let’s rock was good, but no rabbits in the hat

by Justin Horn on Sep 9th, 2008 @ 6:05 pm

Well I know a lot of people might be disappointed by the event and I have to admit I was too at first.  Then I began to think about it more while preparing to write this post and they really did announce a lot of exciting stuff, espeically the new nanos. I think the problem is people (including myself) build up apple events so much that if Steve doesn’t pull a rabbit out of the hat at every event it comes off as a disappointment. Most of the “rabbits” that may have made the event more exciting were roaming the wild the last few weeks.

Watch the event on apple.com

So here is a quick recap of what’s new…

iPod Shuffle
Not much here, just some new colors.

$49 for 1GB / $69 for 2GB (Apple Store – iPod Shuffle)

iPod Classic
Apple seems to be winding down classic and probably won’t be around too much longer.  Now there will just be a single size of 120GB.  It comes in white or black.

$249 (Apple Store – iPod Classic)

iPod Nano **star of the show**
The nano goes back to a more second generation look, but has a bigger screen and noticeably thinner. Under the hood the nano now comes with an accelerometer allowing landscape or portrait views we have become used to with the iPod Touch and iPhone. Another fun and very useful feature is shaking it to put it into shuffle mode. When I used to use my iPod classic in my car (pre iPhone) I would put it on shuffle 90% of the time and it would have been much easier especially while driving to just pick it up and shake it! The nano is avaiable in silver, black, purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and violet so there should be a color for everyone.

$149 for 8GB / $199 for 16GB  (Apple Store – iPod Nano)

iPod Touch
The touch highlights include the new 2.1 firmware, a speaker, external volume controls, and Nike+ built right in. The refresh also brings it inline with a more iPhone 3g look. It now has contoured edges, but instead of plastic it’s a polished stainless steel design. I assume they would have gone with steel on the iPhone 3g too if it didn’t have so many chips trying to get signals out (GPS, 3g, EDGE, WIFI, Bluetooth).  Owners of the current first gen iPod Touch can upgrade for free from 2.0 to 2.1 or if for some reason they didn’t update yet they can still pay the $9.99 and upgrade right to 2.1.

$229 for 8GB / $299 for 16GB / $399 for 32GB (Apple Store – iPod Touch)

iTunes 8
For me there isn’t anything groundbreaking here. Apple is really hyping up the new genius feature and the demo of it seemed to drag on during the event according to gizmodo live feed. Besides that the grid view is nice, but I’ll probably still stick with the classic view for the most part. Oh, it now supports HD which I see as a feature that should have been there a while ago so no big deal.

iTunes 8 is available for download now (Download iTunes 8)

iPhone 2.1 Firmware
Even though the iPod Touch is in the wild starting today (although online only at this point) you won’t be able to update your iPhone or first gen iPod Touch till Friday September 12th. Steve didn’t really go into much detail about the firmware except to say that it “fixes lots of bugs” including significantly improved battery life, improved stabilty to fix crashing issues, fewer call drops, and faster iTunes backups. So we’ll have to wait till Friday to check out the other rumored features like improved GPS and the most important feature which apple has talked about publicily before this… Push Apps!

Wrapping up…
the event wasn’t as exciting because all the rumors had already been leaked…see what we get for constantly digging stuff up on apple? But don’t count apple out just yet! I have a feeling that when Friday rolls around and we update to 2.1 firmware on the iPhone there may be a few rabbits that didn’t sneak out.

Follow me on Twitter @justin_horn

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