With the new iPod hardware out of the way, Apple turns to iTunes, and after a brief bit about the statistics we already know are impressive… Apple unveils iTunes 10, complete with a new and simplified logo.
First the stats. “People have downloaded over 11.7 billion songs from iTunes, and we’re just about to cross 12b. Over 450 million TV episodes, 100 million movies, 35 million books, and over 160 million accounts with credit cards and 1-click shopping in 23 countries,” says Jobs.
Those stats are relevant to the logo change. “Since iTunes is about to bypass CDs in sales, we thought it was appropriate to ditch the CD,” quips Jobs.
And here’s what many of us have been waiting for: Apple officially unveils the new iPod Touch. And as suspect, it takes more than a bit of a queue from the iPhone 4, with dual cameras, an A4 CPU and a Retina Display. But orget about 3G. It is a smidge thinner, though, if that’s a comfort.
“The iPod touch has been a remarkable product for us,” says Jobs. ” It has become the most popular product for us — it used to be the nano. A lot of people call it the iPhone without a phone. But it’s also an iPhone without the contract!”
So what’s new?
• A beautiful new Retina Display.
• Apple’s 1GHZ A4 CPU
• A 3-Axis Gyroscope
• iOS 4.1 With Game Center
• FaceTime with both front and back camera. Unlike the iPhone 4, there’s no flash.
• HD video recording capabilities.
And what about the price? $229 buys you 8GB, $299 buys you 32GB and $399 buys you 64GB.
As we’ve long suspected from the beta iOS SDKs, Apple has just announced that they will be releasing iOS 4.1 today.
What’s new? The proximity sensors have been fixed, against earlier reports. Bluetooth is fixed, as well as the iPhone 3G slowness issues.
There’s also now baked-in support for HDR photos.
“Let’s start off with HDR photos, what are they? A lot of times when you take a photo, it’s blown out with bright light. Now, when you turn on HDR, it takes 3 photos in rapid succession: one normal, one under exposed, and one under exposed. It combines the three with some pretty sophisticated algorithms…” says Jobs.
Even better, you now get HD video upload over WiFi, obviating recent apps that got around the iOS’ compression issues.
Game Center is also finally coming to iOS, after being teased since the iPhone 4’s debut. Your iPhone just got its Xbox Live.
Apple is live-streaming today’s big announcement, so you’ll be able to see the new iPod firsthand. The link isn’t live yet, but should be soon — Apple takes the stage at 10 a.m. Pacific time.
Here’s a rumor that has my heart leaping in my chest: later today, Apple intends to offer the option of 3G with their fourth-gen iPod Touches.
According to the rumor, the new iPod Touches would have the option of 3G, similar to the iPad. For users willing to pay a hundred dollars more for their Touch, it would come with a built-in tray for a 3G micro-SIM.
I can’t tell you how onboard with this rumor I am. While I’ve debated whether or not a retina display and FaceTime would be enough to get me to upgrade my third-gen iPod Touch, the addition of 3G to the fourth-gen would be enough for me to dump my iPhone for good. Who needs it when you’ve got 3G, a multitasking operating system like iOS 4 and a SkypeOut account?
We’re only four hours away from knowing the truth. Right now, I’d say that I think 3G is on the iPod Touch roadmap eventually, but perhaps not today. I think a lot will rest on whether or not the next iPod Touch gains any thickness. It looks like Apple already intends on cramming two cameras into the iPod Touch, which is already a miraculous spatial trick: getting a 3G radio in there without increasing the device footprint would be a design miracle.
Flickr user Marc Krenn has posted this amazing mock-up of what we might possibly expect the new, updated iPod Shuffle / Nano with the 1.13-inch touchscreen to look like when Steve Jobs finally unveils it this afternoon. I think he’s probably nailed it except for the colors: Apple’s chromatic preferences of any given season are always unpredictable.
While I’m thinking about it — and this is as good a place as any to muse — there’s been a lot of debate as to whether this new touchscreen iPod is going to be an update to the Nano or the Shuffle. We’ll know in about five hours, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder if Apple doesn’t intend to converge both models into a single device.
After all, both the Nano and the Shuffle are aimed to the same kinds of consumers: the budget conscious, the footprint conscious and the athletically minded. If Apple can add a touchscreen display to the Shuffle, what’s the point of the Nano, and if the Nano gets as small as the last-generation Shuffle… well, what’s the point of the Shuffle at all?
There’s some holes in this theory, I know: the Nano has a widescreen display for watching movies, which this new Nano/Shuffle/whatever would be hopeless for. It also comes with a camera, which is obviously going to be left out of this new design. But if Apple intends on trying to push iPod customers who want a camera and video capabilities up the ladder to the entry-level iPod Touch, and if they can bring a Shuffle/Nano hybrid down to below, say, $100… I wonder if what we’re seeing here is Cupertino’s attempt to simplify the iPod line-up by merging two distinct devices into one.
Apple is live streaming Wednesday’s iPod event as a test of its massive new data center, we’ve been informed by a source.
Apple’s first live video broadcast in years is a test of the server farm’s ability to stream a future version of iTunes for iOS devices, our tipster says.
“The goal is to monitor traffic load and quality,” says our tipster, who asked to remain anonymous to preserve their connections at Apple.
There’ll be a new $99 AppleTV tomorrow with Netflix movie streaming, Bloomberg reports.
Apple Inc., preparing to announce a new set-top box that delivers TV to consumers, will include movies from Netflix Inc., according to three people with knowledge of the plans.
The streaming service would be available on the revamped version of Apple TV, due to be introduced tomorrow in San Francisco, said two of the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans havent been made public. Users would pay a subscription fee to Netflix for the service, the people said.
The new AppleTV will cost $99 — $130 less than the current model, Bloomberg says. Apple will also update iTunes and offer a new iPod touch with a higher-resolution screen (likely a Retina display to match the iPhone 4’s).
The new Apple TV is rumored to be renamed iTV and run a version of iOS, possibly making is capable of running apps and games from the App Store. There’s no word on whether Netflix’s service will be an app or integrated into the device, as it is with some DVD players.
Netflix already offers a subscription movie streaming service through a wide variety of devices, from Blu-Ray players to TiVo and game consoles. There are also Netflix apps for the iPhone and iPad that stream movies and TV shows to subscribers.
The Apple universe is all a twitter on the day before the Cupertino company makes its holiday product announcements. The folks at bookmaker.com are wagering that we’re most likely to see an iPhone 4 revision and a bigger, better iPod Nano. (Yep, that’s over 100%. For once, the fuzzy math isn’t mine, that’s how betting odds work).
These outcomes are slightly different from what CoM and most of you readers believe, if our reader poll is at all trustworthy — most expect the iPod but also something new for Apple TV and iWork.
Anybody willing to put their money where their mouth is?
The Oxford English Dictionary will not be printed again thanks in part to the iPad, Alastair Jamieson reports for The Telegraph:
Simon Winchester, author of ‘The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary’, said the switch towards online formats was “prescient”. He said: “Until six months ago I was clinging to the idea that printed books would likely last for ever. Since the arrival of the iPad I am now wholly convinced otherwise.”
It may be somewhat hard to remember — what with sporadically poor call performance, lots of other hardware to play around with and all those apps — that the iPhone is more-or-less primarily a tool for voice communication. And there’s no better or cheaper way to use that tool than through the Skype app.
Apple has called a press conference on Wednesday, September 1st in San Francisco 10:00 AM PST. Yeah, we know, it’s not that far away, but here at CoM we had a spirited discussion over the weekend about just what they’ll be introducing.
The iPhone 4’s incredible retina display boasts pixels so small and tightly packed that they are almost indistinguishable to the human eye…. but if a new technology created by University of Michigan researchers ever hits the market, the Retina Display might end up looking as antediluvian as VGA.
Using nano-thin sheets of metal with precisely spaced slits that act as resonators, the team of researchers built a tiny high-definition display with pixels eight times smaller than those on the iPhone 4. These nano-resonating displays are incredibly green-friendly, since they don’t require the chemicals needed to make an LCD; better, they’re far more energy-efficient to boot.
Need proof? The above image of the University of Michigan logo might look blurry, but that’s only because it’s magnified up from its original size, which is just nine microns wide. Six of these logos would fit in the width of a human hair.
If this technology ever hits the market, a fully high-definition 1080p display could be fit in the area of a postage stamp. Don’t be surprised if half-a-decade down the line, a grizzled and hunched Steve Jobs holds aloft the iPhone 9 and introduces the world to their hot new marketing buzz term: Nanoresonators.
Ever since the first rumors creeped out that Apple intended on reinventing its “hobby” AppleTV platform to a $99, iOS-driven streaming media device, people have been assuming that the device would have to support multitouch through some sort of Magic Trackpad-esque remote. Now Dan Wiseman has come along and mocked up what he expects the new iTV remote to look like.
It’s an attractive render, but I’m going to say, “No way.” There are numerous problems with this approach, the least of which is knowing where your fingers are resting on the displayless remote in relation to the elements on the television half a room way. The only way that could work is if the iTV overlay mice-like pointers on your display to show where your fingers were in relation to the trackpad… a clumsy and decidedly un-Apple-like solution.
Then there’s the cost: if the iTV costs $99, and the Magic Trackpad costs $69, how could Apple afford to give one of these away for free with every iTV sold? They can’t. End of story.
If I had to guess, I’d say that the iTV, even if it is iOS-driven, will eschew multitouch as an input method in favor of the tried and true Apple remote. The only possibility I see is the possible ability to pair an iTV to your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to directly interact with the iTV display elements… but surely we would have seen an inkling of that functionality in the iOS betas by now if that was planned, and we haven’t. The iTV may be iOS-driven, but I wouldn’t bet on multitouch.
July’s leak of a tiny 1.18-inch touchscreen being mass produced for Apple seemed so tiny that it had to be destined for the iPod Shuffle, but now Apple Insider is dropping a doozy of a rumor on us. It’s not for the Shuffle at all. It’s for the Nano.
The more we think about it, the more this makes sense, because it shows that Apple is bringing multitouch down — methodically and progressively — through its iPod line-up. It wouldn’t make sense to give the Shuffle a touchscreen and not the Nano. Apple Insider supports its theory with evidence from overseas manufacturers that the new touchscreen iPod will have a 30 pin dock connector, just like the Nano, making it capable of being easily plugged into existing iPod docks.
This theory might seem contradicted by the iPod Classic, which isn’t pegged to get a touchscreen, but at this point, the Classic’s going to be a ghost the second Apple finally manages to upgrade the Touch to 128GB. It’s sole purpose at this point is to accommodate the niche number of consumers with huge media collections — a constabulary to which I happily subscribe — who want to carry every song and movie they own around with them. If and when the Touch doubles its capacity this generation or the next, you can kiss the Classic goodbye.
My dad was a magician at sniffing out great places to eat. We’d drive by some hole-in-the-wall we’d never seen before, and he’d point and say, “that’s where we’ll eat, it’s good.” Then I’d scramble to check out the hole-in-the-wall’s rating using the Yelp app on my iPhone, to see if he was right. The result was always the same: me shaking my head in disbelief as Yelp’s vast community of raters would invariably agree with him.
Unfortunately, most of us don’t have a magic nose. But that’s ok — we’ve got Yelp.
Come September 1st, everyone expects Apple to announce at least some sort of streaming iTunes functionality… but what if that’s all a red herring? According to All Things D, that might just be the case: they are saying that the next version of iTunes won’t stream media from the cloud, but will instead by heavily integrated with social networking features.
The idea is this: future versions of iTunes would basically be little social networks, in which you’d be able to share recommendations of apps, movies or songs with other people. There’d be no actual media sharing ability at first, but this is clearly an evolutionary move, laying the groundwork for a more feature rich streaming iTunes to come.
It’s a very interesting rumor. Apple executives have said that the streaming iTunes capability we should expect in the near future is more modest than the pie-in-the-sky dreams of internet opiners. Combined with the rumored streaming television ability of the new iTV, this would seem to be a more realistic rollout of a future cloud-based iTunes for Apple to take.
Take this with a pinch of salt, but we’ve been tipped that Apple’s rumored $1 TV subscription service, due to be unveiled next week, is technically correct but missing an important detail.
The garage where Apple was founded on Google Street View.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs is the third most popular celebrity whose home is “stalked” by UK users with Google Street view.
From across the pond, there are just two other places that nosy Nellies want to take an up-close look at more than Jobs’ house: the White House and Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion in Los Angeles. (Just to save you the keystrokes, it’s a futile bunny hunt, no street view is available.)
Bill Gates came in sixth in the survey. Other celebs people wanted to see include David and Victoria Beckham, Jay-Z and Beyonce. Nearly half of the people polled said they also looked for their childhood home and 16% tried to get a glimpse of an ex’s home.
The official Netflix streaming app for iPhone and iPod touch hit the App Store this morning. The free download allows anyone with a monthly Netflix subscription of $8.99 or more to watch unlimited streaming movies and TV on the iOS device of their choice.
I’ve been playing with it since I woke up today, and I’m quite impressed — video looks phenomenal on my 3GS, and performance over both WiFI and 3G have been great (which, as a San Franciscan who resides in a neighborhood AT&T ignores, is very impressive).
My two minor quibbles with the app are both interface-related: NetFlix opted to represent titles to watch with large icons, which makes it a labor to scroll through. Worse, it doesn’t provide a thumb on the right side to provide any sense of where you are in the middle of a long list. Search works very well, however.
But these are minor complaints. Frankly, this puts HuluPlus to shame. Better selection, better performance, and no ads. Download the crap out of this. Get it here.
Although Spotify is “the best desktop music player ever,” the revolutionary music service is only available for people located in Finland, France, Norway, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. You can’t get it in the U.S.
This is enforced by Spotify by checking your IP Address and making sure that you are in one of those countries. As such, anyone in the U.S. that goes to https://www.spotify.com/int/get-spotify/overview/ will get a message that Spotify is “Not available in your country yet.”
Don’t worry though, because with this walkthrough I’m going to show you how you can get this great music service on your computer and on your iPhone/iPod Touch.
There’s something heartwarming about a Mac software developer so dedicated to maintaining the quality of his product that, discovering a pirated version of his software on the Pirate Bay that had been shoddily cracked at the expense of the user experience, he actually told the cracker how to do it more elegantly.
That’s just what Coding Robots dev Dmitry Chestnykh did when he found a version of his journal-taking application, Mémoires, up on the popular Bittorrent search site.
Incensed at the crumminess of the crack, Chestnykh wrote the following to the Pirate Bay.
The first porn service to target iPhone 4’s video chat feature FaceTime claims some 1,000 callers have been, uh, satisfied in the first five days of operation.
Called iP4Play, the service costs $4 a minute to chat live with a video vixen. Most of the service subscribers, 93% of whom are men, opted for what the company dubbed a “quick-draw McGraw” five-minute session.
While interactive video sex chats are nothing new, FaceTime brings portability and convenience to virtual cavorting — it’s definitely easier to lock yourself in a bathroom than get your groove on in front of a 27-inch iMac screen.
FaceTime is an iPhone 4-only videoconferencing service that works over Wi-Fi. Both parties need iPhone 4 for it work. Callers pay via credit card for time increments of 5, 10, 20 or 30 minutes.
Buhler's prototype Liquidmetal casting machine is called the most advanced in the world. This is a similar die-casting machine made by the same company.
Apple’s recent deal with Liquidmetal Technologies will give it access to the most advanced manufacturing machinery on the planet, one insider says.
“This is the most advanced injection-molding machine ever made,” Merkel says. “It is state-of-the-art.”
Apple recently licensed Liquidmetal Technology’s IP for use in consumer electronics. Liquidmetal Technologies is one of the leading companies trying to commercialize space-age metal alloys that are extremely hard and lightweight but can be processed as easily as plastics. NASA has said Liquidmetal is “poised to redefine materials science as we know it in the 21st century.”
This aerospace part is a one-piece casting from Liquidmetal, which if made traditionally would have required several manufacturing steps. Image courtesy of Drew Merkel.
As Mac fans, we all know that Apple habitually throws an iPod event in September, where the obsolete iPods allowed to grow dusty in our love are whisked off behind the killing sheds, while the shiniest new models are simultaneously heralded. These events usually see an updated iPod Touch and a new version of iTunes, and this year, everyone’s expecting word on the new streaming iTunes features and perhaps a relaunched, iOS-driven AppleTV called the iTV.
Needless to say, excitement is high… but Apple still hasn’t tipped their hat on when we can expect the conference. Well, you might want to pencil September 7th in for following our iPod Event liveblog, because Bloomberg’s sources are now saying that date’s a lock.
Of course, since Apple traditionally doesn’t alert the press to an iPod Event until a week ahead of time, we won’t know if Bloomberg’s sources are right until the end of this month… but Apple certainly can’t put it off much later. If you’re hungry for a new iPod Touch or even an updated AppleTV, earmark some credit for that date.
