g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
 Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

 btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

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Thursday, September 6, 2007
10:35 - The Continuum agrees
http://www.apple.com/itunes/

 (top)


So here we are... another fine football game.

I think the most interesting thing about this iPod product rollout is that it's probably the biggest, most feature-rich, most product-diverse, and most significant for the long-term positioning of the brand that they've ever done... and yet the price spread at the end of it is so tightly compressed. You'd have thought this rollout would give users choices from $50 up to $700, right? Well, no: $399 is as high as it goes. Remember the days of $399 buying you the one and only 5GB iPod, and $499 for 10GB? Remember when $400 was considered a bargain? Well, now that is the price you can expect to pay for an iPhone—itself a device that was $599 before yesterday—and that's for something that's only an "iPod" in the most all-inclusive sense, where devices that are supersets of iPods (and have little navigation icons labeled "iPod", with an icon shaped like a classic wheely iPod) also count as iPods. If you're talking about the direct descendant of the 5G unit that started it all, the iPod classic, it's now at just over half the price of that device at its debut: $249. And just look at all the stuff it can do now.

Hell. I remember carrying around the first-generation 5G iPod in my shirt pocket and having it weigh down the fabric so much I looked like I buttoned my shirt wrong. The thing was like 3/4" inch thick and heavy as hell—and that was considered svelte and hip, compared to the giant CD-player-sized Nomads of the day. And remember the tiny finicky heat-sensitive monochrome screen, the big blocky pixels, the menu options in the classic-cool but anachronistic Chicago font? Hell, remember physical buttons? Remember the rotating navigation wheel? How ridiculous and quaint they all seem now... but at the time, in 2001, they were the absolute height of cutting-edge coolness. Remember those days?

Six years later, and the iPod lineup is still eminently recognizable to anyone transported forward from 2001. The iPod classic is the same basic form factor—a bigger screen, a slicker wheel, much much thinner, and all that, sure, but the height and width are unchanged from the very first iPod. Apple has managed to avoid the temptation to go to a flip-folding design (as some of the rumor sites' "2G" designs had it), a curvy asymmetrical model, a button-laden PDA or Nokia-esque tablet, or any of the myriad directions they could have taken it. They've stuck to this basic "look" longer, indeed, than they've stuck with any single computer body design. I guess they really nailed it the first time out; since then it's all been evolutionary tweaks.

And, of course, the addition of family members, both below and (now) above.

  • iPod shuffle. I remember when the shuffle was first introduced, in its USB-flash-drive-on-neck-lanyard form factor. I remember how ballsy a move it was: Steve stood on stage and boasted that the thing's lack of a screen was its best "feature". I remember the skepticism up and down the press ranks: what audacity! What contempt for consumers! To think that we would accept a reduction in features and pay extra for the privilege... bosh! ... well, time has proven that the gamble was a good one, and everyone seems to love the shuffle. Apple's UI guys are just that good: they knew that in a world full of $50-100 MP3 players with tiny illegible screens that tried desperately to cram in as much information and control as possible into a device smaller than your finger, it actually makes the user happier to not be able to control his music or see what's coming up next. Take out the screen. Do your music management on the iTunes side. Hit the "shuffle" button and be happy.

  • iPod nano. 4GB/8GB, same as before, but in an excitingly chunky new video-capable body. Now, for some reason I've never been wild about the nano, though everyone else seems to think it's just great; maybe that's my problem, though, since I've come at the whole iPod/iTunes world since Day 1 with the assumption that the device was meant to hold all your music and all your media, that you could just sync it up and go, and never have to worry about defining playlists that match the size of your iPod or manually dragging-and-dropping things onto it. My music/video collection has grown about commensurately with the sizes of the full-size iPods, and the point at which iTunes told me that "not all your music will fit on this iPod" was a day of mourning and gnashing of teeth, because it meant suddenly I'd have to put in a bunch of extra conscious effort in deciding what stuff should go onto the device, in what seemed like a big failure of user-interface design, an afterthought to deal with a weird corner case to account for those weirdo users with way too much stuff. But most people don't seem to have any trouble with that, and devices like the Apple TV are all predicated on the idea of limited space portioned out to only the most elect of your media; so I guess that's the way things are going, and I'd better get used to it.

    All that aside, the new nano looks stubby and weird, a far cry from the lithe and tall model it replaces. I'm not sure I like the way it looks. But then I had my issues with the original nano too—it looked too tall and space-wastey. This one looks screen-heavy and pudgy. But the fact that it plays video now, and does everything the full-size (classic) does, makes it a hellaciously attractive entry at $150-200.

  • iPod classic. This is the one that I'm instinctively drawn to, especially with 160GB available. Surely that would be enough to prevent me from having to pick and choose which of my South Park seasons to have available at the gym! And the new interface is hot as hell, with swoopy transitions and album-art background pans and—finally—a Cover Flow application that makes sense, what with the whole click-wheel-and-the-rotatey-and-GLAVIN. This is no consolation prize for not having wi-fi and a touchscreen, and it's no swan song for the iPod's venerable form factor; it's a solid and attractive device, and probably still the one I'd want, especially since it's at the $250-350 price point, formerly reserved for "budget" iPods. It's hard to say no to something that's worked so well for so long, and seems to have such legs left in it.

    But then again...

  • iPod touch. The big news is almost no news: an iPhone without the phone. Almost a no-brainer. We've literally been expecting this all year, ever since the first iPhone demos. Yet it's rather defeatured as iPods go, and hardly the "top-end" iPod; it has significant overlap with the iPod classic in both feature set and price, with the 160GB classic outpricing the 8GB touch by $50. What you give up in hard drive space you gain in wi-fi, touchability, and sheer coolness inherited from the iPhone's form factor. And that's got me wondering: Am I really still the kind of person who wants to keep all his music and videos and everything on his iPod's massive hard drive, and play it back on the imperfect and not-really-size-optimized screen? Or have I been going about all this sort of the wrong way? Can I have all the enjoyment of the most immediately interesting music and videos through the judicious use of 16GB worth of carefully crafted playlists? Is it worth giving up the (all-too-evanescent-anyway) benefit of grab-it-and-go syncing, if what I get in exchange is pinchable photos, rotatable videos, and YouTube and Google Maps and random web browsing whenever I'm in range of a base station?

    In other words, has the problem been me all along? Have I just not adapted my life enough to fit the model the iPod wants to impose on it? Huh. I guess I'd better get right on that...

    The question remains, though: why not an iPod touch with a 160GB hard drive? What's prohibitive about that—price? Battery life? Thickness? Market alignment? This is a question that anybody with $500 burning a hole in his pocket will be asking after today.

    The wireless iTunes Store just about looks freaky-cool enough to justify the price all on its own. Those animations are so fun-looking. Almost worth a dollar a pop just to watch. (Almost).

    One possible downside is that people might look at someone's iPod touch and assume it's an iPhone, until realizing that no, it's "just" an iPod—a defeatured iPhone. Sneer. Boo. My coolness evaporates as quickly as I thought it had bloomed upon buying the thing.

    But one thing's for sure: Zune users aren't getting any cooler.

  • iPhone. Still the same, but now available in 8GB only, and only at $399—the same price as the 16GB iPod touch. Drop the phone (and the Mail app), add twice the disk space. Maybe that'll be enough to keep the two devices from cannibalizing each other's coolness (to say nothing of sales). Surely now those people who object to phones but love the slick interface are well and truly covered. Indeed, just looking at the iPhone and its price and feature set almost makes me want to buy an iPod touch on the spot.

    Worth noting, interestingly, is that the iPod touch has a Leopard-esque reflecty-Dock, whereas the iPhone just has an opaque strip. I suppose the inevitable question is whether the iPhone's interface will be updated in a future revision to match the touch's, or whether Apple will try to keep them divergent. Surely they could have made them more similar for yesterday's tandem release; they're based on the same software and all.

    Speaking of which, now that we have an honest-to-God "OS X iPod", and yet the classic/nano iPods have such similarly bells-and-whistles-laden interfaces, what does that imply about the underlying operating system of those more lowly devices? They aren't running OS X as well, are they? And if not, just take another look at the iPod classic's interface animations—and compare them to the almost steam-punk Spartan-ness of the original 5G iPod's monochrome interface. If the classic and nano are still using the same basic software platform as they've always been using, well... that's almost as good a software-evolution story as watching the original 128K Mac OS transform into OS X.

    The price cut is big news, and naturally everyone's trumpeting it as proof that the iPhone's sales are in the toilet (and unfair to early adopters, though Steve's got them covered too); but I tend to think this is just the inevitable rejiggering of the price points in the face of the iPod touch. You take the phone out of the iPhone, don't increase the storage space, and what do you get? Surely not a $500 device. You've got to take it down to the $400 level or even less. People expect the high-end iPod to be $400, and what with all the anticipation surroundng this release, the "high-end iPod" necessarily had to involve a touchscreen and wi-fi. So where would that leave the iPhone? You can't take a $400 iPod, add a phone and Mail to it, and charge $200 more for less storage. The iPhone just isn't that much more than the touch, especially once you factor in the 2-year lock-in contract and all. They had to bring down the price on the iPhone or else it would look like they really were raking in the margins on a device that doesn't really contain any more technology than something else they're selling for $200 less. That's a lot of fat to try to justify not trimming. So they trimmed it. I doubt they'll regret it.


So that's it then: I'll get a touch. No—a classic. Wait—maybe a nano; that'll keep the budget down, and it plays videos. No, that doesn't make sense; I need something with big storage. Maybe a classic and a touch? No! Dammit!

That's the awful truth about this lineup: every piece of it is eminently attractive in its own right. There are no also-rans; there are no placeholders. Every $50 segment of the price curve on up to $400 is spoken for, in many cases by several iPods at once. Apple has probably never offered this much choice before; certainly they try not to, as choice is the enemy of user interface simplicity, and indeed of user happiness. But these choices are all so good, they'll probably get away with it.

Be Prepared

The Internet has certainly made living worthwhile for us. Sitting at home not only can you get your favorite movie from an online dvd rental, but also you can watch your new-born nephewís pictureís online sent through his parentsí digital camera. Modern technology has advanced so much in the past decade that its not surprising that it has become a necessity to use laptops nowadays. They are facilitating your work when youír traveling and also are a lot less of a hassle than a desktop computer. These luxuries are not limited to computers only; the second most popular device in terms of facilitating this decade would be cell phones. Currently cell phone deals are so great that you can get the latest ones on best bargains. All in all these electronics have not only facilitated our lives but also improved it.
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© Brian Tiemann