Author: Tyler Kearn
It’s that magical time of the year again-three months before the holidays, when companies come out with their new products to fill the retail shelves. Last week, Apple continued their annual tradition of announcing new iPods.
None of the updates this year were surprising, and changes to iPods simply seem to be the logical progression of the different product lines, but that doesn’t make Apple’s new products any less desirable. These updates keep Apple a step ahead of their competition, and allow them to maintain a ridiculous 75% market share of mp3 players.
With the new iPods, Apple has continued their obsession with making their products thinner. Both the iPod Touch and the iPod Nano have gone from so crazy-thin-that-you-can-hardly-see-them-from-the-side to somehow even fractionally thinner.
This extra thinness might not be that noticeable, and it arguably makes the iPods easier to lose, but it does lead one to look at the devices and say, “how in the world did they do that?” Apple wants their iPods to literally be on the cutting edge.
The most drool-worthy of the new iPods is the updated iPod Touch. Apple’s iPhone-without-the-phone has been redone in stainless steel, and now features a speaker and external volume controls. It is also cheaper-the 8GB version is now $229 (still more expensive than the 8GB iPhone, but the iPhone is subsidized by AT&T because you have to pay a $70 a month data plan).
What’s really interesting about the Touch is that Apple is really trying to push it as more than just a music player. The new TV ad for the Touch only shows it being used to play a selection of the many games that are now available for it. By selling the iPod Touch as a gaming device, Apple puts the device up against other portable gaming platforms (even if just by implication), such as the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP, which is something that Apple has never before attempted.
The new iPod Nano returns to the thin and long body of the first Nanos, but still keeps the wide screen of the last Nanos in order to play videos. It’s smaller, has an accelerometer (which auto-rotates the screen when you turn it on its side, and allows you to shake the iPod to randomly skip to another track) and-in what is always the biggest selling point-comes in nine different colors. The prices on the nano haven’t changed, but the capacities have doubled to 8GB and 16GB.
The thicker 160GB iPod Classic has been discontinued (if it’s not thin, it’s not Apple), and the thinner Classic has been upgraded to 120GB.
Apple’s most touted new feature across iTunes and all their iPods is something that they’re calling “Genius.” Genius is a feature of iTunes designed to analyze your music, and then, when you select a song, it will create playlists of similar songs and suggest songs that you might want to purchase on iTunes.
This is clearly another way for Apple to sell people music, but it might also be a good tool with which to discover new songs. Plus, it could be fun to see what songs it thinks would go well together.
What is disconcerting about Genius is that it works by sending all of the information in your iTunes library to Apple. While this is supposed to be done anonymously, it still amounts to giving Apple a lot of valuable information-information that they could conceivably sell to advertisers and music industry analysts-for nothing. Genius is not working fantastically well at creating great playlists just yet, but, as more people turn the feature on and send their information to Apple’s servers, it should become “smarter” and more accurate in selecting songs.
Apple’s new iPods are more evolutionary than revolutionary, which means that they are not necessarily worth purchasing if you already have a recent iPod. However, they are still very compelling devices, and, if you were planning to get a new iPod, it is definitely worth getting one of the new generation. Or, you could wait until the price drops post-holidays.
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