Check out this gallery of images, courtesy of the Apple hardware experts at iFixit, who meticulously recorded their disassembly of the new device yesterday.
Of particular note in the new iPod Touch are the external speaker, support for Bluetooth, and support for an external microphone.
For more images and details on the disassembly see iFixit’s forensic report.
Genius certainly is a nifty little sidebar to your iTunes collection. After it’s collected every scrap of information about your library and sent it through the Apple ultra-computer you can select any song in your library and create an instant playlist from it. Oh, except for all the songs that aren’t in Apple’s iTMS database.
Since Genius bases all of its playlist making decisions off of the iTunes Music Store users’ hive-mind, it can’t make decisions about songs that aren’t in its database, or songs that no one has bought. That means no Beatles, no live recordings, no transferred vinyl and no public domain digitized cylinders.
Tangerine! figures out what songs go well together by actually listening to the song itself. After analyzing your digital library (about as long as Genius’s initial setup time) Tangerine! finds the beats per minute and the “beat intensity” of all of your music, after which you can generate loads of interesting playlists. Most important, you don’t just click a button and hope the computer knows how to crescendo, climax and lend some sort of feeling to the music, you can select different patterns of intensities to suit your mood.
Tangerine! also allows you to select more precise or longer playlist times than Genius. You can limit the playlist in the same ways as you would limit a Smart Playlist in iTunes – by genre, artist, etc. – and you can select a range of BPMs and beat intensities that your playlist should stay within. You can export playlists Tangerine! makes to iTunes, and if you buy Tangerine! ($25) you can export those handy BPMs to iTunes to give other playlist makers a leg up.
Tangerine!’s biggest problem: it’s a standalone application. It also requires that you leave iTunes open while it’s analyzing your music.
But those are small costs to the benefits of creating a great playlist on the fly and really understanding where it came from. After reviewing the main features and strengths of Tangerine! it becomes obvious that Genius is underpowered. Genius leaves you wondering how it made this playlist instead of giving you any type of control or understanding of how it picked it. Genius imposes the Apple hive-mind on your music more than any other product they’ve made so far.
I think it’s sad that Apple is under the impression that people want a sidebar application that does all the creative work for you, requires no real input, and generates playlists based on nothing but “what everybody else wants”. Sure you can base creative works off of the statistics in your boring grey database, but I think knowing where something came from, and understanding how to affect and change it gives it part its value.
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:
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.
Via our Twitter stream, we ran ongoing commentary on Apple’s Let’s Rock shenanigans. Below is a (somewhat) edited tweet-style stream-of-consciousness from the event.
Speculation surrounding this morning’s ‘Let’s Rock’ Apple special event remains intense, with Digg’s Kevin Rose at the center of the vortex of leaked data, or so it seems.
Overnight we’ve picked up a few more details on what to expect, thanks to MacRumors, who tell us that not only will the iPod nano see a shape-shift, returning to the long and thin look of the first two generations, capacity will rise to 16GB.
Apple’s also expected to introduce nine different colours for the nano, adding purple, yellow and orange to the existing pink, silver, black, blue, green and Product (RED).
Less is known of the iPod touch, which is expected to see a price cut to bring it into line with the cost of an iPhone—and seems unlikely to see a capacity increase, MacRumors also claimed – though far less is known of the iPod touch than of the iPod nano upgrade, other than some suspicions that new features could be enabled in future generation devices, cameras or a microphone, for example.
To recap Rose’s claims, Tunes 8 is expected to offer a Grid View, Genius Playlist recommendations, a new Visualizer (based on the Magentosphere visualiser) and support for HD TV show downloads from iTunes, a feature currently only available to the Apple TV.
iPhone and iPod touch users are also hoping for iPhone Firmare 2.1, which it is hoped will introduce true push support for MobileMe, more stability in 3G connectivity and an end to widely-reported cases in which iPhone user’s applications and iPod features become unavailable. iPods of all stripes are anticipated to see price reductions, as Apple grapples to deal with an increasingly saturated music player market.
Analysts, soothsayers and philosophers of all stripes seem to have achieved a consensus decision in recent days that new MacBooks are unlikely to make an appearance at this event. However, Apple’s publicity people have been urging media to attend the show, which implies that all Apple’s secrets aren’t yet out in the open…that the company has also organized a European media event in London boosts such expectation.
Perhaps that one more thing could turn out to be an all-new version of the Apple TV, now equipped with a digital TV receiver, DVD player and larger hard drive? At least one report speculates on such a possibility.
On Tuesday morning Steve Jobs will take the stage to deliver one of his singular infomercials. He’s expected to introduce a new iPod, but the only thing I care about is how healthy he looks. Sod the iPod, how’s Steve Jobs?
Jobs’ health has been the burning issue surrounding Apple this year. The company is firing on all cylinders (except the odd glitch like MobileMe) but the CEO’s health is an ongoing issue of extreme concern that will not go away. All eyes on Tuesday will be looking to see how healthy Jobs looks –and fingers crossed he’s OK.
After the jump: did Jobs treat his cancer at Greens veggie restaurant in SF?
The most controversial omission of the iPhone’s feature set is its bizarre lack of copy and paste. While anyone who has spent a cursory amount of time trying to figure out the interaction design for multitouch copy and paste using Apple’s guidelines will discover that it’s a little bit harder than it seems.
Even so, it shouldn’t be out of Apple’s depth — they’re kind of the best in the world for interface design. Which is why it should come as no surprise that Apple had touchscreen copy and paste figured out on the Newton 15 years ago, as shown in option8’s video above.
Via BoingBoing
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.
Writer Scott Gilbertson has a very cool Mac netbook that cost him only $550.
It’s got a slick black case, weighs nothing, gets hours of battery life and runs Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X. It’s not a MacBook Air.
It’s a hacked EeePC — a tiny liliputer , as they’re now called, fresh from Asus, a Tawainese manufacturer best known for PC motherboards.
Gilbertson’s netbook is the device Mac fans have wanted for years: A low-cost cousin to the beautiful but pricey MacBook Air.
It runs like a champ but has a couple of quirks (one big one) and may not be strictly legal, though Apple’s never going to prosecute unless these machines are sold commercially. Hit the jump for details.
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.
