Yesterday I posted a quick list of predictions, what I should have done was link you to Kevin Rose's blog. He nailed the keynote. It started with Steve joking about the rumors about his demise a few weeks ago, and that seemed to be the highlight of the morning.
He first talked about iTunes, iTMS has overtaken Best Buy and Wal*Mart as the biggest retailer of music anywhere. With iTunes 8.0 they introduce the Genious Playlist and Sidebar. The idea being that based on your music library and a selected song iTunes will automatically create a playlist for you that makes sense. The sidebar replaces the mini-store with recommendations based on your current selection. He continued with the iPod Nano, and introduced the 4th generetion of these devices. Long LCD, and a interface that is very reminicent of the iPhone/iPod Touch. It's the "thinnest iPod ever" and has the Genious Playlist built in. Then moved on to the iPod Touch. With a sleek metal redesign it now looks better than the 3G plastic iPhone, it also got a pricing point of $229 and gets built in Genious Playlist and Nike+ support. He mentioned a few iPhone/iPod touch games like Spore, FIFA and Need For Speed: Undercover, then they showed a new ad that places the iPod Touch as a portable gaming device, just like Sony's PSP and Nintendo's DS. Wrapping up he announced update 2.1 for iPhone wich includes none of the new features it's lesser sibblings got. Not even Genious Playlist (this might be included, no official word we'll have to see on friday). In fact it's just bugfixes. Here is where the dissapointment begins. I'll start with the one that bothers me the most.
iPhone is not getting Nike+. Apparently the iPhone is no longer an iPod. Back in January 2007
Steve Jobs called the iPhone the "Best iPod Ever", this led me to believe that the iPhone is the top of the line iPod, and everything that works with iPod will work with iPhone because thats what top of the line means. I was obviously wrong. They are saying that there is some extra reciever that the 2G iPod Touch has that enables this to happen without the dongle. Whatever. It's been about two months since the release of the iPhone 3G, they knew about this well in advance and they decided to not include this functionality on the iPhone 3G. I guess they expected people to buy new iPod Nanos or get themselves an iPod Touch now... but that makes no sense. The iPhone is the most expensive iPod, and within Apple's plans, the iPhone is to take over the universe (projected 12M units sold this year). Adding features like Nike+, GPS and Genious Playlist to the iPhone further sets it appart from the rest of the "iPhone Killers" that are coming out this year. Splitting the market like this is really... well... dumb. I was still kind of hoping that its because of the 3 leg system that Jobs setup back in WWDC, iTunes, iPhone, Mac. So there will be a later event that will add Nike+ functionality, and it'll be worth the wait because it'll include map support for running those trails around town, and maybe over the air sync. It just looks more and more like this won't be the case. Theres already a discussion going on at the
Apple Support forums about this and how Apple hasn't even commented on updating the iPhone for dongle support. The whole reason why the Nike+ worked on the Nanos and not on the iPod/Classics was because of the Nano's solid state drive, which the iPod Touch and iPhone have. This is really quite ridiculous. Which brings me up to... Genious Playlist is really quite a half-baked idea and they are not jumping on the opportunity that an
ailing Pandora is presenting. The Genious Sidebar kind of does this, it allows you to see what music you are missing and other music you might like, but really, iTunes Genious Radio would be awesome. Just imagine a service like
Last.fm straight from iTunes. With server-saved playcounts and unlimited music streaming. This could be a monthly subscription service and will also boost their sales since you could one-click-buy any music you really enjoy. I, for instance, no longer travel around with my music collection, and depend solely on Last.fm's radio for my music both old and new discoveries. It's really wonderful, and it works over the air with my iPhone and it's Last.fm application. I have nothing to say about the new Nanos, I didn't like the fatty, these look way better. Another thing that I really don't like, is how there just has not been a 'One More Thing' on any of the last keynotes. It just really kind of falls dead at the end since you would always wait for that one last thing where he would completely re-arrange paradigms and blow minds. This could be something as simple as starting a streaming service similar to Netflix's on the AppleTV or as complicated as the
AppleTV 3.0 rumors that are floating around. I really also expected the announcement of the new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. That was my fault. I still think they will be released sometime soon, before the holidays, but my 2 year old MacBook Pro has seen better days, mainly because I am an extreme power user and carry it everywhere I go. My old Toshiba didn't last through 8 months of that, so imagine how happy I am with my 15" MBP. I am really looking forward to a new 17" MBP as soon as the redesign is set loose. All in all, if you have an old iPod or if you just haven't spent any money on the iPhone (and 3G)/iPod Touch 1G yet, this keynote opened lots of doors for you. But if you are already invested in a iPhone/iPod Touch, specially those with new iPhone 3Gs, this keynote was just sad. It was a wakeup call that tells you that the days of iPhone/iPod Touch parity are over, and theyre marketting them as separate things, not just "a poor mans iPhone" and the iPhone is no longer the one device to rule them all, since Apple now decided that there were things it
can't do.
