Since Apple’s big media event was today I figured I might as well throw my two cents in on what I thought of it all. First off I’ll just say that I’m not a big fan of all the iPod media events. I know the iPod/iPhone is Apple’s big money maker now, but I guess I’m just old school and I want to see more happen with the Mac line. I was happy with just having a monochrome screen and music for the iPod. Anyway that being said I’ll talk about what I thought of today’s event. I won’t go into a lot of detail, you can always go to MacRumors or somewhere for the full scoop. I think the biggest thing I like that came out of the event was NBC returning to the iTunes store, now I can have The Office automatically downloaded and copied over to my AppleTV to watch without commercials, instead of waiting for a torrent to download and then copying it over, or recording it myself with my EyeTV Hybrid and then having to deal with commercials and exporting it for the AppleTV. It’s also nice that shows come in HD (SD is still available too), sometimes it’s hard to watch an SD show on a big HD TV.
The new iTunes 8 seems pretty cool too, Genius Playlist seems interesting. I mean the new iTunes version and the new iPod’s are pretty much just what we expected from Kevin Rose’s rumors, so it’s not too shocking. I don’t know if I really like the new design of the Nanos, but the 24 hour battery life seems cool. Apparently you can just shake the Nano to shuffle, which seems pretty neat. Also, it seems they dropped the 160GB and 80GB Classic iPod and replaced them with just a 120GB. I don’t care about that too much since I’m probably not going to get a new iPod anytime soon, but my music library is pretty big and I always liked the idea of the 160GB. I just liked watching the size of the Classic get bigger and bigger.
There’s also new iPod Touches, they’re thinner, stainless steel, with volume controls, speaker, and genius playlist. they have 36 hours of battery for music playback which is pretty hot, only 6 hours for video though. They have a Nike+iPod receiver built in, too. Which all that means is the my current Touch seems more outdated (I still love it though). There’s software updates for the Touch and iPhone too, which is supposed to solve a lot of problems, especially on the iPhone. All in all there wasn’t anything announced that was super unexpected. Maybe they’ll have new Macs in January.


