Steve @ Apple keynote--iTunes 9, new iPods (w/vid camera!), 50M iPhone + iPods | Hacker News Reader

Steve @ Apple keynote--iTunes 9, new iPods (w/vid camera!), 50M iPhone + iPods

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37 pointssama49 comments

Anybody downloaded iTunes 9 yet? It's grotesque. It feels much snappier, which I like, but the new non-Leopard theme feels like a satire on Apple product. Massive overgradients.

yea same. That theme must have happened while steve was in the hospital.

Let's just hope that Apple doesn't decide to adopt that as a new standard for the next iteration of OS X, like they did with the iTunes sidebar...

God, I know. I lost faith in Apple's taste a little bit when I downloaded that. I love the new mini-scrollers, I love the playback bar that looks like Quicktime X, but the gloss is obnoxious.

Yep. The new, white UI is atrocious. I grabbed a screenshot (even signed up for twitpic just to share my anger): http://twitpic.com/h48v1

I wouldn't quite call it grotesque but it does not quite seem like it was "Designed by Apple of California". It has a bizarrely excessive 3D look that reminds me of the default Firefox OSX theme, much less subtle than previous versions. It's also has more of a plastic look than a metal look.

Other items of note (if you care about these things):

* They fixed the "zoom" button (no longer toggles the mini player, which always irked me as being wildly inconsistent)

* They now use a white background instead of a black in many places.

It's more Macbook and less Macbook Pro.

Curious that the nano gets a camera, and a video camera at that, but the touch doesn't.

I figured they didn't have a lot of extra room in the case. Not that the Nano seems to, either.

Edit: or the rumored manufacturing delays made them delay the announcement.

I guess. I'm just used to Apple magically being able to stick anything they want to inside a nearly nonexistent depth.

Well, I wouldn't hold my breath for an electron microscope or portable DNA sequencer in the next iPhone upgrade... There are limitations to technology. Apple just hires top-end engineers and designers and forces them to work together to meet tight requirements, but they still need to be based in reality.

My wild guess is that they feel it would cannibalize sales from the phone?

Cramming all the other features (FM, pedometer, camera/video) into the nano will make menu navigation pretty complicated though.

Bingo. Nano competes with standard devices but isn't expandable through the AppStore. Touch gives you internet, AppStore but is hardware limited (no radio, camera, mic). Have to buy the iPhone + contract to get both.

I was dreaming of a touch with a speaker + mic so I could use Skype + MiFi.

Zii Egg has that, also video & still cameras. But no radio. :-(

Perhaps you know this but you can use the mic on the iphone headphones with the touch. e.g. http://store.apple.com/ca/product/MB770G/A?fnode=MTY1NDA3NA&...

And it has a speaker.

Thanks - I knew you could buy external mics but didn't know Apple sold mic headphones.

I have the original touch that doesn't have a speaker.

Ok then you should know it doesn't do audio input either. You need gen2.

Possible; My take is that this is what happens when products are developed without strong leadership.

The Nano team internalized, and asked themselves "What have customers been asking for", and added a radio and camera. The Radio seems to have come out of nowhere- So far as I know, the iPhone/touch don't have them.

The iPhone/iPod touch team, on the other hand, continued to not add the Camera, since it's a differentiating feature, as you suggested.

> The Radio seems to have come out of nowhere- So far as I know, the iPhone/touch don't have them.

Not necessarily. It was a much-demanded feature for the iPod for a while, though there isn't much customer pressure nowadays. On the other hand, both my Sansa Fuze and my Nokia 5310 have FM tuners in them... Maybe they felt 'peer' pressure to include an FM tuner since there are a lot of other devices out there that do.

Exactly my point- It's like they went to the box of "What have people been asking for", rather than working on a unified strategy through all of the iPod devices.

The "Good, Better, Best" strategy is massively broken here.. Do I want HD space? Class. Do I want Video? iPhone or Nano Do I want Photos? iPhone Do I want cheap? Shuffle Do I want Apps, but cheap? iPod Touch

We're stuck with a features grid, not a clear progression.

"The Radio seems to have come out of nowhere--So far as I know, the iPhone/touch don't have them"

No, but the Zune player has long had FM radio, so best to dominate the Microsoft competitor in all dimensions.

BTW, FM is very convenient if you have a dedicated old computer streaming internet radio and connect it to a small-commercial-type FM transmitter; you can then get FM reception of internet radio over all of even a large property, automatically in time-sync, using existing audio equipment and "portable radios" including the new Nano. (This is legal in the US, but not in all countries.)

Not really. You don't have any way of tuning to a different channel except while sitting at the PC.

The Radio seems to have come out of nowhere- So far as I know, the iPhone/touch don't have them.

Actually, they might. The iPod Touch 2G, at least, contains a chip that has the potential to handle both Bluetooth and FM radio reception. At the time the 2G Touch was released, the chip's Bluetooth and FM capabilities weren't enabled. But according to the following article, the 3.0 software upgrade started using the chip for Bluetooth: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/iPod-Touch-Bluetooth,news-3642.h...

It's possible that the chip's FM capabilities will be enabled on a future software update.

I think from Apple's perspective having the Nano with a video camera could be a stand alone device. Meaning lots of people might buy it to use only as a video camera. In which case Apple is happy to sell you a Touch and a Nano. They control enough of the market to create these artificial segmentations. I'm sure they have market research on it.

I can't imagine Apple is so dumb as to think that the current situation is a desirable one, or that a wholly artificial segmentation like that would fly with customers.

No-one with a Touch is going to get a Nano for the camera. They'll just keep using their crappy phone or get a Flip.

Not having the video camera in the Touch is a huge missed opportunity, whose net result is lower hardware sales, period.

or get a Flip.

This does not seem obvious to me. The Flip Ultra (4GB) is $149, the Ultra HD (8GB) is $199. Compare the iPod Nano at $149 (8GB) and $179 (16GB). The Flip may be a better camera, but the Nano is clearly competitive, even ignoring it's other features.

whose net result is lower hardware sales

The Nano is the top selling iPod model. They released a new model with at least one significant new feature that wholly replaces another product category in the same price range.

How do you conclude that will result in lower sales?

But is the Nano at all close to the Flip's quality? I'm doubting it shoots in HD.

It doesn't, but then neither does the $149 model of Flip.

I feel that there's a big market for Nano with a camera that iPod Touch with a camera couldn't really serve.

I know many people who don't want to buy a mobile phone with unnecessary features. It's not just cost awareness. They want simple things. And the music player & Camera combo is a simple. They couldn't care less about apps and web browsing functionality in their music player. They will care about those in 2014, but not today and new Nano is targeting that crowd.

The very omission of the camera from the Ipod touch makes me wonder what their design team was thinking. Sticking a camera on the ipod nano adds no value to it than the camera on my old samsung cell phone.

A camera on the touch would have probably destroyed the market for some devices and disrupted Apple's own iphone line.

> The very omission of the camera from the Ipod touch makes me wonder what their design team was thinking.

> A camera on the touch would have probably [...] disrupted Apple's own iphone line.

I think that you answered you own question.

It seems unlikely that adding a camera to a non-phone would somehow disrupt sales for a phone. Particularly when the phone is billed primarily as an all-in-wonder convergence device.

A camera on an ipod touch doesn't somehow remove the flip-phone from your pocket. And leaving it off isn't going to do much to convince people looking at something sold primarily as having 'no contract' to instead get a phone with a relatively steep contract.

I bet the guys at Pure Digital let out a huge sigh when Norah Jones took the stage.

This was my initial thought as well, but I just can't see myself saying "Hmm.. no camera in the iPod, guess I'll have to get the iPhone instead and just not use the phone part of it." I doubt the camera functionality would ever be enough to push people into the cost of a new phone (contracts, initial outlay, etc.).

I'm not saying I agree with the logic or that it makes sense in the real world... I'm sure there is a lot of RDF in Cupertino. Not necessarily from Steve Jobs, but just from being too much of a mono-culture.

I don't know if it's still the case, but IIRC the iPod Touch didn't have Bluetooth support while the iPhone did. I can hardly think that Bluetooth support would be enough to push someone to the iPhone from the iPod Touch...

Even back in the day, I remember things like Apple limiting the capabilities of the video card in the iBook so that it would only support mirroring through the external VGA adapter, even though the video card supported adding an extra monitor as a separate display. (This was demonstrated when someone hacked around the limiation in the OpenFirmware or driver, can't remember)

Apple does this stuff all the time in order to draw distinct lines in the sand between where one product's features end and the other's begins. It's most apparent between the iBook/MacBook and PowerBook/MacBookPro lines dating back to the PPC days. There were many features they were excluded from the 'consumer' model (iBook/MacBook) that were present in the 'professional' model (PowerBook/MacBook Pro) that were not enough for a lot of people to pay the extra $700+ for the upgrade.

I've never thought that it made too much sense in a lot of cases, but it's an ingrained philosophy in Apple's marketing/product design dating back years. I would hardly expect them to end it now.

Dropping a feature like Bluetooth from iPod Touch totally makes sense. It has nothing to do with segmentation.

In case of hardware or software that requires per device licensing, it's about cost. Let's say that BT chipset costs $3 per device. They sell 30 million iPods, it's 90 million dollars saved on a feature that very few iPod Touch users cared about.

Really? There are a lot of people with Bluetooth headsets now. I'm sure they would love to pair that with their iPod Touch to also be able to listen to music... Don't know what percentage of people that is though.

{edit} I would predict that it's equally possible that there are a lot of users out there that don't care about Bluetooth on their phones either, but that didn't stop Apple from cramming it into the iPhone {/edit}

Ah, Bluetooth was just an example I picked from previous comment. iPod Touch actually has Bluetooth nowadays, it seems.

My point was that device manufacturers drop features from cheaper models because of costs. "This won't make a difference how many units we sell, drop it and we save $50 million!". Nokia does this all the time with their phones. From outside, it can appear as an artificial segmentation, but it rarely is.

Now, cameraless iPod Touch? That's definitely deliberate segmentation.

They were probably thinking that the Nano is still the top selling iPod, and that continuing to add features allows them to keep the price (and margins) up. It's obvious that adding a camera does add some kind of value, given how disappointed people are that the Touch did not get that added value.

I have been messing with genius for music in my iPhone and feel that pandora does a much better job. It might be because genius has limited options and has to search for songs within the library you own, but still, I have seen very weird/not pertinent genius recommendations. I hope the app genius recommendation is better.

Since they're updating Genius today, I'm curious to see if there are any significant improvements.

LP looks terrific.

I like Pandora for playing music I don't already have, but usually it seems to end up in a ~20 track loop (I made that number up, but I feel like I hear the same songs a lot). Granted, I have only made a few Pandora stations, and have only made a few Genius playlists, and both were used for "gym" music like Beastie Boys, Eminem, etc., so it's not like I'm pushing any limits here...

I guess I'm saying that the new music from Pandora is a big win. Now imagine if Genius could mix in streams of music you don't own, while giving you an option to buy tracks with a click... that would be a killer feature.

I had the same problem with Pandora, and ultimately realized that you need to seed your channel with a large, diverse collection of artists in order to avoid getting trapped in a small loop like that. I don't want to futz with setting up channels that much, though. Still, I've discovered some good music with it.

Disclaimer: I don't work for these guys.

I've found thesixtyone.com to be AWESOME for discovering good, indie music. It's got a very social-networky-MMO sort of feel to it and is really well structured to trying new music.

Isn't a disclaimer for when you do 'work for these guys?'

That's how one usually sees it, but really a disclaimer is just "a statement that denies something, especially responsibility". So one could read the grandparent as 1) denying that he works for them 2) denying that he would know as much about the service as someone who did, and 3) denying that he has any conflict of interest that would call his assessment of the service into question.

That's a good tip. Also, if you down-rate or snooze a lot of tracks, a station starts to wander more from its core tracks.

But it's still disappointing that a station seeded from a a single artist won't at least put all of their tracks in rotation, instead staying tightly around their best-known/best-liked sound. (I think Pandora is a little too proud of their 'music genome' typing project.)

Agreed, Pandora can get a bit one dimensional if you're not diligent. I've heard it's best to upvote sparingly and downvote heavily if you want a good mix. Also adding multiple bands and/or songs to a channel helps.

Good. A lot of speculation Steve would stop doing these, but it's a good portion of his job to turn on the charisma for the press and the pubic.

And the Beatles tomorrow (never knows)?

Poor Steve is so thin. Can't tell you how sad this makes me.

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