Google tonight announced that it was drastically slashing prices while at the same time offering more storage pricing options for users of its services. Specifically, while Gmail users currently get about 7 gigabytes for free and Picasa users get about 1 gigabyte for free, both can now upgrade to 20 GB for just $5 a year. Previously, it cost $20 to get just 10 GB of additional service.

But what’s really pretty incredible is that Google has an option for you to buy up to 16 terabytes, yes, terabytes, of storage from them. As Google notes, that enough to store 8 million very high resolution photos. Considering that most consumers probably still have south of 500 gigabytes of storage in their home, that’s pretty massive.

Of course, you’ll pay for it: 16 TB will set you back $4,096 a year. But if you do something that requires you to store 16 TB of photos, you can probably afford that. And there are varying storage levels at different price points leading up to that. 8 TB is $2,048 a year, 4 TB is $1,024, and so forth.

These all represent significant price decreases from Google’s previous offerings, but it still would be cheaper to buy your own external drives. So why not do that? Well, Google offers the same levels of backup security that it ensures on all of its data currently. Plus, you won’t have to have dozens of drives sitting around. And since the data is all in the cloud, you’d be able to access it from anywhere, which Google highlights in its post.

But there’s something key to remember: Google is only officially offering this storage for use with Gmail and Picasa. It’s not a complete online backup/storage system, which is what Google Drive (or Gdrive) has long been rumored to be. Of course, there are programs and workarounds that will more or less let you use it for that purpose, but Google is not yet sanctioning the use of its storage as your official cloud drive.

Under Google’s system, 1 TB of storage will cost $256 a year and 400 GB is $100 a year. I don’t know about you, but if Apple offered something similar that would let me backup all my iTunes music and movies and allowed me to access them from anywhere, I would do it.

[photo: flickr/vsz]

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Apple has just added a range of HD movies available for purchase on iTunes. Here’s the kicker: There are actually some good movies, finally. Sure, previously you could grab a few gems like Casino Royale. But now, for example, a total of 9 James Bond films are in HD (though sadly, only two of the Connery ones are, and Goldfinger is not one of them).

So what else is available in HD now? Blockbusters like The Rock, Top Gun, The Sixth Sense, and Cloverfield. Award-winning movies like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, There Will Be Blood, The Queen, and No Country For Old Men. Pixar’s latest masterpiece Up is also available in HD. And you can also pre-order movies like Star Trek, which comes out next week, in HD.

It’s hard to tell exactly how much HD content Apple added today since you basically have to click on each film to see if it’s a) available in HD and b) available to buy in HD. But it’s a lot, and more importantly, as I said, there’s finally a fair amount of content worth purchasing.

Interestingly enough, Apple is touting its new HD movies as “HD Movies on your Mac or PC.” You notice something missing? Apple TV. Yes, Apple’s red-headed step child continues to get no marketing love despite the fact that HD movies not only play on the device, but I would argue that is still the best reason to get HD content from iTunes. Though movies are not Blu-ray HD quality, they’re pretty darn good and noticeably better than standard quality content from iTunes, especially on big HD TVs.

It’s good to see that after months of a slow trickle of mainly junk, Apple has opened the HD pipeline quite a bit more. Now if they could only get iTunes Extras along with HD for most films, the movie area of the store might actually be able to start living up to its music portion older brother. Having all movies available to rent the day they come out on DVD wouldn’t hurt either. But we all know Hollywood hates our freedom in that regard.

Of course, on the flip side, all this HD content to buy also means the more storage you’ll need for these files. HD movies on iTunes tend to range from 3 to 5 GB each. Apple still needs a solution for that eventual problem, like iTunes in the cloud.

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At the time, it was reported that Blockbuster, the former video giant that is aging anything but gracefully, was also backing this 30-day window idea (where it might see a 30-day rental exclusive on some titles). With the company bleeding money, it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re aligning themselves with the studios. But more recently, there has been some very disheartening news: Netflix seems to be willing to back this idea too. Yes, the poster child for much of what is right about the consumer movie business these days may be on the verge of making a deal with the devil.

Let’s be clear about what this means: If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you will no longer be able to rent new movies until 30 days after they’ve been released on DVD.

The show business trade publication Video Business reported last week that Netflix would be willing to accept this 30-day model for huge discounts on the movies after that period — perhaps as much as 50%. As a business decision, this would seem to make sense since 70% of Netflix’s main business is catalog (older) release rentals. As a long-term strategy, this is just about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.

Here’s what this will do: It may drive sales of DVDs a bit short term. But soon, online movie piracy will pick up to new heights. If the movie studios have nightmares about piracy now, their reality will be truly terrifying with this plan in place.

There are two major factors that stop movie piracy from being as bad as music piracy was a few years ago: Broadband speeds and convenience. Let’s speak to the latter one first: With services like Netflix, Redbox, iTunes, and the like all offering fairly easy ways to get movies you want, when you want them, it’s less of a headache for most people to use them rather than digging around online to get them for free.

But with this new 30-day window in place, the masses would be driven online to search for more illegal content — and more importantly, it would begin to fuel a piracy ecosystem for Hollywood content. There would be more people downloading, but also more people sharing. That’s the key.

Broadband remains an issue in many parts of the country, but increasingly, it’s not as big of one as the studios might believe. With devices like the Xbox 360, Apple TV, PS3, and services like Hulu and YouTube, people are getting used to downloading or streaming content over their connections. If you take away the convenience of something like Netflix, these same people will eventually put two and two together that these connections can also be used to get new content online for free, illegally.

Hollywood is making a fatal error with this strategy. In their greed-clouded view, they seem to really believe that most people are renting movies rather than buying them because they’re given an option. Kill the option, kill the problem, right?

The truth is that most people are renting movies rather than buying them because the majority of movies released are crap that no one wants to buy. There’s a huge difference between paying $3 (or less, with Netflix) to rent a movie that may be entertaining to watch once (or might not be), than having to spend $20 to buy something you don’t really want and will have forever.

Hollywood assumes that because they’ve sort of made this type of buy-first, rent-later environment work on services like iTunes and Xbox Live (where it doesn’t really work and is just hampering both services) that it will translate to Netflix as well. But if you give a mouse a cookie, then try to take away that cookie, he’s going to bite your hand off.

What’s really befuddling is that Netflix lacks the vision to see through this BS. They don’t seem to realize that longterm it’s going to screw them too. While new movies may not be as core to their business as they are to Redbox (which is suing many of the studios to stop something like this), new movies are the sexy lures that bring in new business. If I can’t get at those sexy lures for 30 days, they’re not nearly as sexy.

The Internet, meanwhile, offers plenty of those sexy lures. Sure, there’s some risk in grabbing them, but it’s really pretty minimal. Did I mention they’re free? Because Hollywood and now Netflix are practically screaming it.

[images: Miramax and New Line Cinemas]

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That’s not to say it’s not a nice looking product — it is, but there have been some changes that make me confused as to what Apple exactly is trying to do with this thing. From a design perspective, it makes sense. The new remote now has the brushed aluminum and black button exterior that graces both Apple’s MacBook Pro line and the iMac line these days. The original Apple Remote was all white plastic (aside from the top sensor), that matched the older iMacs that it originally launched with.

Back in those days, the remote made more sense. First of all, it came with most new Macs. This, alongside Apple’s Front Row software, made it seem obvious that Apple was going to start taking media (beyond just music) very seriously across the Mac line (for a while it even came with Mac laptops). But today, the remote doesn’t come standard with any Apple product aside from the Apple TV (for obvious reasons). Instead, it’s a $19.00 add-on, even for the new huge 27-inch screen top-of-the-line iMacs (which seem like a natural fit to watch media on).

Also odd: while the original white remote had a magnetic back to allow it to easily stick to the side of the iMac, the new remote does not. That means this remote is yet another piece of clutter sitting on your desk if you opt to buy one. It would seem that Apple doesn’t really care about you using this remote anymore, even though without it, Front Row is basically useless. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to use it over simply using iTunes if you have to sit at your computer to do it anyway.

But the oddest thing about the new remote has to be that Apple has for some reason decided to move the Play/Pause button from the center of the navigational circle to the lower right side of the device, shifting the Menu button left to make room. That might make some sense as just a straight-up ergonomic design change, but the weirdest thing is that the center of the navigational circle is still a button, that does the same thing as the Play/Pause button.

Yes, Apple has added a new useless button. Again, Apple. The company that hates buttons.

Apple’s documentation for the new remote provides little insight, but they do label this new center button as “Select” rather than Play/Pause. But again, it does the exact same thing. Could there be some new funtionality for Front Row in the future that takes advantage of the Select button? Maybe. But even launching something like the new iTunes Extras content now being packaged with movies doesn’t seem like it would need its own button.

Here’s something else: Apple doesn’t even bother mentioning it on the main Remote page on its site, but this new remote does work with the Apple TV. Again, from a design perspective, this makes sense as the new remote looks much more like the Apple TV than the white one that currently comes with it. But again, the remote’s phantom button does nothing different from the Play/Pause button aside from the fact that holding down Play/Pause brings up movie chapters, while holding the phantom button does not seem to. Odd.

There is one definite advantage of the new remote: It’s much easier to change the battery. I have friends who have stacks of old dead white remotes simply because they didn’t even realize you could previously change the battery. So that’s nice, but does it really warrant the $19 price for a larger, heavier remote that no longer sticks to the iMac? Probably not.

If you want a good remote for iTunes and the Apple TV, just use your iPhone or iPod touch. Apple’s own Remote app makes it much, much more useful than either of the physical remotes. You can, for example, do a search by typing on the device’s keyboard rather than being forced to do a ridiculous amount of clicks to manually enter each letter on the Apple TV’s onscreen keyboard. It’s also much better for scrolling through a bunch of titles. Really, it’s better in every way imaginable. The only downside is that you have to own an iPhone or iPod touch. But if you own an Apple TV, chances are you probably own one of those as well.

I really don’t understand Apple’s thinking with these remotes. It would seem that they’re clearly inching towards products with less buttons and more touch elements, but this new remote is the opposite of that. There’s been a touch screen remote rumored for some time now, but this is what we got instead? What gives, Apple?

Update: A few things from some insightful commenters:

1) It’s also a bit odd that the new remote does not feature an Apple logo anywhere on it. The old one did on the back.

2) It’s true that aluminum is not a magnetic metal, but neither is plastic, which the old remote was.

3) I had forgotten about this, but the old Apple Remote is very similar to the original iPod Shuffle. It’s certainly possible that Apple was using the same manufacturing for both, and with that Shuffle long retired, it was easy to move to a new type of remote.

4) Apparently, the Play/Pause separate button also allows you to stop/start content when you’re not specifically in that section. That could very well be why Apple did this, but that is also not very intuitive since the buttons do the same things the rest of the time.

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Back in March, the company started tweeting from its first official Twitter account, iTunesTrailers. They even went so far as to highlight the account on their Apple.com Trailers page. Thanks to the suggested users list, that account now has well over 1 million followers and they’re probably seeing a not entirely insignificant amount of traffic coming from there. And now they’ve added a few more accounts:

iTunesMusic

iTunesMovies

iTunesTV

iTunesPodcasts

These are all new accounts. A couple of them have just over 1,000 followers, but the other two have under 100, and haven’t tweeted yet. But it would seem that Apple wants to promote all of them now, as it has created a customized background for each account’s Twitter page, highlighting the other accounts (and its Facebook iTunes Fan Page, as well).

One account you’ll notice that Apple does not have though, is twitter.com/apple. That account has one tweet, from March 16, which reads, “I love apples.” That hardly seems like something Apple the company would say, and the account points to a Gmail account in its profile, which would seem to suggest they may be interested in selling it. But with just one Tweet in 7 months, Twitter is probably within its rights to simply close the account and give it to Apple, if the company wanted it.

(As a sidenote, there is also a Twitter account with the name “appleinc“, but it’s currently protected.)

Obviously, Apple added a bit of social media to iTunes 9 recently, by including the ability to share items on both Facebook and Twitter. But the effort is half-hearted as best. It’s not like you can share what you’re listening to, just what you’re thinking about buying, or just bought.

Apple has always marched to its own drumbeat, so it seems unlikely that we’ll see Apple corporate tweeting the way that people at Google, Yahoo, and even Microsoft do, but these new accounts could signify a slight thawing of the ice. After all, we do know that Apple does like Twitter.

[via Iain Dodsworth]

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Now, choice is of course a good thing, but the problem is that each of these services don’t really offer much choice. If you want a complete way to get movies over the web, you almost have to have all of these boxes. That’s because the movie studios form partnerships and alliances with various services and not with others. And they have silly rules about who can stream/download what, when, and how. It’s a mess. And Hollywood really needs to sort it out soon, or they are just asking for trouble as broadband continues to improve.

Now, none of this is to say that Epix is bad. It sounds pretty good. They claim to have more than 3,000 titles from Lionsgate, MGM and Paramount at launch. And eventually, they want to tap the full library of over 15,000 movies between the partnering studios. They also claim that Epix will have the largest collection of HD films streaming online. That’s all great, but what they don’t say is that even at 15,000 titles, that’s just a sliver of what’s out there — it’s only movies from those few studios. And, if you want this content in your living room, you’re going to need Verizon FIOS, which only some 2 million people have.

I still find it preposterous that I can walk into a Blockbuster and rent a movie the day it comes out, but cannot do that with all new releases on iTunes and the Xbox 360. Even more perplexing is when studios demand movies be pulled (or made for purchase only) so they can run them on the premium cable channels. Netflix has a great selection of old movies, but has basically no new films. And the HD selections on all of these services are pretty poor.

So while it may sound great that another competitor (Epix) is entering the game, it’s really just another half-effort. I’ll be honest, I’d rather have one service that has everything I want, even if it’s slightly more expensive, then 10 of these half-services. I do not want or need more boxes or pipelines coming into my home just to get content that one of my 5 other boxes doesn’t have because of some backward-thinking licensing agreements.

Of course, while I say all of this, I do not expect it to change anytime soon. Even Apple, which famously bullied the music business into its one-music-store-to-rule-them-all (iTunes), has had a lot of trouble getting the movie studios in line. It’s a crapshoot every week when new movies come out on iTunes whether they’ll be available to rent or only buy (or neither). And the total number of HD downloads — which were unveiled in March — can’t be more than 25 or 30 total, still.

The problem the movie studios face is that while broadband limitations in this country have limited piracy, speed and options are slowly improving. It’s only a matter of time before piracy becomes a large scale issue if Hollywood doesn’t start coming up with some kind, any kind, of comprehensive plan for digital distribution. Obviously, we ran into the piracy problem the previous decade with music, and the lone success to rise up was iTunes. Why? Because it had all the major labels on board and was very consumer-friendly. The current offerings from Hollywood are anything but.

More isn’t always better. Sometimes, it’s just more. Even in Hollywood. Actually, especially in Hollywood.

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One main culprit is what should be a nice, new feature in iTunes 9 called “Automatically fill free space with songs.” It does exactly what it says, finds songs to put on your iPhone to fill it up. This is great for people like me with too large of a music library to sync it all with the iPhone, and who don’t really use playlists (the main way to sync music to the iPhone). Unfortunately, if you click this “Automatically fill free space” option, it seems that sometimes it wants to remove and replace much of the random music. If you have a 32 GB iPhone, that is going to take a while.

It doesn’t do it every time, it only seems to when you have made a change such as installing new apps, which obviously changes the amount of storage available on your iPhone. That’s somewhat understandable, but it doesn’t make up for the fact that it still takes a long time to complete. And I don’t know why it has to remove 10+ GB of music to install one new app.

So easy enough fix, right? Just don’t check that box. Well yes, except that regular syncing itself seems to take significantly longer with iTunes 9 as well. Previously, it would take me about a minute to sync my iPhone with iTunes 8. With iTunes 9, I’m seeing wait times of about 5 to 10 minutes. And sometimes the system just hangs, and you have to manually stop it.

This doesn’t appear to be the backing up process, which is still being done in just seconds, but is some other process involved in the syncing. The status indicator simply reads “Syncing iPhone” as the progress bar spins for minutes.

Hopefully, this is just a matter of another firmware update from Apple for the iPhone. You would have thought they would have checked the syncing speed on the just released iPhone 3.1 firmware, but apparently not. So now, if I want to sync just a couple of songs before leaving my desk, I have to wait 5 to 10 minutes. It’s like the original iPhone all over again.

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For years Apple has been adding to iTunes, and while some improvements have been welcome, many have simply added to the bloat. It’s time — way past time, really — for Apple to put out something lightweight and basic. I understand that iTunes is a wedge (and weapon) for Apple, and I don’t propose gutting it, but considering there are no credible alternatives to the program, it’s at the point where I feel Apple has stopped simply adding to the feature buffet, and has started force-feeding users.

On my PC I use Winamp — have for years, love it. I understand I can’t have a carbon copy, if you will, on OS X, but at the very least give me a program that isn’t 80% features I will never use.

I just prefer apps that do one or two things, and do them well — surely I’m not the only one. I play movies in MPlayerOSX or VLC and organize them myself, as I know many people do. Even if I did use Twitter, I wouldn’t want to tweet what I’m listening to or buying; LastFM works fine for that and already has a client or is embeddable in many services. Same for liking things on Facebook. And App management? I don’t have an iPhone or an iPod, why would I want my media player to include support? You can hide some of it, but far from all of it, and it disturbs me that it’s always lurking there, just underneath the surface. Waiting.

Songbird is out there, I guess (I should switch), but it still emulates iTunes shamelessly and adds yet more features I don’t want in a music player, plus a browser. I already have a browser, guys. Use that one for your fun rich content. What else is there? Audion, abandoned these five years? Cog, abandoned a year and a half? Banshee and Vox, for six months? I’ve seen forums where people recommend running Winamp in a virtual machine to save RAM! We’re in a gilded cage, fellow Mac users, and unlike the iPhone’s gated and patrolled garden of mobile delights, it’s not one you should be satisfied with.

Many Mac users chime in angrily whenever I have the nerve to mention bloat in a precious, perfect Apple product. Is it really such a stretch of the imagination to believe that some people might just want to play their music, or perhaps organize and browse it differently from how iTunes lets you? I think for every person who is excited to let Genius pick their party’s music, there is someone who can’t stand how playlists work. And for every person who likes the way iTunes organizes albums and tracks, there’s someone for whom its method of displaying their collection is frustrating and backwards. For instance:

What’s wrong with this picture? It’s janky as hell is what, and this kind of weirdo sorting issue is far from rare. To say nothing of the many other annoyances I find in this monstrosity of a media player.

So what are people for whom iTunes isn’t right supposed to do? For years now, the answer from Apple and OS X developers has been “just deal with it.”

Meanwhile, among the several options I have to me on XP (and 7) are very competent free and/or open-source alternatives to Microsoft’s iTunes-equivalent, Windows Media Player — which isn’t as bad as everyone says, but lord it ain’t good. Take a look at the features available in Winamp. Now observe the following screen:

(or I could just download the 6.4MB “Lite” version)

Why don’t I have one of those for iTunes? Does Apple not trust me when I say that I’ll never use Genius or Facebook integration? Do they not have the ability to decouple these decadent sidecar-apps from the fundamental functionality of their media player? It’s a fail one way or the other.

At the risk of getting too general in my criticism, the lack of a variety in certain kinds of software is one of the unanswerable complaints against OS X. There are dozens of programs on my PC that have no equivalent (or only a weak one) on a Mac, and rarely because, as is often said, the functionality is duplicated in the OS or what have you. If I weren’t away from my desktop, I’d list ‘em off for you. But this iTunes thing is symptomatic of that larger problem. With no alternatives, Apple’s option becomes more and more entrenched, and as it becomes entrenched, it spreads its tentacles hideously, and results in things like the present iTunes (and to a lesser extent, iMovie, iPhoto, and others). After today’s shenanigans, the program is fatter and more tentacular than ever.

In the end, it seems to me that it would be so easy for Apple to make a smaller media player that they must have made a choice not to do so. Considering there are no other options, that’s a decision that is, to users like me, very damaging. Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to change, since it clearly hasn’t been damaging to their business. Looks like it’ll continue to be their way or the highway, except without the highway.

It’s not spoiled to want what I’ve had for years on the platform Apple disparages as unusable. I think what I’m asking is reasonable enough, though I have no expectation that the way of the world should be suspended for my convenience. Here’s what I’d like:

What do you think? Is that really such a crime?

Update: It’s not a fix for the bloat and so on, but for a clean UI like the one I chopped together above, it’s as easy as context-clicking on a playlist and opening it in a new menu. If you make a smart list that’s your entire library, that can be your only window. Better than nothing! Thanks, Tim F! Update update: Son of a… you can’t delete things or rearrange tracks. Why would you want to though, right?

Update 2: I was mistaken about Cog and Banshee. I checked out-of-date sources apparently, they’re still in development. I’m going to switch to one soon and you should too. The point of this post was not that I can’t resize iTunes or hide the store, it’s that it’s too much to begin with and I don’t want or like the idea of a highly-connected, multi-purpose player. And I think it’s something visible in other Apple applications too — a departure from simplicity and elegance.

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When the Apple event started today, CEO Steve Jobs took the stage to a very long standing ovation. He used his opening remarks to talk about the importance of organ donation. Jobs noted that he now had the liver of a person in their mid-20s who died in a car crash. Jobs urged everyone to think about organ donation, as it saved his life.

After that, Jobs thanked Apple’s executive team, and especially Tim Cook, who steered Apple’s ship in his absence.

But then it was time for Jobs to quickly move into some impressive statistics. Here are a handful of them:

iPhone

• 30 million iPhone have now been sold worldwide in a little over 2 years.
• There are now over 75,000 apps in the App Store
• There have now been some 1.8 billion App Store downloads
• The 3.1 update for iPhone and iPod touch is launching today.

iTunes

• iTunes is now the #1 music retailer in the world
• 8.5 billion songs have been downloaded from iTunes
• There are now 100,000,000 accounts on iTunes, making it one of the largest stores on the web
• iTunes 9 is launching today, with a revamped look and feel
• It also features a Genius feature for the App Store (*ahem*)
• An easier way to organize apps on the iPhone and iPod touch
• iTunes LPs (this is the “Cocktail” feature)

Later, Phil Schiller took the stage to share some other impressive numbers:

iPod

• Apple has sold over 220 million iPods to date
• It’s one of the most successful products in history
• In the U.S., the iPod has 73.8% market share
• The next biggest MP3 player is “other” with 18%
• “Microsoft pulling in the rear with just about 1%”
• There have been over 20 million iPod touches sold.
• So combined that’s 50 million iPhones and iPod touches.
• 21,178 games and entertainment titles in the App Store now
• Compare that to 3,680 on the Nintendo DS and 607 on the Sony PSP

iPod nano

• Over 100 million sold
• By far the most popular MP3 player
• Now has a built-in video camera, and it’s 1/5th the width of a Flip cam, and is 1/10th the volume.

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I’ve been to all but one of the past two years worth of Apple events. And for the several years prior to that, I followed along online on sites like this one, with the rest of you. These past two years there has been a noticeable trend immediately following these events: Disappointment.

Now, the degree of disappointment varies, but there always seems to be an overall feeling that people are walking away unsatisfied in some way. The reason for this is obvious: Apple is a victim of its own success. It has spent so many years doing large keynote addresses with “one more thing…” that when it has more recently tried to scale back its events a bit, the public was left expecting the same string of “wows.”

And of course, Steve Jobs has taken a major step back recently from these events due to his health situation, but even before he left, the “wows” seemed to be not as plentiful as in years past. I can’t even recall the last time there was a true “one more thing…” (maybe the Apple TV, then called iTV?) and the last major new product that seemed to draw out the “wows” was probably the MacBook Air — which was unveiled in January 2008.

But I’m not sure I would even count that as a truly “wow” moment. The talk of that product leaked out in the days leading up to the event, and if anything, the “wows” seemed to come from Jobs’ brilliant display of showmanship by bringing the machine out on the stage in a manilla envelope.

And the year before that, we of course had the iPhone. That was really a “wow” moment, but again, there had been no shortage of talk about it, leading up to the unveiling. No matter which way you slice it, that takes away some of the “wow” effect.

And let’s remember, both of those two previous examples were during the keynote of Macworld, a large event. Apple is no longer participating in Macworld, and instead is now focusing more on these smaller events, with WWDC likely to be its largest of the year. The biggest cheers at this year’s WWDC were probably for the price of Snow Leopard (a product Apple itself had already previewed the previous year), and the new features of the iPhone (which Apple previously had unveiled at its iPhone 3.0 event). The new iPhone 3GS was the main event, but everyone already knew basically everything about it beforehand.

The biggest surprise may have been the $99 iPhone. Which again, wasn’t all that surprising.

My point is that in this day and age, it’s simply very, very hard for any company, even Apple, to keep new products a secret. And because the blogosphere has grown to the size that it now is, the news of new products penetrate the mass media. Sure, some product rumors are bogus. But anyone who follows this stuff closely enough can pretty accurately guess what is coming when Apple takes the stage.

Let’s try it. What are we going to see tomorrow? iPods with cameras, iPod storage increases with price cuts, iTunes 9, and the “Cocktail” albums. There are various sources on all of that stuff (with iTunes 9 probably being the shakiest), and all seem like sure bets, and seem like exactly what we’re going to get.

But still, whether we admit it or not, we’re all holding out hope for that “one more thing…” Some want it to be the tablet, some want new Apple TVs, some want products we’ve never even heard of. The likelihood of any of those? Very, very small.

I’m no different. I write about my desire for The Beatles on iTunes, and dreams of iTunes going to the cloud. Neither are going to happen tomorrow, but I still hold out hope. And that, in turn, leads to some level of disappointment when the show wraps.

And I’m fine with working myself up to be let down, because I know that most of these things we dream about will be a reality in the future (the tablet, The Beatles on iTunes). And I enjoy thinking about the future. But I know that many of you work yourselves up with these huge expectations and then are pissed off when Apple doesn’t meet them. “New iPods, that’s all?”

Apple still certainly has the ability to surprise, because Steve Jobs is known to make product unveiling decisions at the last second. But in recent years, we’ve known about all of the products beforehand, even the ones he chooses not to go with. That’s hardly Apple’s fault, they’d have to develop a product with absolutely no outside help in order to truly keep something on lockdown these days. And considering that not even Apple has the capacity to make every single thing it needs internally, that’s going to be very hard to achieve ever again.

The bigger picture is that by continually waiting to be surprised at these events, we often overlook some of the subtle and interesting things Apple is doing with its products. That will probably be the case again tomorrow. I’m going to try to remember that, but I probably won’t be able to get some damn Beatles song out of my head.

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But it’s entirely possible that Jobs won’t be leading this event. And it’s starting to look more possible that what’s thought to be the key product, iPods with cameras, may have to be delayed. And that tablet computer seems pretty unlikely. And The Beatles on iTunes is far from a lock. In other words, there are a lot of possible ways that Apple could disappoint with this event.

But Apple doesn’t like to disappoint, it likes to surprise. And that’s why I’m holding out hope for a big one: iTunes in the cloud.

Now, the likelihood of Apple announcing this on Wednesday seems fairly small. After all, even if Apple has to delay the launch of it iPods with cameras, it will still likely announce them at the event. And it likely has a new, more social iTunes 9, and its new “Cocktail” music format ready to be announced as well. All of that would seem to be enough for what will be a relatively small event in San Francisco — especially if Jobs does take the stage.

But, as myself and others have noted before, iTunes in the cloud is inevitable.

An Expansion Of Music

When iTunes was confined solely to music on your desktop, life was good. There was a lot of talk about how subscription-based streaming services would kill the pay-to-download iTunes model, but that never happened. Instead, iTunes continued to dominate the landscape.

But things are evolving. The new hotshot in the music space is Spotify, which despite not being available in the U.S. yet, has plenty of people going gaga. The interesting thing about it is that everyone praises its user experience and being second-to-none, including yes, iTunes. Spotify has raised a ton of money, and counts some some of the major music labels as investors, and also just launched an iPhone app. As Apple is attempting to make its software more social, you had better believe they are watching the reaction to Spotify closely.

And iTunes itself is evolving. As we are likely to see on Wednesday, Apple and the music labels are pushing for these new “Cocktail” type album downloads that feature much more than just music. A key component is likely to be video, which obviously takes up a lot more space than music. That, alongside Apple’s move earlier this year to a fully iTunes Plus (DRM-free) store, has meant that the space needed to hold all of this music has been going up.

As most people have computers these days with large hard drives, they have been able to handle iTunes music on their machines without much trouble. But a push for more video — especially if it’s HD video — will mean more storage that is needed. And that’s before we get to the real keys to the iTunes in the cloud idea: Movies and television shows.

iTunes’ Video Problem

Apple has obviously been increasing its movie and television show library over the past few years. It now has a fairly robust offering, including many shows and movies in high definition (HD). But have you ever really looked at the size of those files? Anyone who has more than a few of them likely has, because you were probably forced to, as you were running out of room on your hard drive.

Let’s look at the most recent season of ABC’s show Lost. If you bought the HD Season Pass of the show on iTunes, that’s 28.2 GB of data on your hard drive. That’s one season. Of one show.

Say you also bought last season of The Office (a 30-minute show versus the hour-long Lost), that’s 19.43 GB. Those two shows alone — again, just one season of each — have nearly 50 GB of your hard drive tied up right there. Throw a few HD movies (usually 3 to 4 GB each), and maybe a few more shows and you’re going to need hundreds of gigabytes for all of these. And God forbid you want the other 4 seasons of Lost or The Office.

The way to combat this problem right now is to do what I did: Buy terabyte external hard drives. But let’s be honest, most average consumers are not going to do that. If and when they see that their entire hard drive has been eaten up by season 3 of My Name Is Earl, they’re going to be upset. It’s probably more likely that they’d simply delete the content. But should they really have to do that for content they paid for? Of course not.

Apple’s Options

That leaves Apple with two options:

1) Offer television show rentals. This is certainly something it could, and may do, but it would be a short-term fix.

2) Move iTunes fully to the cloud.

Actually, iTunes is really already is in the cloud — kind of. If you delete a piece of content from your machine, Apple will allow you to download it again (at least once). This is more or less the idea of how iTunes in the cloud would work. Rather than storing all your media locally on your machine, it would be stored on iTunes’ servers in the cloud — which again, they’re already doing.

If you bought a television show, movie or even song, you’d be able to stream it from Apple’s servers. Or, if you wanted to take it on the go, on your iPod or iPhone, you could download it and store a physical copy locally. There would be no risk in deleting content locally when you were done with it, because Apple would have a copy for you to obtain again.

Concerns

Now, this idea is so obvious that it has to be coming, right? Well, there are obviously some concerns as well. First, security. The music labels and television and movie studios would want assurances from Apple that no one could “game the system” and get access to content for free. With iTunes in the cloud, Apple would likely have to partially rework the 5 computers-at-a-time system for iTunes that it uses right now (for DRM content), but something similar would probably be intact.

The second concern would be cost. Apple undoutbedly spends a lot of money now serving music and movies over iTunes, but it’s for the most part a one-time deal, where a user pays and then downloads the content. If you introduce streaming into the mix, costs will go up. But perhaps that is part of the reason behind Apple’s new massive 500,000 sqaure foot datacenter in North Carolina — which will be one of the largest in the world.

Untenable

The fact of the matter is that any way you slice it, iTunes current model is untenable. Even if you opt to get standard definition video content from the service, we’re talking ten to a dozen gigabytes of storage needed for just one season of a television show. Movies are still over a gigabyte a piece. If you buy as much content as Apple and the studios would like you to, you’re going to fairly quickly get into the hundreds of gigabytes and then terabytes range. I should know, I’m already there.

Meanwhile, there’s a movement underway to more portable machines that feature smaller amounts of storage. Obviously, there are netbooks, but you can also be sure that Apple’s tablet device, when it comes out, will not have a terabyte of storage. And Apple itself has been starting to push faster, but smaller capacity, SSD drivers in its laptop lines.

The larger point is that while it’s great to own your own content, most customers likely do not want terabytes of data cluttering up their machines. It becomes a huge management burden. And if you get a new machine, transfers are a hassle.

There are some other short-term solutions, like the aforementioned TV show rentals, but long term, the only viable model would seem to be Apple holding all of this content for us on its servers. Streaming a huge collection of movies works beautifully right now for Netflix via its Watch Instantly service. Apple would need a download component to supplement its portable devices, but it likely can and will be done.

Months ago, there were rumors of such a service called “iTunes Replay” for iTunes 8, but nothing ever came of them. But since then, Apple has launched services like HD movie downloads — the need for such a service is only getting greater. And it will continue to.

Apple chose to use a Rolling Stones’ lyric as the tagline for this event, “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it.” Here’s to hoping that they work in another Stones’ lyric as well, “On my cloud, baby.”

[photos: flickr/Kables and flickr/preater]

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So anyway, every year there are rumors of The Beatles coming to iTunes. The rumors seem to start from just about everywhere: From Steve Jobs’ love of The Beatles, to EMI removing DRM on music, to the settlement of lawsuits with Apple Corp, to the appearance of Beatles’ album covers on Apple event promotions. There have even been quotes from Paul McCartney saying he thought such a deal would happen soon. The only problem is that it never ends up happening. But this year could actually be different. Well, maybe.

First of all, The Beatles are definitely releasing their music in video game form for a new Rock Band game. That’s a first for them, branching out of traditional music distribution. This game is launching on 9/9/09, which happens to be the same day as the rumored next Apple event. That, in and of itself, doesn’t really mean much, but there are reports today that on the same day, The Beatles are releasing their entire catalog, digitally re-mastered for the first time, on CD, as Cult of Mac points out.

Wait, CD? People still buy those? Yes, they do, though they’re increasingly going digital and choosing iTunes as their store. So it stands to reason that EMI and Apple Corps (the corporation that handles The Beatles’ affairs, not to be confused with the other Apple we’re talking about here) have looked at the numbers and seen the trends, and realize that if they really want the catalog to explode in sales, they’re going to have to release it online, and preferably through iTunes.

But there’s more. In the press release for The Beatles re-mastered release there’s this nugget:

Each of the CDs is packaged with replicated original UK album art, including expanded booklets containing original and newly written liner notes and rare photos. For a limited period, each CD will also be embedded with a brief documentary film about the album.

What does that sound like? It sounds like the perfect type of album for Apple to try out its new “Cocktail” music format, also set to be unveiled at the September event. While not all the details are known about Cocktail, it is believe that it’s a format that places emphasis on album purchases by giving downloaders all types of goodies like, yes, artwork, booklets, liner notes, photos and films.

The press release says nothing of online versions of the albums, but it’s entirely possible that those are being kept as a surprise, and possibly even for Apple’s event. Or maybe not. But at the very least, you know that while the engineers were remastering the recordings, they were thinking about how the catalog would be dispersed over the web eventually too. It’s not a matter of “if”, but a question of “when”. And 9/9/09 sounds like the perfect date for a full-on assault of Beatles music on the masses.

This is of course all just speculation, that history suggests will be wrong. But if we find out that the Apple event is at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco on 9/9/09, and that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr both happen to be in town…I’m just saying. And how would that be for a Steve Jobs return to the limelight after months away on medical leave? Boom!

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As expected, the tipster says you’ll be able to broadcast songs you’re listening to out to various social networks. But the really interesting thing is the reference to some new social application that Apple is supposedly getting ready to launch. It’s not clear at all if this would be a desktop app or an iPhone app, but it is said to be something that consolidates your various social networking activity from around the web into one place.

Is Apple planning a FriendFeed-killer after Facebook has already essentially killed FriendFeed? That would certainly give the team a good reason to sell, if they caught wind of that. But who knows, it could be anything, or it could very well be nothing. Hopefully we all know by now how rumors, especially Apple rumors, work.

Regardless of what Apple has in store, if there are social elements added to iTunes, it will be a big move for the company. Right now, they basically have absolutely no social strategy beyond a bit of Facebook and Flickr integration in iPhoto. And yes, there are plenty of apps that use Facebook Connect, but that has basically nothing to do with Apple itself.

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Each of those features have been talked about for some time now on the web. But as BGR notes, the talk of Blu-ray does line itself up well with an AppleInsider report from yesterday that very vaguely suggested Apple has new iMacs due shortly with features that have long been on the wish-lists of Mac owners. Blu-ray is certainly on that list, and seems like a pretty good candidate, despite Steve Jobs’ calling the format a “bag of hurt” as recently as October of last year.

More compelling may be the talk of a new way to organize iPhone/iPod touch apps in iTunes. This has been badly needed ever since it became clear that people were downloading a ton of apps to use on one device. Currently, system for managing them within iTunes is quite franktly, awful. The concept video posted at the bottom of this story shows how it really should work.

BGR says the Twitter/Facebook/Last.fm stuff from its tip was more vague, but you can imagine that if such features were integrated it would involve tweeting out or updating your Facebook status with what song you are listening to. It’s possible that for Last.fm, iTunes would build-in support for logging what songs you are playing, something which Last.fm currently does through its own software.

The Twitter angle is also interesting because of the rumors of talks between the two companies a few months ago. We were unable to confirm those rumors, but perhaps the two sides did meet to talk about something like this. Obviously, that’s just speculation.

Apple has worked with Facebook in the past to get support for uploading pictures built-in to the newest version of iPhoto. The integration is pretty slick as it also allows you to tag Facebook friends in pictures, and keeps edits made on both iPhoto and Facebook in sync.

And just imagine if Apple made a feature not only to send the name of a currently playing song to Twitter and Facebook, but if it included a link to buy the song on iTunes as well. That could mean some significant sales.

While we’re speculating, I would also love to see a Genius feature for iPhone apps, something which I talked about the need for recently.

Again, these are all just rumors for now, but we could see if they’re true or not as early as next month when it’s likely that Apple will hold some kind of iPod even, just like it does every September.

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It was little surprising to see a custom one pop up that focuses specifically on iTunes links.

iTunes links are inherently long, non-sexy and practically unsharable web addresses that lead people directly to Apple’s media management software program where they can download applications for their iPhone or iPod Touch in a section called the App Store, à la http://ax.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/browserRedirect?url=itms%253A%252F%252Fax.itunes.apple.com%252FWebObjects%252FMZStore.woa%252Fwa%252FviewSoftware%253Fid%253D321041850%2526mt%253D8.

(In case you’re wondering, that one goes to the Swimsuit Models app from Sports Illustrated. You’re welcome.)

What Appsto.re does is let you take those long URLs and turn them into custom links such as http://appsto.re/AreYouAMoron and … no that’s basically all it does, even if the team that built the app felt the service actually required its own manifesto. For something that can already be done with the tons of other URL shortening services out there.

I’m leaning towards the first question: why?

Update: as commenters have pointed out, the reason is that the developers of the service insert an affiliate link when shortening the URL and pick up a piece of the revenue generated from paid apps sales. They don’t mention this anywhere, but you can see it for a split second when you open the short URLs (the team told me the main benefit is for iPhone app developers to better brand links to their apps and in the future track conversion for clicks/sales).

Update 2: Tim Dorr tells us iPhone apps already have short URLs, e.g. http://itunes.com/apps/scavenge. Who knew?

Update 3: Appsfire also has a custom URL shortener for iPhone app links, and offers real-time analytics and soon, monetization tools.

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Does embattled music streaming site imeem think it can take on iTunes? For the most part, nearly every streaming song on the site has a download button which links to both iTunes and the Amazon MP3 store. But it is quietly testing its own music download store which bypasses iTunes and Amazon and sells MP3s directly. For instance, this is the case with some Sub Pop artists, such as Iron and Wine and The Shins. When you hit the download button on songs for those artists, a window pops up showing the album where that song came from with with the option to download the entire album or any individual song for $0.99 (see screenshot above). You can then pay imeem directly by credit card or Paypal and download the song to your computer.

This imeem music store is obviously an experiment. The vast majority of songs still direct users to iTunes or Amazon for downloads, and you’d expect imeem to provide its own lightweight desktop client to manage and store the downloads, or at least place them directly into iTunes instead of a download folder on your computer. But it is also likely a sign of things to come. After nearly running out of cash because it was paying out too much money to the music labels for streaming rights, imeem went through a sever recapitalization. Warner Music ended up taking a $20 million hit to write down its investment and bad debt from imeem. Instead of walking away, however, Warner renegotiated its deal with imeem to get new shares without putting in any new money.

Imeem is doing everything it can right now to cut costs and find new sources of revenue. Last week, it announced it will soon stop storing user’s photos and videos, an expensive remnant from its earlier strategy to compete with Facebook and MySpace as a larger social network. Now, imeem is focusing on being a music site. It was one of the first sites to strike streaming deals with all the major labels and for the most part has renegotiated those on more favorable terms. Its iPhone and Android apps, which also offer streaming music, are taking off and driving even more downloads.

And that’s where the imeem music store comes in. Currently, imeem gets a dinky 5 percent affiliate fee for every song its users buy from iTunes or Amazon. As part of its renegotiations with the music labels, it is getting download rights along with its streaming rights I’ve been able to confirm. Instead of getting a few pennies for each song from iTunes and Amazon, imeem can capture the roughly $0.30 per song that doesn’t go to the labels. What is more likely, however, is that it is giving the labels more than the 70 percent cut they get from Apple. Even if it splits its share with the labels and takes only $0.15 per song, imeem still stands to triple its download revenue. Add in ringtone sales and its existing advertising revenues (imeem attracted 25 million unique visitors worldwide in May, according to comScore), and imeem might just have a chance to survive. But if it does survive, it probably won’t be because of its advertising model alone. It will be because the free music is driving enough sales of actual music downloads.

Update: Imeem has confirmed that it is planning to roll out this store more broadly, but says that when it does it will continue to offer iTunes and Amazon downloads as an option.

Below are screenshots of the new post-payment window for songs imeem sells itself and the regular affiliate link window which still pops up for most downlods:

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The Ratings

When you go to submit your app through iTunes Connect, one of the steps takes you to a ratings matrix that you must fill out. This contains 10 questions listed under “Apple Content Descriptions.” For each of the 10 questions you must say “None”, “Infrequent/Mild”, or “Frequent/Intense.” Depending on what answer you give for each of these, the rating of your app in the upper right corner will change. These ratings go from “4+” to “9+” to “12+” to “17+” to “No Rating.”

That last one is key. If your app gets the “No Rating” label, a warning written in red appears underneath it stating that: “This content will not be sold via iTunes.” So what triggers such a rating? Well, not a lot. Basically, it comes down to the final two questions in the 10 question matrix. Let’s run through them in descending order:

• Cartoon or Fantasy Violence
• Realistic Violence
• Sexual Content or Nudity
• Profanity or Crude Humor
• Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References
• Mature/Suggestive Themes
• Simulated Gambling
• Horror/Fear Themes
• Prolonged graphic or sadistic realistic violence
• Graphic sexual content and nudity

As I noted, those last two are the keys to getting your app banned. But there’s a few interesting things about this. First of all, you may notice that these final two are not capitalized in the same way that the other questions are. That suggests to me that Apple added them at a different time than all the others and possibly even in a rush.

Second, you’ll notice that there’s a question about both “Sexual Content or Nudity” and “Graphic sexual content or nudity.” What’s interesting about this is that apps with “Sexual Content or Nudity” are still allowed — even if you select “Frequent/Intense” in that field. You’ll get a 17+ rating, but your app will still be allowed. However, if you click even “Infrequent/Mild” in the “Graphic sexual content and nudity,” your app is banned. I’m not sure what the difference is between “intense sexual content and nudity” and “mild graphic sexual content and nudity”, and neither do a lot of developers.

The Gray Area

And while you might think that since apps can be classified as having frequent/intense sexual content or nudity, that an app with topless girls would be okay. But apparently, it’s not. In Apple’s words:

Apple will not distribute applications that contain inappropriate content, such as pornography.

So, then what exactly is frequent/intense sexual content or nudity that is allowed? One developer we spoke with believes Apple may be intending that for applications to feature things like sexual education. If so, that is hilarious. Why would only people over the age of 17 be allowed to look at such apps?

The questions that pertain to violence are just as bad — maybe even worse. I understand that there’s a difference between cartoon violence and realistic violence, but both of those are allowed. How “frequent/intense realistic violence” differs from “mild prolonged graphic violence”, seems again like a pretty big gray area. Yet one is allowed, and one isn’t.

And not only is one allowed, “mild realistic violence” carries only a 9+ rating. “Intense realistic violence” carries only a 12+ rating. Apparently, the jump from “intense realistic violence” to “mild prolonged graphic violence” means skipping over the 17+ rating entirely, and going straight to banned. That makes no sense.

That’s the key point to all of this: The ratings range from making no sense to having way too much gray area. Apple is expecting developers to rate their apps correctly, but if it simply doesn’t allow anything in the last two categories to get through, of course those developers are going to wiggle their apps into the “safe” categories. Any why shouldn’t they? A lot of those definitions appear to be the exact same.

And that’s probably why we’re seeing a lot of apps that aren’t supposed to get through, slip through the system. Flat out: The system is broken.

When the Hottest Girls app got through, just look at the rating that was attached to it:

Rated 17+ for the following:

Frequent/Intense Sexual Content or Nudity

Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes

That seems like a reasonable rating for an app with topless girls. But apparently, Apple wanted it rated under “Frequent/Intense Graphic sexual content and nudity” — meaning it wouldn’t have been allowed in the App Store. (Though, to be clear, according to Apple, the app in question was tricky and added content to the app after Apple approved it. But it was just more topless girls, and so the main point remains the same.)

And at the same time, Apple is letting in apps that say they have topless pictures right in the title of the app. If it’s aiming to ban all of them, it’s doing a pretty awful job.

The Hypocrisy

Perhaps my favorite thing about all of this though is the hypocrisy that is staring back at each one of us who have an iPhone or iPod touch. Load up iTunes on the device, you can buy any number of movies that have plenty of nudity, sex, sadistic violence, prolonged violence, and any combination of them. Yet if you want an app that has any of those, forget about it.

I can understand why Apple would want to restrict mature apps before it had parental controls in place for them, but now it has those in place — there should be no reason why an adult shouldn’t be allowed to get an application with nudity in it if they want. Especially if that same type of content is available on the device through movies in the iTunes store. (Not to mention through any number of websites using the Safari browser.)

I understand that the store is run by Apple and it has the right to accept or reject whatever content it wishes, but again, this is about an absurd gray area for developers and hypocrisy. The gray area, I believe, is making app screeners lives a living hell, and all of us have to suffer for it. I can’t tell you how many emails we get from developers complaining that their apps have been in Apple’s approval queue for weeks or months with no response. Some of these developers are hoping to make a living off of these apps, yet Apple is backlogged in the approval process because it has to check for things like a certain level of nudity in an app, rather than letting the rating system do its job.

Apple hasn’t responded to multiple attempts to contact it on this matter. Frankly, I don’t think it knows what it really wants to do in this regard. Judging by its own rating system, it wants to allow “Nudity” with a capital “N,” but not “nudity.” Or maybe it’s that the nudity can’t be “graphic.” But how are topless pictures graphic? And if those are graphic, what is non-graphic nudity? Maybe it means that it wants to allow for “tasteful” nudity, but again, that’s a big gray area. Is Apple — and by Apple I mean app screeners — now going to be arbiters of taste? As if they needed any more to do.

I think what Apple really wants to see is the image below. And that’s too bad.

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If Twitter is good for one thing, it is for promoting whatever it is you have to sell. Some of the best self-promoters out there are rappers, and they’ve taken to Twitter just like every other type of celebrity. Just as Twitter can drive traffic to Websites, it can also drive music sales on iTunes.

On a panel at the 140 Characters Conference yesterday, Xavier Jernigan (@xjernigan, the director of digital marketing at Universal Motown Republic, described how Twitter help put one of his new artists, Asher Roth (@asherroth), on the map. Roth released his first album, Asleep In the Bread Aisle, on iTunes on April 20, a Monday. The night before he Tweeted out to his followers (he currently has 69,566) that the album would be on iTunes. And then he Tweeted out a short link which opened up to the album page in iTunes. With no other marketing, the album rose to become the No. 1 digital album for the week. Since then, it has sold about 100,000 copies. Update: As people point out in comments, Roth’s own team did a lot of groundwork before the album hit. Nevertheless, Twitter did play an important role in turning that early interest into iTunes sales.

The key to engaging fans, as is well known by now, is for the celebrities themselves to really send out Tweets and show fans a more personal side. Then when they Tweet that a new album is out, it doesn’t seem like marketing. It seems like inside information. One rapper on the panel was Jim Jones (@jimjones), who has more than 500,000 followers. He’s also seen iTunes sales spikes after Tweeting out to his followers. In between releases, he entertains them with dirty knock-knock jokes and observations on “What’s Ghetto?” For instance, “drinking out of mayonnaise jars” or getting the last bits of ketchup out of the bottle by putting water in it and shaking it, that’s ghetto. So is using Twitter to move albums on Twitter.

I caught up with Jernigan and Jones in the hallway after their panel and got them on video:

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In a rather odd update on the support area of its site today, Apple has an entry titled: iTunes: About unsupported third-party digital media players. While it never explicitly mentions the Pre, or any other device, it doesn’t take an Apple Store Genius to figure out what it means. Here’s the full text of the article:

Apple designs the hardware and software to provide seamless integration of the iPhone and iPod with iTunes, the iTunes Store, and tens of thousands of apps on the App Store. Apple is aware that some third-parties claim that their digital media players are able to sync with Apple software. However, Apple does not provide support for, or test for compatibility with, non-Apple digital media players and, because software changes over time, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with non-Apple digital media players.

So basically, if you have a Pre and are syncing iTunes with it, enjoy it while it lasts. You may want to back up your data elsewhere, because very shortly, that syncing will very likely no longer work.

I like how Apple sort of implies that it’s okay with these third-party leaches using iTunes, but that it simply can’t support them. Yeah, right. Hope you enjoyed that few weeks of functionality, Palm.

[via Daring Fireball]

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I spent this week at Apple’s WWDC conference in San Francisco talking to quite a few iPhone app developers. One thing that struck me was just how many of them shared the exact same concern with the App Store: App discovery.

By now, you’ve likely heard some of the success stories from the App Store (Apple does what it can to promote these at just about every event it holds pertaining to the iPhone now). But for each of those, there are also a ton of developers who work hard on apps only to watch them fall by the wayside. Apple’s greatest strength with the store — the fact that there are now 50,000 + apps — is also turning into its weakness with many developers. And if it doesn’t adapt the store to its huge growth, those developers might start looking at other platforms.

The problem is that while early on, it was pretty easy for small-time developers to make an app and get it noticed in the store, now with 50,000 apps, we’re getting to the point where you need to do something else to promote your apps. That’s good news for big time development studios like EA, which can throw marketing money at the problem. But for some smaller developers — some of which are just one person — that’s simply not an option. But there is one potential solution, and it’s one Apple already has built-in to iTunes: Genius recommendations.

Apple rolled out its “Genius” feature for recommending music on iTunes last year. Based on my experience with it, I believe it really is genius — it scans your music library and uploads the information to iTunes’ servers where it compares it to other users’ libraries (anonymously) and sends back recommended playlists based on the other songs you have on your computer. And, perhaps more importantly, it also recommends songs on iTunes that you will probably like based on songs in your library. Apple also more recently rolled out the same feature for movies purchase recommendations on iTunes. And it’s the iTunes Store recommendations that are key, because it could easily do the same thing with the App Store.

At its most simple level, it could probably work like this: Say there’s an app that you downloaded and really like, Apple should be able to recommend other apps of a similar genre you might like based on what others’ downloading habits are. But Apple could probably go much deeper than that and see which apps you use (or at least launch) the most, and use that as a basis for these recommendations as well. And it could also use the star rating system it already has in place as another point of recommendation — though it should probably make it easier to rate apps from within iTunes if it does that.

While such a system may not be perfect, it would be much better than the current system of app discovery through iTunes, which really isn’t too fair to little developers. Apple features some apps within iTunes, but those are usually skewed towards ones made by the bigger App Store players. For example, look at the apps featured along the top of the App Store right now: The Sims 3 (an EA game), ESPN Scorecenter, A Home & Garden app, a Lonely Planet app and a Square Enix game.

Now, to be fair, those are all popular things in their own regards, so the largest collection of people would probably be interested in them and so it makes sense for Apple to highlight them. But in doing so, it’s perpetuating a type of “rich get richer” system that threatens to take over the App Store.

And if you are a smaller app, it’s not like being featured on this main iTunes App Store page matters all that much anyway. I spoke with one developer of a top application this week who told me that when his app was featured on this main page, they only say a single-digit percentage point bump in terms of downloads. Much bigger, he says, was when it was featured on the iPhone version of the App Store.

But let’s look at the featured ones there. It’s largely more of the same: ESPN Scorecenter, a THQ game for the new Disney movie Up, the Sims 3 again, an AT&T app, etc. Apple does do a much better job diversifying this list, wrapping in some smaller apps as well, but there are still only so many apps they can fit in this area — especially since it’s on a much smaller screen. Again, a Genius feature on the iPhone or iPod touch would go a long way in helping to uncover new, under-the-radar apps.

The Top Paid and Free app lists are great when it comes to helping with downloads, I hear as well. Of course, you have to actually move a lot of apps to get on those lists to begin with. So it’s another of the “rich get richer” situations.

Some smaller developers have started to think outside the box to promote their apps. A bunch of them have started banding together, forming their own networks of sorts, for promotion. This method allows them to not only promote each other’s apps over the web, but within the apps themselves. That way if one of them takes off, the likelihood that another one of the apps in this group will be seen, is much greater.

Another outlet that app makers use to try and get traction is the press. Every day, we’re pitched dozens of apps, even though we don’t really cover that many apps here at TechCrunch. If we happen to, that seems to be a decent way for an app to get some downloads, but that fame is often fleeting. A developer’s best chance in this regard is to hope that their app gets enough coverage from multiple outlets over an extended period of time. That should help it both spread by word of mouth and hopefully make it onto one of the top apps lists. But again, this is very hard to do.

And these alliances and means of promotion pale in comparison to having Apple actively promoting your app. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that if you can get our app on one of the iPhone’s television commercials, your downloads will absolutely go through the roof. And if Apple puts your app on the demo units in its store, that helps sales in a big way as well. But Apple can only do that for so many apps. There needs to be a better way, that scales to a huge store — which the App Store has become.

All this matters because there is plenty of money behind all of this. The App Store is already a big business for many developers, and increasingly for Apple itself. And when Apple launches the in-app payment system in the iPhone 3.0 software due next week, I think the store could even jump to the next level in terms of people making money off of it.

But to keep the overall momentum the store has going, Apple needs to make sure its ecosystem is enticing for the small developers to work in. And that’s getting to be a problem with so many apps now in the store, and with so many big name development houses now making apps. I think a Genius app recommendation feature would go a long way to help this.

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Well, it finally happened.  Apple just delivered its 1 Billionth application download from the App Store, which currently features over 25,000 apps (35,000 by one estimate) built by thousands of developers. The significance of the milestone (besides just the 1 billion mark) is that it’s taken only nine months from when the App Store launched on iTunes to hit 1 billion paid and unpaid downloads.

Last summer, Apple sold one million 3G iPhones worldwide across 21 countries in the first 3 days on sale. During that same time, iPhone users made 10 million app downloads from the then newly launched iTunes App Store.

The count was at 300 million in early December, and the App Store hit 500 million downloads by January 16th.  It took Apple six months to reach the first 500 million downloads.  It would take Apple only three months to get another 500 billion downloads.  By March, 2009, it was at 800 million.  We started keeping track via Apple’s billion-app countdown at around 928,077,779. Apple also offered us a fleeting glimpse of the most popular apps ever, something the company only did once before.

Apple apparently already had a hunch of when the billion mark was going to be passed, because the billionth app celebration page was already ready to go.

Apple predicted the time when the billionth app would be downloaded: 1:24:06 AM PST on April 23. That didn’t happen.

The number of different apps available has also been growing  steadily.  In November, the app store had 10,000 apps, and grew to 15,000 by Apple’s quarterly earnings call in January. Within a month, the app store added 5,000 more apps, bringing the total available apps up to 20,000. By March, the app store has over 25,000 apps.  Now, according to an estimate by App Store analytics firm Mobclix, there are 35.550 apps worldwide.

Some lucky iPhone user who downloaded an app in the past two weeks will win a $10,000 iTunes gift card, MacBook Pro, Time Capsule, and iPod touch. We also hosted our own contest to see who could guess when the billionth app would be downloaded and we will release the results soon.

Here’s a current list of the top apps, free and paid, downloaded, courtesy of Mobclix. The numbers next to the global stats indicate how many countries had that app ranked as #1.:

Top 5 free (Global):
1: Heat Pad – Relaxing Heat Sensitive Surface (17)
2: Skype (9)
3: Ferrari GT Evolution: Lite Version (6)
4: Racing Live (4)
5: Yahoo! Messenger (4)

Top 5 paid (Global):
1: Camera Zoom (12)
2: Flight Control (11)
3: Playman Track & Field (3)
4: Wild West Pinball (2)
5: Airport Mania: First Flight (2)

Top 5 free (US):
1: Catcha Mouse
2: iDare
3: F-MyLife
4: Heat Pad – Relaxing Heat Sensitive Surface
5: Dictionary.com

Top 5 paid (US):
1: Flight Control
2: StickWars – Siege
3: Pocket God
4: iHunt 3D
5: ParkingLot

[photo: flickr/thetruthabout]

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Yes, Apple actually sold fewer iPhones this quarter than the previous two quarters, but that was coming off of the always-hot holiday shopping quarter, and the one before that was when the iPhone 3G was still relatively new on the scene. All told, Apple has sold 21 million iPhones since its launch. Perhaps just a drop in the bucket compared to overall Nokia sales, but remember, Apple was not in the mobile business at all before 2007. And aside from just sales figures, in the past two years, it has revolutionized the industry. That is, of course, a cliche. But in this case, it’s true.

People can downplay the actual number of iPhones in circulation all they want — the fact of the matter is that it has changed things. While there were some third-party mobile app developers before Apple’s App Store, they received almost no attention, and as such, it wasn’t really a viable business. Now, everyone and their mother is flocking to develop for the App Store. And every major mobile player is rushing to make their own app stores. But Apple’s already has over 35,000 apps — and in a few short hours, there will have been one billion apps downloaded in just 9 months.

Think about that for a second: One billion apps downloaded. There are currently 37 million iPhones and iPod touches combined. Certainly, there have been a lot less than that over various stages in the last nine months, but just take that 37 million number. That means that every single one of those devices has had an average of 27 apps downloaded to it. 27 apps — that do everything from games to music to movie times to fetching me a taxi.

I remember the phone I had before the iPhone, fondly: Motorola’s RAZR. It had zero third-party apps, and the most exciting thing it could do was take a grainy picture. That was just two years ago.

Look, Apple’s iPhone platform is not perfect. The app approval process, to put it lightly, sucks. There are apps getting rejected for questionable reasons, that are forced to wait weeks to just be reviewed again. And then there are other apps which feature outrageous things, which get accepted without the slightest peep. Apple needs to revamp this system.

And the network is far from perfect as well. AT&T seems to have a failure rate that is unacceptable to a lot of people. Some have gotten rid of their iPhones just to ditch AT&T.

But the fact of the matter is, that iPhone is simply the best all-in-one device that I’ve ever owned. I cannot imagine my life without it now. I would be lost — sometimes literally — without it. I say that because I know that of the 21 million iPhone owners out there — there are a great deal who feel the exact same way. That may be annoying, and may even sound pretentious to those who don’t own an iPhone — but I’m giving you my honest take as someone who has owned and/or tried a lot of the so-called “smartphones” out there. I have a G1. I have a Nokia N95. I’ve used a number of Blackberry devices. None compare. And I think for a lot of the other devices, it actually speaks less to the iPhone itself and more to the shit products that the other mobile companies have gotten away with putting on the market for so long.

And thanks in no small part to the iPhone, that could be about to change. Google’s Android platform was long seen as the next big thing, but so far, the only phone to run it, the G1, is junk. That should, hopefully change before the end of this year when new Android phones hit the market. But before then, the first real challenger should be coming — perhaps next month — with the Palm Pre. I’ve known a few people who have used the Pre a bit, and the consensus seems to be that it is the first true competitor, in terms of experience (both hardware and software), to the iPhone.

But it has some major handicaps — ones that I’ve already mentioned: 21 million, 35,000, and 1 billion. The iPhone has established itself as the standard that all mobile platforms now aspire to be. And with so much developer mindshare tied up in the platform, it will be hard for any other to come along and compete. The Pre, simply put, has to actually be better than the iPhone, if it wants to stand a chance.

For a while, it seemed like that would be the case. When the Pre was first unveiled, major hype immediately began. It had all the features the iPhone didn’t. But Apple isn’t stupid. It didn’t rush out with a buggy software update to match all the features. Instead, it sat back, worked, and then dropped the iPhone 3.0 software bomb. Not only does its update coming this summer include many of the features the Pre was touting as advantages, but it has a lot more that the Pre doesn’t offer.

And the Trojan Horse, that not a lot of people are talking about yet, is that the 3.0 software’s micro-payments system (In-App Purchases) could take the iPhone to an even higher level in terms of developer commitment. It could represent a whole new level of money for them — and Apple.

Oh yeah, and there is likely new iPhone hardware coming shortly as well.

Of course, there are still two major differentiating factors that the Pre will offer: a physical keyboard and background applications.

To me, the physical keyboard argument is a short-term one. Yes, a lot of people right now insist on having a physical keyboard — something which Apple has refused to provide. But Apple is doing that because it knows that they are not in the cards for the future of mobile devices. In the not-too-distant future, there will be screens with full haptic feedback that let you orient your hands on them. Physical keyboards will be seen for what they are: A huge waste of space.

The larger issue is background applications. Apple still refuses to run them (from third parties). You might think this is an obvious advantage for the Pre, but there are some major potential downsides. One is performance. How will the device run when multi-tasking? But the larger issue is battery life. I have a G1 that runs applications in the background. The battery life is a joke. If you think the iPhone has a poor battery, try using the G1 for a day. Or should I say, try using the G1 for about 3 hours. Good luck.

Some developers say that if an app is made correctly, it shouldn’t drain a battery to such an extent even while running in the background. They often cite older Nokia phones and the like with applications as examples. But those older phones ran applications that are nowhere near as advanced as we have now in the post-iPhone world. If applications can be optimized for battery life, no one told the developers on the Android platform.

And so, I have my doubts about the Pre’s main advantage, actually being an advantage at all. Again, Apple is a lot of things, but it is not stupid. If it thought allowing applications to run in the background was the best play in keeping customers happy, it would do it. Instead, it went through the painstaking process of completely redeveloping the Push Notification system to get it working. It seems to say something that now Palm has a similar service it has built into the Pre SDK, called Mojo Messaging Service.

Apple, with its still relatively small overall market share, is in a position of power right now in the US. If it had an iPhone that was $99 and could run on any major carrier, it would completely dominate this market. Instead, it’s doing things its way — just as it has always done. And that has worked for the iPod, and for iTunes, and has been working the past few years for the Mac. That also leaves a small opening for a nice Android device or the Pre to have a chance. But they can make no mistakes. Or they will be written in the Wikipedia entry for Apple next to the Zune.

[photo: flickr/techburst]

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