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In the week since Apple announced its “Let’s Rock” event, the organization’s spokespeople have assured all observers that this would be a really critical launch, with bigger news than just a refresh of the iPod product family.

Well, apparently Apple and I have very different definitions of “big news.” Because all the organization delivered was more of the same:

• An iPod touch that looks more like the iPhone 3G, but loses the black aluminum border that gave the device its own distinctive personality. But hey, price cuts and built-in Nike+ support! (no word on iPhone support, however)
• An iPod nano that looks more like the nano 2G than its predecessor, adds a few new colors and awkwardly tries to implement the UI from the touch and iPhone. Oh, and you can shake it to shuffle.
• An iPod classic that literally makes no changes other than bumping the hard drive capacity and cutting the high-end model. It now costs exactly the same as the high-end Zune, and has the same hard drive capacity.
• A new revision of iTunes with smarter automatic playlist generation, HD TV show downloads, and the return of NBC/Universal programs
• Bug fixes for the iPhone.
• And two lame songs from Jack Johnson. That’s it.

The business sense side of me is saying that Apple has another winner. The designer side of my brain really likes the subtle changes that Apple’s design team has brought to the the product line (except for the ugly iPod classic — hate the use of aluminum there). But the Apple fanatic in me can’t help but me incredibly disappointed by this morning’s activity.

Just how perfunctory was this round of updates? Consider this: The event has been done for 30 minutes, all the new models are available for purchase on the Apple Store, and Apple still hasn’t updated its own website to announce the product launches (EDIT: It went up as I finished typing. STILL). Apple has never gone this long without getting its main site up-to-date.

Now, none of us should be surprised by any of this; after the launch of iPhone 3G, AppStore, and the fiasco called MobileMe, it’s little surprise that Apple hasn’t been able to devote many resources to doing more than making slightly curvier cases for the iPod line. But Apple has trained us to expect the best, particularly when they say it’s really time to pay attention. Today, it completely missed the mark. I can’t recall an Apple launch event this underwhelming since the launch of the iPod HiFi and iPod socks. It’s this year’s model, and nothing more. It’s the entire iPod product line as afterthought to the iPhone.

And that’s not good. The iPod family is Apple’s highest-revenue business, and any indication that the company is bored with the media player business or unable to innovate beyond bringing iPhone features to iPods is going to mean a rough time in the market. It’s certainly not impossible to do so, Apple’s just in an unfortunate liminal space between the launch of a new business and the adaptation of another. The new nanos, in particular, felt oddly anacronistic. Why go to all that trouble to design such a wildly different case for this revision and then still use the same old clickwheel? Why, in the name of all that is holy, would you copy the horizontal interface on the right, screen on the left interaction found on the flash-based Zune? Why launch nine, count them, nine new colors in a single day when this is a clear incremental upgrade while the company works on a touchscreen nano for the near future?

Honestly, the biggest news today is that the iPod touch has dropped in price by $70 and has external volume controls.  It’s the future of the product line, and Apple needs to drive its adoption rapidly while the pre-2007 iPod outlook gradually ramps down.

In the mean time, I sincerely hope that we’ll see new Mac announcements on a not-too-distant Tuesday. The entire product line is just begging for processor upgrades, and they’ve been suffering while Apple has put so much attention on the iPhone this year. Not to mention which, it’s high time that Apple brought out a true Home Theater Mac for the living room — AppleTV and Mac mini aren’t cutting it.

Steve Jobs took the stage this morning for Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event, bounding into the lights like a rock star himself. My grandmother would say he looked svelte, but most importantly, he seemed energetic and strong.

We’ll be back later in the day with a full reaction and analysis of Apple’s news, but the big news is Steve looks ready to keep on truckin’.

This week’s entry in the ‘Greatest Mac Moment’ series caused a bit of debate in our sacred halls.  The contrarians questioned how a piece of software that wasn’t even originally written by Apple could possibly be one of the top 25 of Mac moments ever. Browse the opinions of our staff, and let us know your own!

Pete Mortensen: In many ways, iTunes is the most significant software program ever created by Apple. Without iTunes, there could be no iPod, and without iTunes for Windows, there could be no iPod and iPhone for Windows, which would mean far lower revenues for Apple these days. It showed people that Apple could do more than just make computers, and it opened the company’s first significant new market in years. Without iTunes, there is no third-wave Apple.

On the other hand, iTunes is only really important in retrospect. QuickTime for Windows already existed as a beachhead into the Dark Side for Apple, and MP3 software was widely available and adopted on Macs prior to the release of iTunes (ask any lovers of Audion what they think of iTunes 1 and 2 if you don’t believe me). While it’s clear that Apple had the iPod in mind as it rolled out iTunes, the digital hub strategy was more a hypothesis than a market reality in those days. Though many people credit iTunes for turning iPod into the cultural sensation that it became, I think it’s actually the converse. The iPod drove demand for iTunes. Thanks to the iPod, iTunes matured into the world’s leading jukebox program and helped drive Apple’s last seven years of growth. But for a first-generation program, it was kind of sad.

Leigh McMullen: I don’t disagree that iTunes is important enough to be one of the ‘Greatest Mac Moments’, I just disagree with its position on the list. If anything it needs to be MUCH MUCH Higher. iTunes ought to be in the top 5, and here’s why: it’s a little celebrated fact that iTunes is the most popular piece of software for Microsoft Windows.  It is very likely that there are more legitimately licensed copies of iTunes out there than Windows Vista!

With its popularity, iTunes is the official ambassador of the “Mac Experience” to forlorn Windows users everywhere.  It is in this capacity, that iTunes is second only to the switch to Intel processors in driving people to switch to Macintosh.  Anything that is responsible for that degree of proliferation of our beloved platform has got to be more important that #21 on our list!

Craig Grannell: I think Pete and Leigh have both missed one of the most important aspects of iTunes, in that—for better or worse—it’s driven UI considerations elsewhere on Macs: Finder is, to all extents, iTunes for documents, iPhoto is iTunes for photos, and so on. Therefore, iTunes is pretty much welded to the modern Mac experience and subsequently deserves to be on the list. On the surface, iTunes is just a media manager, but it clearly has plans for world domination; so don’t be caught unawares by SoundJam’s kid, because before you know it, the thing will have taken over the world.

Apple PR pulled out the big guns this week and invited, nay “encouraged” tech and entertainment media luminaries to pack the Yerba Buena Center for Steve Jobs’ “Let’s Rock” in San Francisco on September 9th.

The now-familiar rumors and speculation, with “leaked” photos and drawings that precede these Apple “events” have been flying back and forth for weeks, and soon enough we’ll see how all the pieces fit together. Join us on Tuesday as we twitter the proceedings.

We invite you to follow along with us as the morning unfolds, using the keynote bingo card below to keep track of both likely and rumored items that could appear during the presentation.

Amazon.com is now offering what it calls “instant ad-free movies and TV shows” on Macs, PCs and Sony BRAVIA TV sets at the newly re-branded “Amazon Video On Demand” website.

A few months ago, consumers greeted the giant webertainment service’s “Unbox” partnership with TiVo with a collective yawn, due mainly to complaints about the lack of on-demand streaming options, according to the director of Amazon Video On Demand, Roy Price, who says “the ability to watch content instantly without downloading first was among the most requested features of our customers, and now it’s live–customers can instantly watch the ad-free title of their choice “¦”

Some promotional videos are free and you can preview the first 2 minutes of any offering. Episodes of TV shows cost $1.99 and movies are $14.99. Movies can also be ‘rented’ for 24 hours for $3.99. Purchasing allows download to two machines and unlimited viewing online. The service claims to stock over 14 thousand movies and 1,200 TV shows including pre-purchase-able rights to upcoming seasons.

Amazon claims to be the only digital video service in the US offering the choice of streaming as well as downloading webertainment content.

Shouldn’t the Dems be on the Left and the Repubs on the Right?

Just in case you didn’t get enough of the Democratic and Republican conventions from the mainstream media during the past fortnight, Apple has kindly made the speeches from both conventions available for free on iTunes. The collections include audio files for almost every speaker as well as audio and video for the more prominent ones.

Given how often politicians are known to be for something before they are against it, these could come in handy someday.

I just caught the “Pizza Box” Get a Mac spot during the Top Design premiere, and it struck me. Not because it’s particularly brilliant — it hits the same mark exactly that all the other college-related Apple ads have lately — but because I realized it was the first time I had actually paid attention to a Get a Mac ad in almost three months.

Nor have I talked about one with anybody in more than a year. People don’t even get upset about it or make parody ads anymore. PC and Mac have been up there so long that I’m expecting them to introduce their children at any minute. Worse than being annoying or controversial, Apple’s core Mac marketing campaign has become the one thing the Cupertino Collective can never allow itself to be: boring.

Apple’s been here before. Switch had its (rather desperate) day. Think Different saved Apple during its darkest times. But each of them eventually outlived its usefulness based on where Apple was as an organization.

Today, Apple has become a powerhouse in media and a top-three computer maker. The iPhone is poised to become as ubiquitous as the iPod. And Get a Mac‘s playful jabs are starting to make Apple look small. “Able to run Microsoft Office” isn’t news to anyone who could be swayed by a TV ad. What’s the next narrative? How does Apple start its next growth curve, whether through marketing or design?

If you’ve accumulated any amount of gadgetry in the past several years you may consider from time to time the carbon footprint you lay down charging their batteries up every day and overnight.

Well, if designer Vivien Muller ever gets production funding for her concept solar charger, you’ll be able to rest easy and get visitors talking about your impeccable taste in futuristic decor.

Via Gizmodo

Although not a Mac itself, iPhone instigated a major shift in the personal computing market not unlike the original Mac, and its arrival has propelled Apple’s remarkable turnaround onward–the one started by the Bondi Blue iMac, itself something of a successor to the original Mac. Therefore, at the very least, iPhone deserves to be on this list, because its success means a healthier Apple, which in turn means healthier Macs. However, it also has to be on this list, because iPhone undoubtedly provides a glimpse of what the future of the Mac will be.

Craig Grannell:
Of our list of 25 Mac moments, this is one of the most contentious for me. The iPhone is not a Mac. Its operating system is OS X, rather than Mac OS X. And the only obvious relationship it has with a Mac is that a typical iPhone user is somewhat likely to plug their iPhone into one at some point.

However, some commentators argue that the iPhone is effectively the next-generation of the Mac, and even if that isn’t the case, it’s pretty clear Apple’s smartphone is in one sense a sounding board for the future of its company, and that technology from the device will eventually trickle down to future Macs. And for that reason, iPhone justifies its place in our top 25 Mac moments.

Pete Mortensen: As an audience member when Jobs took the wraps off the iPhone, the biggest impact that it left on me was this: that Apple’s business plan was not just a pattern of steady upgrades across an established product portfolio. This was a company prepared to not just make the best media players and computers in the world, but one that was prepared to bring about world-changing innovations that are years ahead of the competition. It was confirmation, once and for all, that the iPod was never a fluke, but a signal that Apple could do something far more than what it was doing today.

In short, the iPhone made it exciting to think about where Apple is capable of going in the next five years.

Leigh McMullen: See now, I absolutely believe that iPhone is a Macintosh. It’s more powerful than all but the top of the line Macs from the 2002-2003 era.   As we move more towards “cloud computing” processing power “in hand” becomes less important than connectivity and functionality. iPhone may just be a phone / ipod / camera / blender today, but it is also very much the future of both Apple and Macintosh.

Photographer Pat St. Clair has a couple more panoramic images from Thursday’s big night for the Democratic Party at Invesco field in Denver.

Above is a still shot from his vantage point near the Jumbotron behind the media pavillions. St. Clair made it from three fisheye images stitched and interpreted usung PTGui Pro 7.8 on a McBook Pro. The original size image is here.

Go here for a dynamic four-image shot that captures the enormity of that historic evening.

Unlike St. Clair, I was in Denver without the benefit of a Press Pass or professional photographic equipment and struggled to capture my own memories with the rudimentary camera in my iPhone.

Judge for yourself the quality of the iPhone’s camera by clicking on the gallery thumbnails. Large pics and descriptions after the jump.

The hilariously named VPILF.com — a site devoted to Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin — is made on a Mac, which is excuse enough to mention it here.

More importantly, Palin supports the teaching of creationism in public schools, according to Wired.com.

Photographer Pat St. Clair shot a super-cool QuickTime panoramic photo from last night’s historic session of the Democratic Party’s convention at the Pepsi Center in Denver, CO.

Working on assignment for LightSpeed Media, St. Clair shot the DNC image using a new Canon XSi with a Sigma 8mm f3.5 circular fisheye lens. It was four shots around on a custom rig, with the camera set to ISO 1600 and aperture priority metering.

He shot RAW files, used Photoshop Camera Raw to render them to tiffs, stitched the panorama in PTGui Pro 7.8. and authored the final pan in Cubic Converter, all on a MacBook Pro.

Apple wants to know what you’re thinking about your new iPhone 3G and has been sending out email surveys asking questions such as where you’ve gone for iPhone help, whether you’ve returned your handset to your carrier for repair or replacement, whether you primarily use Windows or Mac, whether you primarily use your iPhone for work or play, whether it’s your first Apple product, and general demographic info.

The company promises not to use your responses to sell you products or services.

Via iPhoneBlog

Pre-release testing of the Blackberry Bold 3G smartphone appears to show the new handset may suffer from connection problems similar to those that have plagued the iPhone 3G. Citigroup investment research analyst Jim Suva reported occasional 3G signal dropping troubles at some locations, “especially on high-rise building streets on our 34th floor… which may be why AT&T has yet to launch the product,” according to AppleInsider.

Because the Blackberry uses a component of its Marvell processor as its 3G modem, where iPhone 3G uses a different Infineon chipset, previous speculation about problems with Apple’s hardware appears less likely to be the cause of iPhone 3G connection instability.

3G network performance varies greatly among different 3G carriers throughout the world, according to survey released this week on the Wired blog. Users in Europe, which has some of the most mature 3G networks, reported the fastest overall results, while US-based iPhone owners suffer the largest number of failed data speed tests, particularly in dense urban areas, according to the Wired survey.

Citibank’s Suva speculates that the Bold won’t be released in the United States until AT&T rectifies its 3G network issues.

Apple is on track to sell just shy of 3 million Macs and close to 11 million iPods in the September quarter, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. If Apple manages to hit the high end of Munster’s estimate of betweeen 2.7 million and 2.9 million Macs sold from July through September, it will be the first time Apple will have sold 10 million Macs in any fiscal year in its history.

Munster based his estimates on July sales data from NPD Group, which also suggested the possibility of sales of 4.1 million iPhones and a gross margin of 32 percent. Munster estimates Apple’s earnings per share at $1.19 on revenue of $8.5 billion. Wall Street consensus estimates put the numbers at $1.11 on $8.08 billion, while Apple’s previous guidance calls for $1.00 on $7.8 billion.

Munster affirmed his Buy rating on Apple, Inc. (AAPL) shares, with a price target of $250. The stock closed today at $172.55 in New York trading.

Quick Look. Two words that brilliantly sum up one of the most important and yet least celebrated additions to the Mac experience. When stripped down to basics, Quick Look is merely a document preview. But what a preview! Using it, you can preview the majority of documents on your Mac by selecting them and hitting space, without opening the documents’ parent applications. Quick Look showcases the best of Apple and the Mac, highlighting how it’s sometimes the most obvious things that can be used as the basis for innovation and making the computing experience better.

Craig Grannell:
People use a whole lot of files, and Quick Look has the potential to save Mac users a lot of time every single day, by providing a full and simple preview to a selected file that doesn’t take ages to render, doesn’t require parent apps to open, and is often actually preferable to using apps at all. (I certainly rarely use Office now, preferring to read Word and Excel documents in Quick Look.) It shows how much Quick Look has become ingrained in me that I spent a good ten seconds dumbly hammering space on my iBook yesterday before realizing that, no, it doesn’t actually have Leopard installed.

For me, Quick Look shows what the best thing is about the Mac experience: it’s not about bells and whistles, and it’s not about flashy, showy gimmicks–it’s about doing something in the simplest, most efficient and intuitive fashion, in order to improve the experience for the user. And even though each use of Quick Look may save only a few seconds, it’s often the little things in the Mac user experience that leave the biggest impressions.

Leigh McMullen:
It’s hard to image that a simple OS feature could be considered one of the top Mac moments of the past 25 years. Nevertheless, Quicklook is truely a game changing feature, all the more so for its incredible subtlety. The implementation is so Apple. Take a feature (document preview) and make its implementation so seemless that it disappears. It’s like two-finger scrolling on Macbook Pro trackpads, you don’t even notice you’re doing it.

If you work with a lot of documents and doubt this feature’s importance, take the Tiger challenge: try using 10.4 for a day. You’ll be banging on that space-bar with so much  frustration your colleagues will think you’re playing Quake.

Steve Wozniak spoke to Intel developers in San Francisco yesterday, telling them maintaining a vision without compromise, is “the right way of going through life.”

In a wide-ranging on-stage interview at the annual Intel Developer Forum, Wozniak also said being poor helps inspire creativity. As a computer designer, “I would do any trick I could think of to try to save money,” he said. “Not having any money helps.”

In the end, the man who began work on the first Apple computer as an engineer working at Hewlett-Packard (and offered his invention to that company five times before accepting rejection and taking it on himself with Steve Jobs), waxed philosophical about technology’s impact on our lives.

“Technology is always supposed to improve our lives,” he said. “I don’t know. Are we happier than we were 100 years ago? Are we happier than we were 1,000 years ago? Do we smile more?”

• Daring Fireball reports that OpenClip will fail once iPhone OS 2.1 ships: https://tinyurl.com/69lntu #

An Alabama iPhone 3G owner filed suit in Federal court yesterday, seeking class action status in a complaint against Apple’s ‘twice as fast at half the price’ marketing blitz.

The petition claims “[Apple] expressly warranted that the Defective iPhone 3G would be ‘twice as fast’ and would otherwise perform adequately on the 3G standard or protocol.” The plaintiff claims she and a class of “thousands, perhaps tens of thousands” of consumers were duped by the company’s marketing into buying a product that does not perform as it was advertised  and asked the court to force Apple to repair or replace the iPhone 3G, and award  an unspecified amount of money in damages.

Apple has yet to issue a statement or response to the suit.

Via ComputerWorld

Image via Wall Street Journal

UPDATE: The original reference to Chiat\Day as creators of the campaign referred to in this post was incorrect. We regret the error and any confusion it may have caused.

Microsoft is launching a $300 million advertising campaign featuring Jerry Seinfeld to try and slow the juggernaut that has seen Apple take increasingly big bites out of the Windows maker’s dominant share of the personal computer market.

Seinfeld, a known Apple/Mac fan, will reportedly take $10 million to look the other way and come up with one-liners to help transform Microsoft’s stodgy and serious image in the public mind.

The campaign, created by Chiat/Day, the agency responsible for Apple’s legendary 1984 commercial,  MDC Partners’ Crispin Porter + Bogusky in Miami, will also feature comedians Chris Rock and Will Ferrell (who starred in a Mac “switch” ad years ago). Apparently up in Redmond they don’t think Apple’s recent success is funny at all.

Via WSJ

Apple has doubled its share of the mobile web browser market since launching iPhone 3G six weeks ago, according to Pacific Crest technology analyst Andy Hargreaves. Still quite a small pebble in a large pond, at 0.31% of the total mobile browser market, iPhone’s “accelerating web usage highlights…key long-term advantages” for Apple and the company’s investors, Hargreaves says. Coupled with the recent announcement that iPhones will be carried at Best Buy outlets beginning in September, he predicts Apple will easily sell more than the 3.5 million iPhones Wall Street expects in its third quarter.

Despite some continuing worry about the health of the general economy, Hargreaves and other analysts see the iPhone as very bullish for the price of Apple, Inc. shares. Consensus targets are in the $200 – $225 per share range; the stock closed today at $173.53.

Via CNBC

Apple, Inc. ranks first in customer satisfaction among its PC industry peers for the fifth year in a row, posting the highest score ever recorded in the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Apple’s 85 score is a full ten points higher than runner-up Dell, which joined Apple as the only computer companies in the University of Michigan survey to record increases over their 2007 scores.

Claes Fornell, a professor at the university and head of the ACSI, said, “we have never seen a gap between the leader and the rest of the pack this big,” but acknowledged Apple’s lead was likely affected by widespread disappointment with Windows Vista among HP-Compaq, Dell and Gateway consumers.

Apple’s score also does not reflect the customer service turmoil the company has tried to weather since launching iPhone 3G and MobileMe in July, problems Fornell expects will cause Apple’s score to level off in next year’s survey.

Via CNet

• TapeDeck 1.1 – 1.0 reviewed here: https://tinyurl.com/646hba – has added MP3 import/export and YouTube support: https://tapedeckapp.com/ #
• Simple WindowSets 2.1 – 2.0 reviewed https://tinyurl.com/5oyyle – has added modifier key commands: https://tinyurl.com/5b97uo #
• CG: I love I Love Stars, a menu-bar-based iTunes ratings app. If only someone would combine it with iTunesMenu… https://tinyurl.com/5pfegt #

For those of you following along at home, we’re counting down the greatest Mac Moments of the past 25 years. This week’s is sure to be controversial.

We’ve got no idea what the 25th Anniversary of the Macintosh will bring, but we certainly know what we’d like it NOT to be. The 20th Anniversary Mac was a trifecta of bad, underpowered, overpriced, And while it was a beautiful machine, it looked like it was designed Bose instead of Apple.

For more thoughts on the topic, Craig’s interview with TalkingHeadtv.com is below.

The New York Times reports that today, just down the road from Apple’s headquarters, two Georgian men will present what they claim to be incontrovertible DNA and photographic evidence of Bigfoot.

Even more startling, is that one of the gun-happy rednecks in question appears to be holding the Fabled Mac Tablet.  Sasquatch’s next of kin were unable to confirm or deny that he was a beta tester for the tablet due to “NDA issues”.