Apple’s Showtime Announcements Reviewed

Apple hit the tech world with a raft of announcements at their “Showtime” event on Tuesday. Now that Ryan and I have had a chance to talk about some of the new products and services, here is our take on Tuesday’s announcements.

The much ballyhooed “widescreen video iPod” was not to be at this event. Instead we got refreshed full-size iPods (now widely being referred to as 5.5G) with:

• 60% brighter screens
• Larger hard drives (30GB and 80GB)
• Longer battery life (3.5 hours and 6.5 hours of video playback respectively)
• Lower prices ($249 and $349)
• New headphones
• Gapless Playback
• Instant Searching
• Letter overlay when scrolling
• New Games

At first glance, these updates are a bit underwhelming, but taken all together they make for some pretty nice enhancements, especially given the $50 price reduction. The pieces of this puzzle that I am most excited about are the gapless playback and searching improvements. Ever since making the transition to digital music I’ve been really bummed out about the small gaps between songs that originally flowed into each other. If you have an album on CD where say, track 3 and 4 blend right into one another, the new iPods will play these songs without a gap between them as originally intended by the artist. Nice!

The ability to search for songs on the iPod using text and the letter overlay while scrolling are also welcome additions. Using the touch wheel to zip around 30-80GB of songs was getting a bit tiresome. These new features allow you to search for songs or albums by using the wheel to select letters instead of just scrubbing back and forth through the entire list until you find the track you are looking for.

Way, way more thoughts after the jump!

The Nano line has donned the iPod Mini aluminum cases of olde and is now available in five colors. This should be a huge boost to what is already the most popular model in the iPod family. The old multi-color Minis are still so popular that they often sell for near retail on eBay. The new storage capacities include: 2GB in silver only, 4GB in silver plus the three colors, and an 8GB available only in black. These new Nanos will receive the same software enhancements that the full-size iPods are getting and will likely be hot sellers this holiday season. It’s too bad that they are limiting the colors by storage capacity. A black Nano would be really nice but I don’t know if people are going to be willing to pay $249 for an 8GB player when they could get a 30GB full-size player for the same price. 8GB flash drives are still relatively new on the market so we expect these prices to fall as time goes by and manufacturing gets less expensive. If you are in the market for a Nano and really want one in black, we would recommend waiting a while or picking up one of the 1G Black Nanos on the cheap.

The new iPod Shuffle. This thing is tiny! It reminds me of the “iPod Inviso” sketch that was on SNL a while back. It comes in a 1GB size only and has a built in clip so you don’t need to buy an accessory to wear it. That’s probably a good thing because it’s so small now that it’s basically become a clip-on button. In fact it’s so diminutive, holding it seems like it could be a bit awkward. I guess the idea is you clip it on to your clothes and then grab the clothes along with the player to push the button. I’m impressed with the new design, it looks a lot nicer than the old Shuffle design and the new shuffle/continuous play switches should be a lot easier to use than the glossy flat switch of the previous model.

Ok, here is where the magic is happening. Let me give you a rundown of all the new features that they have packed into a completely renovated iTunes:

• Reorganized source list
• Automatic download of missing album artwork
• Two new views: Album view and Coverflow view
• Gapless playback
• iPod management from within iTunes
• Ability to transfer content between authorized computers using iPod
• Upgraded 640 x 480 video resolution
• Download manager
• Movies

I’ve blogged before about ways to restore cover art to albums in your library that are currently missing it. Thankfully, the new iTunes 7 has made that search unnecessary as it will automatically (provided you have an iTunes account) download missing album art for you. This is a very welcome addition and will save OCD people like me a lot of time tinkering around with their music libraries in attempts to find artwork for every single song. Granted, even iTunes doesn’t have artwork for every track, but they do have a lot.

This new feature was most likely added because of the two new views that iTunes is boasting. Album view and Coverflow view give you new ways to browse your music and video library. Ryan and I are both big fans of the album view as it presents your songs with the album art to the left, almost like you are looking at a CD. This helps get listeners back to that “album as a piece of sonic and visual art” that has been lost during the transition to digital distribution. Personally, I still buy music in album format and a new list of titles in my music library never held the same appeal to me as holding a brand new CD complete with liner notes. Now I am one step closer to that experience and can recognize albums in my collection by their covers rather than reading through what amounted to a fancy Excel spreadsheet.

Coverflow view is more of an animated flipping through of your music collection, not unlike going through your CD rack. I was a bit surprised that it is such a direct copy of another piece of software I use (also called Coverflow) but cherry picking the best third-party software seems to be a trend with Apple. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that, at least in this case it seems that they did the right thing.

One of the things I’m most excited about from yesterday’s announcements is the new gapless playback feature. Standard on all new iPods, it is also woven into the iTunes 7 software and will finally provide the proper listening experience that has been lost since moving to digital music. Not only are all new downloads from the iTunes Store now supporting gapless playback (where it exists), when you first install iTunes 7 it will scan your entire library and fix any albums that shouldn’t have gaps between certain songs. This is a very exciting prospect and I’m eager to hear the difference. Steve Jobs demoed the technology using Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and it sounded great.

The ability to transfer content between computers using the iPod as a conduit is also very intriguing. I can think of multiple times that I have bought a new album on my Powerbook at home, uploaded it to my iPod for listening on the way to work and then that’s where the experience ends. What they are doing with this feature is if your work computer (Mac or PC) is one of your authorized computers, you are allowed to upload the music that you have purchased from your iPod to this other computer. This is a feature that should have been implemented a long time ago and we are glad to see it finally showing up now. I haven’t yet experimented with how smoothly this works, but my work computer is an IBM Thinkpad so stay tuned for a review.

Movies for sale in iTunes is the big feature that everyone has been waiting for. The iTunes Music Store has been renamed “The iTunes Store” to support this new addition of feature films. They will be selling movies on the same day as their DVD release for $14.99 with month-early preorders going for $12.99. Older films are going to be sold for $9.99. So far, the only studios participating are Disney owned (Walt Disney, Pixar, Touchstone, Miramax) but if Apple’s TV shows strategy is any indicator, more will join as time goes on. Apple boasts that they began with one network and 5 TV shows and how have over 40 networks selling over 200 hundred shows on the iTunes store.

Movies are being advertised as near-DVD quality (640 x 480) with a download time of approximately 30 minutes over a 5Mb/s broadband connection. $14.99 seems a bit high for a movie with no DVD extras but perhaps that will be a convenience worth paying extra for. The jury is still out on the pricing. Ryan and I have pondered before about the “non-instant gratification” of delivering films over the internet. 30 minutes doesn’t seem too bad, but we still wonder how Apple is going to handle the release of a really popular film. Will they be able to handle the hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of multiple download streams? This remains to be seen. The new iTunes download manager is supposed to allow you to begin watching the film after the first minute has downloaded, but anyone that has tried to stream a large file over the internet is aware of the annoyance of stopping and starting while the buffer catches up. A quick look in the iTunes Store reveals that most movies are between 1.2 - 1.6GB. That’s a heckuva big file and a few movies along with a decent music library would fill up your laptop in a jiffy. Jobs spoke about “broad usage rights” for the movies so I would hope that it won’t be a problem to offload these to some convenient storage when you are done watching them. Oh, one more thing: Death Race 2000 is already available.

So, updated iPods, a new iTunes design and the movie store were all just about confirmed going into this event. What surprised most people was when Jobs demoed a prototype of what they are calling (for now) iTV. This is the much theorized about set-top box that Apple has been working on. It promises to stream all these movies and music that you are buying from the iTunes Store over to your big screen TV in the living room. This represents nothing less than Apple making an attempt to beat Microsoft at their own game. The boys up in Redmond have been pitching their Media Center PC method of incorporating computers into the living room for years now to what can only be called very minimal success, if that. If anyone can do this, and do it right, it’s got to be Apple. This little device, far from being a big, noisy, expensive PC tower is a sleek little set-top box that promises to wirelessly deliver all your movies, TV shows, music, photos and podcasts to a bigger screen in the comfort of your living room. Not only that, it will manage this with the style and grace that has made Apple a market leader in digital music delivery. And at $299 it will only cost about as much as an iPod. There are a lot of questions to be answered here regarding the actual technology that will make all this possible, what type of DRM we are going to have to put up with and how smooth the execution will actually be, but you can be sure that it will be one of the most talked about gadgets for the next few months. iTV is planned for release in Q1 2007.

So there you have it. About 4 pages worth of reviews and this is really only scratching the surface. As we experiment with the new offerings from Apple I’m sure we will find much more to write about. That’s not to mention that we are about to enter the “three-months-till-the-holidays-avalanche” in which tech launches fall like rain from the heavens. Stay tuned!