there’s something more going on with the downloading of artwork for ripped (… etc.) MP3s?
That’s what first caught my attention - is that basically now we’re pinging Apple’s servers, telling them every MP3 we have. If that means the iTMS can get better at predicting what songs I might like, I’m all for it; however, I hope this has absolutely nothing to do with the RIAA.
Can you say underwhelming?
Movie downloads w/ less selection, at a worse resolution, and for a higher price than was just announced by Amazon. No wonder Steve changed his tune and announced the iTV before it was ready to ship.
And $399 for a device that will provide the same functionality as my Tivo/Xbox 360/PS3/Wii? No thanks.
If Amazon can straighten out their initial issues Apple’s in trouble.
Michael, you mentioned you were almost kicked out from the event. Details?
He was screaming Gates ForEver, and was wearing a cape with the windows logo on the back.
I have to completely disagree with this part of your coverage:
“iPod Updates: Nothing too important to note here.”
Lack of gapless playback on the iPod & in iTunes has been the bane of my existance for years. For reference, gapless playback between tracks is standard on any CD player.
Thank you, Apple, for making this a software update that works. We can finally listen to live albums and DJ mixes without a hiccup between each track. Ahhhhhhhhh…
Hey guys, I think you are missing the big picture here. iTV is very huge. I’m not going to give away the answer, but Apple is two technological pieces away from making this work.
And yes, families do watch movies on their computer… people are on the go more than ever these days.
FYI, I have some audio clips of Michael talking about the “Apple Incident”:
http://www.centernetworks.com/.....-arrington
Great !!
I have been waiting for such a device, iTV will change the way entertainment content is delivered and consumed and will foster the delivery of content via internet.
Q1 of 2007 appears to be too far to have a hang of it…
iTV is great for a single home but in my case, my son lives with me one week on and one week off. He wants to take his 20 episodes of Robot Chicken home from my house to play at his moms house. Obviously, we have no problem watching the iTunes downloads here on computer but the thought of having to upgrade him to a video ipod and then itv is a $600 upgrade and one we just can’t afford.
I think the answer will have to be that Jobs figures out how to software protect Apple created DVDs and allow creation of archive disks like the PeeCee types are beginning to announce.
Not sure how good one of these otunes downloads will even look on a larger screen but having a disk makes more sense to me. I hope they can work out the issues.